Cleaning up “Scientific Reports”: Can It Be Done?
I have had some problems with the journal Scientific Reports over the years, and I’m not alone. At the same time, I’ve read some interesting and useful papers published there as well. But worthless/faked manuscripts showing up in a journal tend to contaminate everything else that shows up there, which is a problem that you’d hope that scientific publishers are concerned about. To put things in the style of my late father, his one of his analogies was that if he had a gallon of urine and put a shot glass of wine into it, he still had a gallon of urine. On the other hand, if he had a gallon of wine and put a shot glass of urine into that, he now had a secondgallon of urine. That’s the problem.
This open letter, signed by many well-known literature fraud experts, is (to me) more than enough evidence that Scientific Reports has some serious problems with the papers it’s letting through, and that the publishers (Springer Nature) are not doing enough to address them. It shows numerous examples of papers with odd and questionable references in them and with phrases that are redolent of (unstated) chatbot use, those apparently in attempts to bypass automated plagiarism-detection software. The authors of the letter note that even when the editors have taken action, that can be just to republish the same paper with slightly altered phrases:
