A total of 58 research papers, most of which involve researchers based in Iran, are to be scrapped from the record of two leading scientific journals, amid growing concern over peer-review manipulation.
The announcement by the publishers BioMed Central and Springer follows a “thorough investigation” prompted by a tip-off from an informant, the publishers said in a joint statement on 1 November.
The retracted papers—of which 28 were published in BioMed Central journals and 30 in Springer journals—were found to have various malpractice including plagiarism, authorship manipulation and “attempts to subvert the peer review and publication system”.
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