Journalology #131: A trust crisis

Hello fellow journalologists,

Tomorrow I’m travelling to London to attend the STM Innovation & Integrity Days 2025. I’m hoping to see some Journalology readers there. Please do introduce yourself if we haven’t met before.

Innovation and research integrity feature heavily in this week’s newsletter, so there will be a lot to talk about.

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News headlines

China’s scientific clout is growing as US influence wanes: the data show how

China is redrawing the global science map, according to an analysis of citation data by the analytics firm Clarivate. The country is increasing research collaborations with European partners, even as it expands into emerging areas from southeast Asia to the Middle East and Africa. The United States, meanwhile, is losing its long-held lead as a research powerhouse and collaborator in world science. The analysis, which is based on a quarter of a century of citation data from the Web of Science, also warns of the looming consequences of policies instituted by the administration of US President Donald Trump

JB: To my mind the rise of China and the fall of the USA is the story that 2025 will be remembered for. Yes, research integrity challenges have repeatedly been in the news, but the acceleration of the transition of scientific power from the USA to China is especially noteworthy. This will have profound implications for academic publishing for decades to come; the retreat from open, which I outlined in October, is just one outcome of that shift.

You can read Jonathan Adams’ summary of the Clarivate report in Research Professional News (which Clarivate also owns) here: The US research empire is in retreat. Jonathan writes:

Across the board, China appears to be a game-changer for the US’s place in global science. China’s annual research output of papers in journals indexed in Web of Science has grown from fewer than 30,000 in 2000 to more than 850,000 in 2024, passing the US in 2020. China’s citation impact is now also well above the world average. China is less internationally networked than other major research powers: only 20 per cent of its output is internationally co-authored.

Once you’ve read the report, you may want to dip into: Why the world must wake up to China’s science leadership and also China accounts for more than half of leading output in the applied sciences.

I’ll be returning to this broad theme repeatedly next year.

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Conditions of Academic Journal Censorship Complicity and Resistance in China: An Interview Study

The findings from this interview study support other sets of findings regarding the involvement of non-state, overseas organisations in Chinese censorship practices. For example, the interviews showed how the Chinese state and its intermediaries use the threat of economic penalties to advance political interests and coerce non-Chinese scholarly publishers into self-censoring their output, exhibiting the dynamics of ‘delegated censorship’ found elsewhere.

JB: This was big news in 2017 (for example: Cambridge University Press accused of ‘selling its soul’ over Chinese censorship); the topic will likely come up again in the future as China’s bargaining power increases.

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Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI

Pangram’s analysis revealed that around 21% of the ICLR peer reviews were fully AI-generated, and more than half contained signs of AI use. The findings were posted online by Pangram Labs. “People were suspicious, but they didn’t have any concrete proof,” says Spero. “Over the course of 12 hours, we wrote some code to parse out all of the text content from these paper submissions,” he adds. The conference organizers say they will now use automated tools to assess whether submissions and peer reviews breached policies on using AI in submissions and peer reviews.

JB: I covered this story previously, but the Pangram estimates are new.

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The fall of a prolific science journal exposes the billion-dollar profits of scientific publishing

That journal, Science of the Total Environment — one of the 15 that publishes the most studies worldwide — has just been expelled from the group of reputable publications by one of the leading evaluation companies, after dozens of irregular articles were discovered. The scandal exposes the windfall profits of scientific publishers, who in recent years have amassed billions of dollars in earnings from public funds earmarked for science.

JB: I wrote about the delisting of the Elsevier journal Science of The Total Environment from the Web of Science database earlier this week. It’s the latest example of a large open access journal that grew very fast and then fell from grace.

This week Retraction Watch ran a story about other journals that have been delisted by indexers: Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases

The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications. One of the titles, which was included in Clarivate’s Web of Science, was dropped from that index as well.

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Journal retracts weed killer study backed by Monsanto, citing ‘serious ethical concerns’

In 2017, a lawsuit uncovered internal emails from chemical giant Monsanto that suggested its employees helped ghostwrite an influential paper that claimed to find no evidence the company’s widely used glyphosate herbicide, Roundup, caused cancer. Now, the scientific journal that published the 2000 paper has announced it has been retracted. The paper was withdrawn because of “serious ethical concerns” and questions about the validity of the research findings, toxicologist Martin van den Berg, co–editor-in-chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, wrote in a scathing retraction notice released on 28 November.

JB: If only all retraction notices were this clear.

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