Materials science journal withdraws 500 papers from fake conferences

The publishing giant Elsevier is withdrawing around 500 fake conference papers from one of its materials science journals, Retraction Watch reports. Many of the manuscripts published in Materials Today: Proceedings are off-topic, incomprehensible to the point of nonsense or seem to have been written by software. They all seem to have come from conferences that never happened, possibly created by paper mills as a way to ‘launder’ publications.

The problem was highlighted by James Heathers in late September, who found at least 1500 potentially fake articles in Materials Today: Proceedings. Some proceedings even had titles that had been advertised for sale to researchers looking for quick and easy authorship on a peer-reviewed article.