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How Endocrine Society Journals Continue to Adhere to Maintain the Highest Standards Possible

Scientific journal integrity is increasingly being threatened with the rise of predatory journals, fraudulent papers, and even nonsensical submissions.

On January 28 this year the Endocrine Society released a statement warning members against solicitations from a journal called “Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism.” The Society cannot verify the authenticity or accuracy of this “journal” with the statement going on to say that the authentic journal goes by the name of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Two days later, the editor-in-chief of (the real) The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM), Paul M. Stewart, MD, FRCP, wrote an editorial in the journal titled, “‘Houston We Have a Problem….’: Raising the Quality and Authenticity of Manuscripts Submitted to JCEM.” Stewart begins by pointing to the demographic shift in submissions to JCEM – China is now regarded as a scientific superpower and has overtaken the U.S. and Europe in size of research workforce and its scientific output. “We are processing thousands of manuscripts per year from China, the vast majority of them either out of scope or lacking a mechanistic or experimental basis,” Stewart writes.

But make no mistake; no on here is trying to blacklist China or anyone else. “We embrace geographical diversity in our governance (we have editors from 12 countries and editorial board members from 25 countries, with China well represented), and are committed to publishing the best research wherever it is undertaken around the world” Stewart writes. “Indeed we publish outputs from submitting authors based in 42 countries (2023 data). So what is the problem? In a nutshell, quality.”

Publish or Perish

Stewart tells Endocrine News he is passionate about journal quality, but is concerned that quality risks being eroded, and he wants to do what’s right for the sector. JCEM is an extremely well-regarded journal globally. When Stewart took over as editor-in-chief, he aimed to maintain that reputation by soliciting exciting content, but found he was being deflected. “We were getting to a stage where it was just getting ridiculous in terms of the volume of content being submitted that just didn’t make sense biologically,” he says. “my editorial in-box was increasingly swamped with scores of submissions each week that were basically nonsensical.”

So why is this happening? Why submit a paper you know is not up to scientific standards or even downright fraudulent? For many early career researchers particularly in developing countries with an emerging science sector, the pressure on them to churn out papers is crushing. They have no chance at career progression unless they get something in a journal. Publish or perish.

“We’re now working in a global context where the pressure on researchers in many countries is unacceptably intense. And we’ve all seen over the years the odd figure that’s probably been incorrectly doctored in a paper and raised red flags” Stewart says. “That’s in no way excusable, but is nothing compared to what we’re seeing now. Over and above a proliferation of fraudulent papers, there is no biological reason why anybody in their life would ever measure the association of serum rhubarb with thyroid function tests but papers of this ilk are now the norm.”

Reviewer Fatigue

Zane B. Andrews, PhD, deputy head of the Metabolism, Diabetes, and Obesity Program at Monash University in Victoria, Australia and editor-in-chief of the Endocrine Society’s flagship basic science journal Endocrinology (END), agrees that as an experienced editor, it’s pretty easy to spot to the “dodgy” papers, especially when those submitted papers have nothing to do with the journal.

“My concern is that they clog up the review process and lead to reviewer fatigue,” Andrews says. “It’s really important for handling editors to weed them out before review, but in my experience junior handling editors often feel unsure about what to do, so they err on the side of caution and give authors benefits of doubt – we have to weed them out before review.”

Stewart says that JCEM receives up to 4,000 submissions a year now, half of which are from China, and the editors are a small percentage of these. “There is a very large number of manuscripts that are at best of poor quality and at worse complete rubbish or fabricated,” he says. “And that’s a huge amount of work for staff.”

Stewart writes in his editorial that these low-quality submissions have led to the “reject without review rate” being unacceptably high, so editors have to focus more on “firefighting” than content strategy or journal enhancement.

Fire Prevention

Education is probably the most effective way to prevent fires, and Stewart says there are plenty of authentic researchers who are just misguided and don’t have a supportive research culture environment. “Hence our inclusion of more expert Chinese endocrinologists into editorial leadership roles ,” he says.

Then there are noninstitutional email accounts. Stewart says that of those 1,900 aforementioned manuscripts, possibly 50% are fraudulent. They come in from amorphous email accounts with no way of confirming the identity of the author. When the editors email them back requesting authenticity, radio silence. “The singular most important issue here,” Stewart says, “is to ensure an authentic email address for example one that tracks to a definite individual that is actually employed within an institution.”

And Stewart is careful in his editorial to note that requiring an institutional account might be unpopular in some countries where junior researchers or PhD students don’t have access to these types of official email accounts yet. “I get there may be those in transition between institutions or there may be those who say they are working in partnership with a university group but based in a hospital, where they may not have that email address,” Stewart says. “That’s easy; we can accommodate for this with the principal author on the paper confirming that this individual is who he/she claims to be ”

Stewart also says that the implementation of this email rule has already caught on with other journals.

Andrews says that END makes sure corresponding authors have an institutional email address and appropriate ethics documentation. He goes on to say that END put guidelines and policy around certain types of studies where it’s easy to generate data fast, like from publicly accessible databases where scientists place datasets, often mandated by funders to ensure transparency and promote open science. “While this is good practice and most scientists support this approach, it can lead to quick data generation without rationale, hypothesis to generate any data that can become a manuscript,” he says.

Any Data Can Become a Manuscript

Earlier this year, the Endocrine Society published a “Notice about Predatory Publishing” warning researchers about the deceptive practices of “journals” who will sure, publish your article about the association of serum rhubarb with thyroid function tests, but you’ll have to pay handsomely for it.

“Predatory journals or publishers cheat authors (and their funders and institutions) through charging publishing-related fees without providing the expected or industry standard services,” the statement reads.

And again, the pressure to publish that rhubarb study is enormous. It could mean a promotion, a better job. But it might not have to be that way. (Especially if you have to get cheated to publish it.) “Our training mantra was very much an inquiring mind and if you see something that doesn’t quite look right in the clinic and investigate why, or you advance a new clinical therapy or come up with a new concept, innovation or technology, this is where JCEM is here to support you in disseminating your research to others,” Stewart says. “That’s very different from sitting at a desk and in perhaps in a single day coming up with meaningless comparisons from an already published data set. For this reason, generally JCEM will no longer accept association studies in isolation without a strong mechanistic/ experimental base”.