Ideally, scientific publishing is an objective endeavor in which manuscripts are held to high standards of review to ensure accuracy and guard against conflicts of interest that could compromise a study’s trustworthiness. Yet, as Retraction Watch and occasionally other outlets document, it’s not uncommon for poor-quality, or sometimes fraudulent or nonsensical, papers to gain the imprimatur of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
A study published today (November 23) in PLOS Biology points to potential favoritism that could be present within specific journals’ editorial procedures, allowing less-than-stellar papers through. Clinical pharmacologist Clara Locher and a team of researchers from the University of Rennes in France examined nearly 5 million papers published between 2015 and 2019 in 5,468 journals and found that while a majority of journals carried publications distributed across a large number of authors, five percent of journals had a single, highly prolific author that was responsible for at least ...
