The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles.
Cabanac and Magazinov have now flagged 1,850 articles from the journal, Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR), with the Problematic Paper Screener, which looks for evidence of bad practices in academic papers.
Most of the flagged articles ran afoul of the “Feet of Clay” detector, which looks for articles that cite retracted material. More than 100 papers contained tortured language, nonstandard phrases which are sometimes the result of a rewriting extension called SpinBot.
Since February 2024, the journal has retracted 136 papers by our count. The most recent retraction came August 2.
