On 22 October, an unusual editorial appeared in the journal Neurosurgical Review. “We have made the difficult decision to temporarily pause the acceptance of letters to the editor and commentary manuscripts,” wrote Editor-in-Chief Daniel Prevedello, a brain surgeon at Ohio State University. The publication had been knocked off its feet by an “unprecedented increase” in submitted commentaries that appeared to be “driven by” advances in artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, he explained.
Neurosurgical Review is not the only journal overwhelmed by commentary articles, a joint investigation by Science and Retraction Watch finds. They now make up 70% of the content in Elsevier’s Oral Oncology Reports, and nearly half in Wolters Kluwer’s International Journal of Surgery Open. At Neurosurgical Review, a Springer Nature title, letters, comments, and editorials comprised 58% of the total output from January to October—up from 9% last year. More than 80% of these commentaries are from South Asian countries, compared with fewer than 20% of research and review articles.
Science and Retraction Watch’s investigation suggests authors, journals, and institutions all benefit from the scheme, which floods the literature with poor-quality publications and casts doubt on metrics of scholarly output and impact. For authors, commentaries can be a quick and easy way to amass publications and citations. Authors “just want a PubMed-indexed article. That’s it,” says Shirish Rao, a recent medical graduate who works at a hospital in Mumbai, India. Commentaries are an ideal avenue because “you don’t really need original data,” so AI tools can generate them in almost no time, explains Rao, who is a member of the Association for Socially Applicable Research, a nonprofit think tank. And because they are rarely peer reviewed, they are typically easier to get into journals than a research paper.
Publishing these pieces can be good business for journals, too. For one, many charge publication fees for commentaries. They also offer a ripe opportunity for gaming the journal impact factor, a citation-based measure that gives extra weight to opinion pieces. Commentaries “are a free lunch” for journals, says John Ioannidis, a bibliometrics expert at Stanford University. Journals can also ask authors to add citations to the publication’s own papers, giving the impact factor another boost.
As for institutions, commentaries offer an easy way to inflate their output and citation numbers and therefore boost their rankings, which are aggressively used for advertising, says Moumita Koley, a senior research analyst at the Indian Institute of Science. Several private universities in India appear to be manipulating their rankings, according to Achal Agrawal, a data scientist at Sitare University and founder of the nonprofit India Research Watchdog. “If you are measuring research by quantity [of scientific papers] or by number of citations you will see that India is going up quite well,” he says. “If you delve slightly deeper … you realize that we are doing well because we are gaming those metrics, not because we are actually producing better research.”
A behind-the-scenes look at Neurosurgical Review highlights one likely example. Four days before Prevedello’s announcement suspending all commentaries, an anonymous email landed in his inbox. The email, which the sender shared with Retraction Watch, detailed how, in the preceding 2 months, three authors from one university in India had published “an astonishing 69 comments” in the journal. Nearly all of them appeared to be machine written and lacked “substantive relevance,” according to the email. The publications also cited “irrelevant” works from other researchers at the same institution as the authors—Saveetha University.
Saveetha, which hosts India’s top dental school, has a history of manipulating metrics to improve its rankings. A 2023 investigation by Science and Retraction Watch found the institution coerced students to write thousands of research papers during exams that were then furnished with inappropriate citations to other Saveetha works. Retraction Watch later reported that the school offered payments to prolific authors around the world for listing it as an affiliation on their publications.
A Saveetha representative wrote that his institution had “ordered a formal inquiry and will take appropriate action if any wrongdoing is identified.” But he contended, “It is preposterous to claim that the institution has any role in such alleged practices,” falsely claiming that because commentaries “are excluded by all ranking agencies” there would be “no benefit for anyone to manipulate these citations.” The school also pointed the finger at Neurosurgical Review, which this year published 466 commentaries, 120 of which were from Saveetha authors. “Why is the journal not being investigated?”
Prevedello declined to answer how his journal could have published so many commentaries with clear red flags in such a short time span, although their numbers began to grow shortly after he took the helm in January 2023. A Springer Nature spokesperson said the publisher was “looking into the matter urgently” but could not “share any more information” at this stage.
The commentaries in Neurosurgical Review are just a small part of the more than 1200 total letters, editorials, and comments written by scholars with Saveetha affiliations this year—a ninefold increase over last year, according to Reese Richardson of Northwestern University, a bibliometrics expert who contributed to the analysis.
Science and Retraction Watch examined the five journals that published most of them. At most of those journals, commentaries started out contributing only modestly if at all to journal volumes, then rose in recent years. A spokesperson for Elsevier, publisher of two of the titles, said, “We have a rigorous editorial process in place. [We] will continue to monitor patterns of authorship and citation, and we are vigilant in ensuring that our editorial standards are upheld.”
Systematic spot checks across the journals revealed Saveetha authors frequently cited researchers from their own institution. Neurosurgical Review had the highest rate of institutional self-cites, with eight of 10 sampled Saveetha commentaries referencing other Saveetha work. “This is clearly a scheme to inflate publication counts and citations,” Richardson says. Koley, who read some of the Saveetha commentaries, calls them “meaningless” and “definitely” AI generated.
Roughly 200 of the Saveetha commentaries published this year include as an author the world’s single most prolific commentary writer, Thai physician Viroj Wiwanitkit, who pumps out more than 500 letters to the editor annually. Wiwanitkit has listed a variety of university affiliations on his publications; at Saveetha he “is a part-time research faculty,” the university’s registrar says. Wiwanitkit did not answer repeated emails seeking comment.
He may be inspiring others. “Maybe other people understood, ‘Hey, this is working well; if he can write commentaries, we can also write commentaries,’” Agrawal says. “I had not seen anyone else using this trick till now.”
