another embarrassing role for MDPI

Many publishers are nervous about getting into paper mills, which can torpedo a journal’s reputation if they succeed in publishing papers that are clearly worthless. Recently Open Lettera group of sleuths drew attention to an example in Scientific Reports, published in Springer Nature.

After the Open Letter was published, the paper raising our concern was quickly retracted by the journal, but as far as I can tell, not much has changed. The point about a paper like this is that it’s so obviously bad that it can’t go through any kind of serious editorial review or peer review. This acts as a canary in the coalmine: if gobbledegook is published in your journal, it is a sign that you need to take a hard look at your editorial processes, and act quickly to remove the editors who introduce it. thing. Unfortunately, I haven’t but seen a lot of evidence of that happening in Scientific Reports.

This post, however, is related to another publisher, MDPI, which appears frequently on my blog, and not in a good way. Last month, I commented on the strange situation in which Finland lowered its classification of 187 MDPI journals due to evidence of “minimum time spent for editorial work and quality assessment”, at the same time that German universities have obtained a national publishing agreement. with MDPI. The story I have to tell here may prove the verdict of Finland, and give Germany pause for thought. This is about this article: Abbas, R., Amran, GA, Hussain, I., & Ma, S. (2022). An Advanced Computing Approach for Scientific Categorization of Vegetable Supply Chain Issues. Logistics, 6(3), https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics6030039

As in the example of Springer Nature, the first sign of problems came through Problem Paper Screenerthe best system that checks articles for various red flags, including “tortured words”. This gives an indication that a paper may have been plagiarized but then goes through a process that replaces synonyms with key words, with the aim of avoiding plagiarism detection software. So, as stated by PubPeerin this case we have “fluffy logic” for fuzzy logic, and “unaided ML” for unsupervised machine learning.

However, the example sentences in which the tortured phrases are included show a deeper problem. Most of the text is incomprehensible, and things start to get seriously weird when the authors keep on tomatoes. We are told:

…. the third creative framework considered for the creative stage is tomatoes. This creative framework is dedicated to the development of homegrown creations raised in rural settings to produce vegetables. It can carry pet tomatoes as well as broad or serious frameworks. The expansive structures include creatures that roam the pastures (usually under the supervision of a shepherd). Different, serious tomatoes are located in closed foundations and equipped with ICT innovation, which empowers the creatures to be observed constantly. Within these creation frameworks, the most common issues we run into are observing the meadow (75), helping the government of the creature (76), following the behavior of the creature (77), and predicting and improving the creation. in tomato (78,79) , as shown in Figure 3.

According to a VSC point of view, the formal meanings of these issues are recorded below.

• Field assessment: This issue is connected to the precise identification proof of the grass inventories to separate between the most reasonable types for tomato purposes.

• Tomato government aid: It is centered on the exemplary arrangement of dehydration method of behavior brushing creatures for investigations of creature nourishment, development, and well-being.

• Examination of the growth of tomatoes: It depends on the use of investigations to carry out the identification of early signs of medical problems and the development of early negotiations.

A clue to the origin of this material comes from the cited references, which are about pigs and cows. Anonymous Comment on PubPeer Nerita vitiensis found that a large part of the text was adapted from a previous work by different authors, but in the subjects “livestock and fish” was changed to “tomatoes and cruciferous vegetables”. This explains the description of tomatoes as “creatures” under the supervision of a shepherd.

The authors of this piece seem to be seriously out of their depth, as evidenced by the short comments apparently written on Chat GPT that they provided to PubPeer.

Now, one very good thing about MDPI is that it usually identifies the academic editor who is in charge of a paper, and sometimes it also makes the reviewer’s reports public. This means that when a major foul-up like this happens, it should be possible to identify and clean up those responsible for accepting the job.

The academic editors who accepted this article are Xue-Ming Yuanwhich is currently soliciting papers for a special issue of the MDPI journal Mathematics, and Anrong Xue.

The MDPI website appears reports from three named reviewers.

The first reviewer, Edyta Kardas, was concerned about the use of first-person language, and punctuation, but not apparently about the statements about the animated tomatoes.
He reviewed 8 papers for MDPI journals in 2024.

The second reviewer, Alejandro Vega-Muñoz focused only on the structure of the article, but apparently did not look at the content. He has edited two special issues for other MDPI journals.

The third reviewer, Francesco Barreca, attempted a synopsis of the article (which I could not understand) and then had only two suggestions:

“The job is well done but I have a few comments:

• The numbers should be reviewed, the dimension is the variable

• Moderate change in English required”

“moderate English changes” are undefined. Barreca has a track record of editing a special issue of another MDPI journal.

Last week, I contacted MDPI’s Publication Ethics to draw their attention to this article, noting the dereliction of duty of the reviewers and editors, and suggesting that as well as retracting the paper, they should fire the editors. and peer reviewers from their database. They answered saying:

“We confirm that the Editorial Office has investigated concerns related to this paper following the standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics https://publicationethics.org/ of which we are a member and our policy https:// www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark29.

We want to let you know that this case is a priority for us, and we are actively working to resolve it. We will update you on the outcome of this investigation as soon as possible.”

I await developments with interest. It is widely recognized that the COPE guidelines are not suitable for dealing with this type of situation: they make the default assumption that the authors should be consulted to give their perspective when criticisms are raised – a reasonable assumption in many cases, but not when there is obvious evidence of forgery.

The most serious case of infestation of a publisher by nonsense occurred in 2022-3, when the publisher Hindawi (owned by Wiley) was targeted by paper mills who, among other things, generated a lot of papers I marked as AI gobbledegook sandwiches. Eventually, the publisher withdrew literally thousands of papers and shut down the Hindawi brand, after shareholder complaints began to affect profits.

Like most sleuths who track paper mills, I have become cynical about the commitment to research integrity that many publishers, including MDPI, claim. But I believe they will act if it is in their interest to do so. As the nonsense and disinformation in the scientific literature increases, I think we are entering a new phase where the reliability of journal contents will begin to have a much higher value. If you want to be taken seriously as a peer-reviewed journal, you can’t keep pumping out articles accompanied by superficial words from “peer reviewers” who have no real contact with the subject. Publishers must act now to clean up their editorial boards if they want to stay in business.

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