Recently I have reviewed an article about fiber reinforced beams (topic from area of civil engineering). In the first paragraph of introduction I had found some references so I have looked at reference list just for curiosity. I was astonished to find that the mentioned articles have nothing to do with the subject. Moreover, they have nothing to do with engineering at all!
In this situation I decided to look through the whole bibliography and discovered that out of almost 40 quoted articles maybe 5 could have some connection with the topic. The rest were from such remote areas as agriculture, forestry, pharmacy, biology, geography, etc.
I decided not to read the article further, but to report an attempted fraud and recommend that the article be rejected. Unfortunately, one article by the same author, with a very similarly constructed bibliography (with no connection to the topic of the article), I found published in the same journal.
But I have some questions about this case:
When reviewing the article, do you also assess the relevance of the included bibliography?
Has a situation like the one described above happened to you?
How do you react in such a situation: to review the article anyway and raise objections to the bibliography, or to recommend that the article be rejected without further evaluation due to a clear attempt at fraud?
Roman Jaskulski Good job for the reaction against that fraudulent work. What baffles me these days is a biased attitude of many Editors. Most times, they accept papers when it cites many of their previously published articles, an indication to help increase their IF. What many journals do, nowadays, is about their self-enhanced work, very few of them critique to a reasonable level or rather go against the outcome of the reviewers.
Andrew Paul McKenzie Pegman As a reviewer I cannot reject any article. I can only recommend it and insist on it. :)
The journal editor and the editorial board should be accountable for this kind of frauds.
Roman Jaskulski yes of course a reviewer does not do the actual rejection; it was my shorthand answer to your question. But a reviewer can refuse to review a bad paper, which is a type of rejection :)
Roman Jaskulski Good job for the reaction against that fraudulent work. What baffles me these days is a biased attitude of many Editors. Most times, they accept papers when it cites many of their previously published articles, an indication to help increase their IF. What many journals do, nowadays, is about their self-enhanced work, very few of them critique to a reasonable level or rather go against the outcome of the reviewers.
I have recently wondered what happened to the article I reviewed, because I did not receive information that it was rejected. So I looked at the Symmetry page and... and it turned out that it was returned for a major revision!! Unfairness pays off???
Can you imagine! The journal promotes backwardness. From the first message to the end of this matter here, it shows that the Editors and their Chief are all criminals.
Outright rejection. I have seen a situation in which an author cited a related article but wrongly stated the findings in the cited article.
The manuscript should have been rejected without being sent for peer-review. The content of the manuscript would be fraudulent since the references were not even related to the field of the manuscript in question. Roman Jaskulski, you have done well sir.
It is also worthy to note that the authors might have submitted the manuscript with false names to authenticate the journal because no scientist/researcher would submit such manuscript for possible evaluation and publication in his/her name. This is a reflection of the quality of work done by the editorial team.
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