Study says small editor group handled many problematic manuscripts — and a Nature investigation finds out who they are

Exclusive: retraction-prone editors identified at megajournal PLoS ONE

Study says small editor group handled many problematic manuscripts — and a Nature investigation finds out who they are

In 2022, *PLoS ONE* retracted more than 100 papers after an editor noticed an unusual spike in submissions. An independent study has now looked at the journal's retraction history more in depth. Credit: Getty

Nearly one-third of all retracted papers at PLoS ONE can be traced back to just 45 researchers who served as editors at the journal, an analysis of its publication records has found.

The study¹, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 4 August, found that 45 editors handled only 1.3% of all articles published by PLoS ONE from 2006 to 2023, but that the papers they accepted accounted for more than 30% of the 702 retractions that the journal issued by early 2024. Twenty-five of these editors also authored papers in PLoS ONE that were later retracted.

The PNAS authors did not disclose the names of any of the 45 editors. But, by independently analysing publicly available data from PLoS ONE and the Retraction Watch database, Nature’s news team has identified five of the editors who handled the highest number of papers that were subsequently retracted by the journal. Together, those editors accepted about 15% of PLoS ONE’s retracted papers up to 14 July.

“The footprints that systematic fraud leaves in the literature are so massive that there’s no way that it’s just a couple of bad authors,” says PNAS study co-author Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “There is complicity from within the journal-appointed editors that allows for this to happen.”

“PLOS has long been aware of the issue addressed in this article,” says Renee Hoch, head of publication ethics at the publisher. “In each case we promptly removed the people of concern from PLOS editorial boards and took action as needed on the affected articles.” She adds that “the issues discussed in this article are not specific to PLoS One and have been affecting journals and publishers across the industry”.

Cassidy Sugimoto, a science-policy researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, calls the findings “disheartening”. But, she says, they show “that we have the tools and mechanisms to identify misconduct at scale, and begin to uproot some of the poor behaviours that are happening in science”. Sugimoto adds that the study cannot not determine whether all flagged editors acted deliberately to slip problematic work through peer review, or whether they were “negligent in their duties”. Papers can be retracted by their authors or publishers for myriad reasons, including honest errors, authorship disputes or problems that arise from research misconduct.

Editors with high retraction rates

PLoS ONE is published by the open-access Public Library of Science (PLOS) in San Francisco, California. The journal relies on thousands of volunteer academic editors, who handle submissions and oversee peer review, with support from 22 staff editors.

In the PNAS study, researchers examined 276,956 articles published in PLoS ONE from its launch in 2006 to late 2023, and tracked 134,983 authors and 18,329 handling editors. They identified 22 editors who disproportionately accepted papers that were later retracted, and 33 others who accepted papers that had been flagged on PubPeer — a site for post-publication peer review — more frequently than would be expected by chance. Furthermore, the analysis identified 21 authors who seemed to steer their submissions towards the group of 22 editors flagged for high retraction rates.

The study reveals how individuals can form coordinated networks and work under the guise of editorial duty to push large amounts of problematic research into the scientific literature, in some cases with links to paper mills — businesses that churn out fake papers and sell authorship slots.

Hoch denies that PLoS One systematically allows authors to choose who is assigned to handle their submission. “Editor assignment at PLoS One is done via an algorithm that matches submissions to editors with suitable expertise, or in a minority of cases PLOS staff manually research and assign editors. Author requests for specific editors are not honoured or even considered in most cases, and when they are considered they are carefully vetted for potential competing interests.”

Conflicting interests

In 2022, PLoS ONE retracted more than 100 papers after an editor noticed an unusual spike in submissions, many in agricultural research, from one author. The journal’s investigation found that some academic editors had handled manuscripts from the same authors repeatedly, co-authored papers with them and manipulated peer review.

In their analysis of PLoS ONE’s publication records, Richardson and his colleagues identified 19 researchers — based in 4 countries — who served as academic editors between 2020 and 2023, and repeatedly handled each other’s submissions. More than half of the papers they accepted were later retracted, with nearly identical notices citing concerns about authorship, peer review and competing interests.

Nature’s analysis identified 3 of those 19 editors. Shahid Farooq, a plant biologist at Harran University in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, topped the list of PLoS ONE editors ordered by the number of retracted papers that they handled. Between 2019 and 2023, Farooq was responsible for editing 79 articles, 52 of which were subsequently retracted. All of the retraction notices stated that the papers were “identified as one of a series of submissions” for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Farooq also co-authored seven articles in PLoS ONE that were later retracted with identical retraction notices.

Farooq told Nature in an email statement that he relied on reviewers’ reports to make his editorial decisions, and that editors had limited tools to detect conflicts of interest. In a 2022 press release, PLOS's Hoch said that “internal competing interest checks” were not “equipped to identify co-publication histories” at the time. PLOS introduced new policies in 2023 to try to prevent manipulation of the publication process. More recently, journals have started using automated tools for analysing co-authorship patterns and flag potential paper-mill issues.

Farooq says that PLoS ONE removed him from the editorial board in 2022, and that he subsequently resigned from his editorial positions in other journals, including Frontiers in Agronomy and BMC Plant Biology. “My editing experience has changed to not editing any paper for any publisher, as the publishers become innocent once any issues are raised on the published papers,” he added.

Another editor flagged in Nature’s analysis is Zhihan Lv (also known as Zhihan Lyu), a researcher in virtual reality, who ranked second in the list of editors who handled high numbers of retracted PLoS ONE papers. Between 2017 and 2021, Lv edited 54 papers, and 43 of these have been retracted, including 31 this year. All notices cited concerns about peer-review integrity and potential manipulation of the publication process.

Lv was also an editor for more than 400 papers in journals published by Hindawi — a subsidiary of New Jersey-based publisher Wiley that has now ceased activity. Many of these papers have been retracted. In 2024, the journal Neural Computing and Applications — published by London-based Springer Nature — retracted 24 of 26 papers in a 2018 special issue for which Lv was the managing guest editor (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher). The retractions, which included one research article co-authored by Lv, referred to compromised editorial handling and peer review, irrelevant citations, image manipulations, tortured phrases and content outside the scope of the journal and its special issue.

Lv told Nature he did not know at the time that there was a conflict of interest in submitting a paper to a special issue for which he was the handling editor.

In 2022, PLoS ONE removed Lv from its editorial board and retracted three papers coauthored by him in later years. “I was listed as a co-author in these three articles without my consent. I have no knowledge of the details of these articles,” Lv told Nature. “I remember informing the journal of this when they contacted me before retracting the papers,” he added.

But in 2023, PLOS alerted Uppsala University — where Lv worked from 2021 until his resignation in September 2024 — citing concerns about his involvement in paper-mill activities. The university’s investigation concluded that there were “grounds for suspecting research misconduct” on one of his PLoS ONE papers, and referred a separate matter, involving an ethics review it said Lv had fabricated, to the Swedish police. Lv has since moved to Xidian University in Xi’an, China.

Authorship concerns

Haibin Lv, a marine geologist at the North Sea Bureau in China’s Ministry of Natural Resources in Qingdao, ranked third in Nature’s list of editors. Between 2021 and 2022, Haibin Lv edited 28 papers for PLoS ONE. All but one of the 28 papers have been retracted, and the journal noted that they were part of a series of submissions for which it had concerns about peer-review integrity, similarities across articles and potential manipulation of the publication process. PLoS ONE issued an expression of concern for the remaining paper in June, citing issues with peer review and citations.

Nature also identified 113 papers published in Hindawi’s Journal of Sensors between 2021 and 2023 that Haibin Lv edited, 88 of which have been retracted.

Two of the retracted papers in PLoS ONE that Haibin Lv edited were co-authored by Zhihan Lv, who told Nature he was listed as an author without his consent. “Zhihan Lv and I are collaborators on multiple research projects. My handling of the two PLoS ONE papers he co-authored was no different than handling papers from strangers,” Haibin Lv told Nature.

Nature also identified ten articles that Haibin Lv and Zhihan Lv co-authored and published between 2022 and 2024 — six of which appeared in conferences run by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a professional association and publisher based in New York City. None have been retracted. IEEE declined to comment on the matter.

Zhihan Lv and Haibin Lv both told Nature that they are not brothers. Zhihan said they were not blood relatives, and Haibin described their relationship as “private”.

Fourth on Nature's list is Adnan Noor Shah, an agronomist at Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology in Rahim Yar Khan, Pakistan, who handled 24 papers published in PLoS ONE between August 2021 and May 2022. Eighteen of those papers have been retracted, and the retraction notices for 17 of them said that they were part of a series of submissions for which the journal had concerns about authorship, competing interests and peer review. Shah also co-authored five articles that PLoS ONE later retracted, citing similar concerns, as well as issues with reference citations and overlap with other publications.

Nature’s analysis found that, in 2022, Shah co-authored two papers in two journals, including Frontiers in Plant Science. His co-authors on these papers included three researchers who appeared as authors in four other papers that Shah edited for Frontiers in Plant Science. The journal’s publisher, Frontiers (based in Lausanne, Switzerland), told Nature that it is investigating 20 publications across the journals that Shah edited. Shah did not respond to Nature’s emails.

Nature’s investigation also identified cancer researcher Aamir Ahmad as the most prolific PLoS ONE editor. Ahmad is the editor-in-chief of Non-coding RNA Research, an open-access journal published by Beijing-based KeAi. He has also been a cancer editor at Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports since 2017.