?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001133.g004&am

  • A survey of biomedical journals to detect editorial bias and nepotistic behavior
    https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001133
    https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001133.g004&size=inline

    Research integrity matters across the research ecosystem. In this process, scientific journal editors are key actors that ensure the trustworthiness of the scientific publication process. But, paraphrasing Dr. Drummond Rennie’s famous quote, who is guarding those guardians? [1] Some of our team (CL, IC, DM, and FN) had doubts that anyone does such safe guarding in the case of New Microbes and New Infections (NMNI), an Elsevier journal, whose most prolific author, Didier Raoult, coauthored 32% of its 728 published papers [2]. NMNI’s editor-in-chief and 6 additional associate editors of the journal work directly for, and report to, Raoult. Together, these editors authored 44% of the 728 papers published in the journal as of June 25, 2020. We suggested that such “self-promotion journals” were “a new type of illegitimate publishing entity, which could have certain key characteristics such as (i) a constantly high proportion of papers published by the same group of authors, (ii) relationships between the editors and these authors, and (iii) publication of low-quality research” [2]. We applied a preliminary approach to detect these “self-promotion journals” in the field of infectious disease using a measure easy to compute: the proportion of contributions published in a journal by the most prolific author, i.e., the one who published the most articles in a given time period [2]. In journals publishing more than 50 papers over 5 years, it was rare to see journals where a specific author published more than 10% of the papers, and, indeed, NMNI was a clear outlier. Note, however, this is a crude measure as it is based on all published articles, whatever their type (research, letter, editorial, etc.) and therefore may give high scores for legitimate contributions by active editors.