BMJ Group Retracts Guest-Edited Special Edition on Cancer Immunotherapies Amid Broader Publishing Concerns

The publishing group of the British Medical Journal retracted nearly its entire guest-edited special edition of the Journal of Medical Genetics dedicated to cancer immunotherapies last week, Stat reported. The retraction exemplified concerns with guest-edited editions regarding research integrity.

Springer Nature retracted 34 papers from special issues in 2024 because of compromised editorial handling and peer review, according to Retraction Watch cited in Stat reporting.

Retraction Watch’s database includes more than 64,000 retractions, Stat reported. About 20,000 entries in Retraction Watch’s database are likely tied to paper mills, many of which are published in special issues. Ivan Oransky, director of the Center for Scientific Integrity, which publishes Retraction Watch, said, 'I don’t know why anyone is surprised that they have so many problems.

' The number of special issues among several top publishers increased by the thousands from 2016 to 2022, according to one analysis reported by Stat. From 2018 to 2022, special issues made up 20% of the articles published by Elsevier, Stat reported from another paper. During the same period, special issues accounted for around 11% of the articles published by Springer Nature.

Special issues comprised around 12% of the articles published by Taylor and Francis from 2018 to 2022, according to the same paper cited in Stat. In 13% of special issues across the past decade, more than a third of the papers were authored by the guest editor, Stat reported from that paper.

This year, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute began requiring its researchers to publish their work first as a preprint, which will be used to evaluate their requests for future funding, according to Stat.