IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jpubli/v2y2014i2p51-60d34811.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Editorial Misconduct—Definition, Cases, and Causes

Author

Listed:
  • Matan Shelomi

    (Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California-Davis, 1 Shields Ave, Davis, CA 95616, USA)

Abstract

Though scientific misconduct perpetrated by authors has received much press, little attention has been given to the role of journal editors. This article discusses cases and types of “editorial misconduct”, in which the action or inaction of editorial agents ended in publication of fraudulent work and/or poor or failed retractions of such works, all of which ultimately harm scientific integrity and the integrity of the journals involved. Rare but existent, editorial misconduct ranges in severity and includes deliberate omission or ignorance of peer review, insufficient guidelines for authors, weak or disingenuous retraction notices, and refusal to retract. The factors responsible for editorial misconduct and the options to address these are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Matan Shelomi, 2014. "Editorial Misconduct—Definition, Cases, and Causes," Publications, MDPI, vol. 2(2), pages 1-10, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:gam:jpubli:v:2:y:2014:i:2:p:51-60:d:34811
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/2/2/51/pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2304-6775/2/2/51/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Aycan Sentürk & Sylvia Pfennig & Alexander Weiss & Katja Burk & Amparo Acker-Palmer, 2011. "Ephrin Bs are essential components of the Reelin pathway to regulate neuronal migration," Nature, Nature, vol. 472(7343), pages 356-360, April.
    2. Joost de Winter & Riender Happee, 2013. "Why Selective Publication of Statistically Significant Results Can Be Effective," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(6), pages 1-7, June.
    3. Adam Marcus & Ivan Oransky, 2011. "The paper is not sacred," Nature, Nature, vol. 480(7378), pages 449-450, December.
    4. Gabriel M. Peterson, 2013. "Characteristics of retracted open access biomedical literature: A bibliographic analysis," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(12), pages 2428-2436, December.
    5. Gabriel M. Peterson, 2013. "Characteristics of retracted open access biomedical literature: A bibliographic analysis," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 64(12), pages 2428-2436, December.
    6. In-Uck Park & Mike W. Peacey & Marcus R. Munafò, 2014. "Modelling the effects of subjective and objective decision making in scientific peer review," Nature, Nature, vol. 506(7486), pages 93-96, February.
    7. Aycan Sentürk & Sylvia Pfennig & Alexander Weiss & Katja Burk & Amparo Acker-Palmer, 2011. "Erratum: Ephrin Bs are essential components of the Reelin pathway to regulate neuronal migration," Nature, Nature, vol. 478(7368), pages 274-274, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hamilton, Daniel George & Fraser, Hannah & Hoekstra, Rink & Fidler, Fiona, 2020. "Journal policies and editors’ opinions on peer review," MetaArXiv qkjy4, Center for Open Science.
    2. Catalin Toma & Liliana Padureanu & Bogdan Toma, 2022. "Correction of the Scientific Production: Publisher Performance Evaluation Using a Dataset of 4844 PubMed Retractions," Publications, MDPI, vol. 10(2), pages 1-25, April.
    3. Richard A. Bernardi & Kimberly A. Zamojcin & Taylor L. Delande, 2016. "Ranking accounting authors and departments in accounting education: different methodologies – significantly different results," Accounting Education, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 25(6), pages 568-597, November.
    4. Lucy Santos Green & Melissa P. Johnston, 2022. "A contextualization of editorial misconduct in the library and information science academic information ecosystem," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73(7), pages 913-928, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jodi Schneider & Di Ye & Alison M. Hill & Ashley S. Whitehorn, 2020. "Continued post-retraction citation of a fraudulent clinical trial report, 11 years after it was retracted for falsifying data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 2877-2913, December.
    2. Tamar Sapir & Aditya Kshirsagar & Anna Gorelik & Tsviya Olender & Ziv Porat & Ingrid E. Scheffer & David B. Goldstein & Orrin Devinsky & Orly Reiner, 2022. "Heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein U (HNRNPU) safeguards the developing mouse cortex," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-14, December.
    3. Day, Theodore Eugene, 2015. "The big consequences of small biases: A simulation of peer review," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(6), pages 1266-1270.
    4. Yaxue Ma & Zhichao Ba & Yuxiang Zhao & Jin Mao & Gang Li, 2021. "Understanding and predicting the dissemination of scientific papers on social media: a two-step simultaneous equation modeling–artificial neural network approach," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 126(8), pages 7051-7085, August.
    5. Michail Kovanis & Ludovic Trinquart & Philippe Ravaud & Raphaël Porcher, 2017. "Evaluating alternative systems of peer review: a large-scale agent-based modelling approach to scientific publication," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 651-671, October.
    6. Janine Huisman & Jeroen Smits, 2017. "Duration and quality of the peer review process: the author’s perspective," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 633-650, October.
    7. Hopp, Christian & Hoover, Gary A., 2017. "How prevalent is academic misconduct in management research?," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 80(C), pages 73-81.
    8. David Pontille & Didier Torny, 2013. "Behind the scenes of scientific articles: defining categories of fraud and regulating cases," CSI Working Papers Series 031, Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation (CSI), Mines ParisTech.
    9. Xiancheng Li & Wenge Rong & Haoran Shi & Jie Tang & Zhang Xiong, 2018. "The impact of conference ranking systems in computer science: a comparative regression analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(2), pages 879-907, August.
    10. Michail Kovanis & Raphaël Porcher & Philippe Ravaud & Ludovic Trinquart, 2016. "Complex systems approach to scientific publication and peer-review system: development of an agent-based model calibrated with empirical journal data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 106(2), pages 695-715, February.
    11. Pardeep Sud & Mike Thelwall, 2014. "Evaluating altmetrics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(2), pages 1131-1143, February.
    12. Marcel A L M van Assen & Robbie C M van Aert & Michèle B Nuijten & Jelte M Wicherts, 2014. "Why Publishing Everything Is More Effective than Selective Publishing of Statistically Significant Results," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(1), pages 1-5, January.
    13. Lin Zhang & Beibei Sun & Fei Shu & Ying Huang, 2022. "Comparing paper level classifications across different methods and systems: an investigation of Nature publications," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(12), pages 7633-7651, December.
    14. Mario Paolucci & Francisco Grimaldo, 2014. "Mechanism change in a simulation of peer review: from junk support to elitism," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 99(3), pages 663-688, June.
    15. Stein J Janssen & Annelien L Bredenoord & Wouter Dhert & Marinus de Kleuver & F Cumhur Oner & Jorrit-Jan Verlaan, 2015. "Potential Conflicts of Interest of Editorial Board Members from Five Leading Spine Journals," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(6), pages 1-11, June.
    16. Yanwei Jia & Jussi Keppo & Ville Satopää, 2023. "Herding in Probabilistic Forecasts," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(5), pages 2713-2732, May.
    17. Gary A. Hoover & Christian Hopp, 2017. "What Crisis? Taking Stock of Management Researchers' Experiences with and Views of Scholarly Misconduct," CESifo Working Paper Series 6611, CESifo.
    18. Leonid Tiokhin & Minhua Yan & Thomas J. H. Morgan, 2021. "Competition for priority harms the reliability of science, but reforms can help," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 5(7), pages 857-867, July.
    19. Hajar Sotudeh & Zeinab Saber & Farzin Ghanbari Aloni & Mahdieh Mirzabeigi & Farshad Khunjush, 2022. "A longitudinal study of the evolution of opinions about open access and its main features: a twitter sentiment analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(10), pages 5587-5611, October.
    20. Furukawa, Chishio, 2019. "Publication Bias under Aggregation Frictions: Theory, Evidence, and a New Correction Method," EconStor Preprints 194798, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jpubli:v:2:y:2014:i:2:p:51-60:d:34811. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.