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REVIEW 4 major objections 6 minor 43 references

More than 1,000 special issues a year are 'Published in Support of Self,' with guest editors authoring over a third of the papers.

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2026-08-03 11:02 UTC pith:D7BZXQGM

load-bearing objection A large, openly shared measurement of special-issue endogeny that makes a defensible qualitative case — exact counts rest on unvalidated name-matching, so treat them as estimates. the 4 major comments →

arxiv 2601.07563 v2 pith:D7BZXQGM submitted 2026-01-12 cs.DL

The Issue with Special Issues: when Guest Editors Publish in Support of Self

Paolo Crosetto , Pablo G\'omez Barreiro , Mark Austin Hanson This is my paper
classification cs.DL
keywords endogenyspecial issuesguest editorsscientific misconductpublishing ethicsconflict of interestopen accessresearch integrity
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

This paper argues that special-issue guest editors frequently publish their own articles in the issues they edit, and that when more than a third of an issue's papers are authored by its guest editors the issue should be considered an abuse of editorial power. Using a dataset of more than 100,000 special issues from five publishers, the paper estimates that over 1,000 such PISS issues are published each year, hosting tens of thousands of endogenous articles. The paper's core message is that this is a systematic integrity problem comparable in scale to scientific fraud, but one that can be fixed by enforcing existing endogeny policies.

Core claim

The central discovery is that endogeny — guest editors publishing non-editorial articles in their own special issues — is endemic in special-issue-centered publishing. About one in seven special-issue papers is endogenous on average, and although the majority of guest editors publish responsibly, around 1,100 special issues per year cross the paper's one-in-three threshold and are labelled PISS. The abuse is concentrated: journals that host many special issues host almost all PISS issues, with a small number of journals accounting for the majority. The paper also finds that endogeny declined after indexers announced stricter policies, suggesting enforcement works.

What carries the argument

The paper's core machinery is a large special-issue dataset (over 100,000 closed special issues, roughly one million papers, 2015–2025) and a name-matching procedure that flags an article as endogenous when a cleaned guest-editor name (given name plus first surname) matches a paper author. On top of this, the paper defines the threshold concept PISS (Published in Support of Self): any special issue where more than 33% of non-editorial articles are authored by at least one guest editor. The threshold is deliberately set above existing publisher limits so the label is conservative.

Load-bearing premise

The entire count of PISS issues rests on the assumption that cleaning names to 'given name + first surname' and matching them to author lists reliably identifies which articles are authored by guest editors; the paper notes errors are most likely false negatives, so if anything the headline numbers could be understated.

What would settle it

A validation study on a random sample of special issues comparing the name-match flags against manually verified guest-editor identities (via ORCID or editorial-board pages) would settle whether the matching undercounts or overcounts. Similarly, checking publisher archives for special-issue tags that were later removed would reveal whether the true PISS count is higher than reported.

Watch this falsifier — get emailed when new claim-graph text bears on it.

If this is right

  • If these numbers hold, special-issue-based growth strategies at several large open-access publishers produce a volume of conflict-of-interest papers comparable to the estimated volume of fraudulent or questionable research.
  • Indexers and publishers can enforce existing endogeny caps because the required metadata — author lists and guest-editor names — is already available and tracked.
  • Journal-level auditing is sufficient: a small number of high-volume special-issue journals host most PISS output, so targeted action at those journals would eliminate the majority of the problem.
  • The post-2023 decline in endogeny that the paper links to an indexer's 25% policy change suggests that announced, enforced limits change guest-editor behavior.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • If the name-matching underestimates endogeny, as the paper concedes, the true PISS count could be higher, placing the problem at the larger end of the paper's own range.
  • The same dataset could be extended beyond guest editors to 'network endogeny' — papers by co-authors, frequent collaborators, or former students — which would likely substantially raise the estimated volume of self-serving special-issue publishing.
  • The paper documents that some publishers post-hoc remove special-issue tags from under-filled issues; comparing current metadata to archived web pages would quantify how many endogenous articles were reclassified as regular papers, a concrete test of hidden endogeny.
  • The one-in-three threshold itself could be empirically calibrated by surveying researchers on which special issues they would judge as misconduct, testing whether the cutoff matches community norms.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

4 major / 6 minor

Summary. The paper presents a large-scale descriptive study of 'endogeny' in special issues: guest editors publishing non-editorial articles in their own special issues. Using data from over 100,000 special issues published 2015–2025 by MDPI, Frontiers, BMC, Discover, and the Royal Society's Phil Trans, the authors define a special issue as 'Published in Support of Self' (PISS) when more than 33% of its articles are authored by at least one of its guest editors. They report that although most guest editors engage in endogeny moderately or not at all, more than 1,000 PISS special issues are published annually, hosting tens of thousands of endogenous articles, with MDPI and Frontiers accounting for the vast majority. The paper argues that excessive endogeny is a form of scientific misconduct, that current publisher/indexer policies are insufficiently enforced, and that simple metadata-based enforcement would largely solve the problem.

Significance. If the quantitative claims hold, this is the first systematic estimate of a specific and previously under-measured conflict-of-interest mechanism in scholarly publishing, and it provides a transparent, policy-relevant framework and a shared replication package (data and scripts on Figshare, plus a Shiny app). The qualitative pattern — endogeny concentrated in special-issue-heavy journals and publishers — is likely robust to several measurement concerns, and the paper explicitly distinguishes between the definitional threshold and the sensitivity of the results to that threshold. The authors also credit existing policy efforts (e.g., DOAJ's 25% rule) and identify a small number of journals whose remediation would address a large share of the problem. These strengths make the paper valuable to the scientometrics and research-integrity communities despite the methodological caveats noted below.

major comments (4)
  1. [Methods and Data, 'Data collection' (name-cleaning paragraph)] The central quantitative claims — 126,596 endogenous articles and ~1,100 PISS special issues per year — rest entirely on cleaning names to 'given name + first surname' and text-matching guest editors against author lists. The paper asserts that matching errors 'would most likely be false negatives,' but no validation set, manual audit, or sensitivity analysis is provided. Common names (particularly in large author pools at MDPI and Frontiers) will generate false positives, and name variations or transliteration issues will generate false negatives. The direction and magnitude of the net bias are unknown. A small percentage of false positives in the ~126k flagged endogenous articles could materially change the PISS special-issue count. Please report a validation exercise (e.g., manual inspection of a random sample, comparison with ORCID-linked identities, or a stricter matching rule) and
  2. [Methods and Data, Table 2 and 'one-in-three rule'; Results, Table 4] The 33% threshold is acknowledged as debatable, and the authors helpfully report endogeny volume distributions across thresholds (Table 4). However, the headline 'more than 1,000 PISS special issues per year' and the comparison to the magnitude of scientific fraud are stated as point values, with no uncertainty intervals and no explicit sensitivity of the annual PISS count to threshold choices (e.g., 25%, 30%, 40%). Since the threshold is a normative and arbitrary demarcation, the main quantitative claims should be presented as a function of the threshold, at least in sensitivity form, so readers can assess how much of the 'endemic' conclusion is driven by the chosen cutoff. A simple bootstrap of the journal-level or article-level estimates would also clarify sampling uncertainty.
  3. [Methods and Data, 'Data collection' (BMC paragraph)] BMC data were manually curated because the publisher's web architecture prevented scraping, and 1,929 collections were annotated by hand. BMC also shows the highest PISS rate (24%) of all publishers in Table 4. The paper recommends caution in extrapolating BMC trends, but the manual curation step is a potential source of systematic error that is not quantified. In particular, the exclusion rule for post-hoc collections (publication date range > 2 years) could bias BMC endogeny estimates either upward or downward, and the paper notes that BMC sometimes defines collections post-hoc. Please report inter-annotator reliability or a reproducibility check for the BMC dataset, and clarify how sensitive the BMC-specific PISS percentages are to the 2-year window.
  4. [Discussion, paragraph beginning 'Such publishers often offer the rebuttal...'] The paper documents that publishers sometimes remove the special-issue tag from articles if an issue fails to meet minimum size, which would cause endogeny to be undercounted. This is an important mechanism, but it is only described qualitatively. If the goal is to establish the lower bound of PISS, the paper should attempt to estimate the frequency of such metadata modifications in the sample (e.g., by comparing archived snapshots with current metadata, or by citing the authors' own File S2 examples systematically). Without this, it is unclear whether the 'conservative' framing is correct for all publishers, since the same metadata-retagging practice could also affect the guest-editor-to-issue mapping itself.
minor comments (6)
  1. [Abstract and Results, 'PISS is concentrated in some journals'] The abstract states 'more than 1,000 hacked SIs are published each year,' while the text uses 'approximately 1,100 PISS special issues are published per year.' Please harmonize the phrasing and provide the precise annual average in the abstract.
  2. [Results, 'PISS is concentrated in some journals', paragraph 5] The phrase 'collectively host ~38% of the journals in our dataset' is ambiguous: it refers to BMC, Discover, and Phil Trans, but the number should be stated explicitly (e.g., 'collectively cover X of 904 journals'). Please clarify.
  3. [Discussion, paragraph 6] The comparison to scientific fraud relies on estimates from papers with different journal universes (Web of Science, Scopus). Since the PISS dataset covers only 904 journals, the comparison should be framed explicitly as an upper/lower bound with the relevant caveat that the two quantities are not directly commensurable.
  4. [Methods and Data, 'Data collection'] 'Name cleaning involved removing titles, hyphens, extra spaces and converting character strings to lower case.' Converting all names to lower case is fine, but the paper should state how diacritics, non-Latin scripts, and multi-part surnames were handled, as these are common in the author populations of MDPI and Frontiers.
  5. [Table 5] The table header states ranking by 'mean percent of special issues that are PISS,' but the text also mentions absolute counts for the worst offenders. Please add the absolute counts to the table or clarify the ranking criterion in the caption.
  6. [General] The phrase 'up over 200,000 persons' in the Discussion should be 'over 200,000 persons.' Also, 'Paper mills' footnote i is helpful; please ensure all supplementary files (File S1, S2, Tables S3–S7) are included in the replication package and are discoverable from the DOI.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: PISS is a stipulated definition applied to independently collected metadata; self-citations are background, not load-bearing.

full rationale

The central quantity, the number of PISS special issues, is a count produced by applying the paper's explicit definition (endogeny >33%) to guest-editor and author metadata collected from publisher pages and CrossRef. The definition is not fitted to the data; the paper also reports endogeny across thresholds and argues the 33% cut is higher than existing policies (DOAJ 25%, Frontiers 30%), so the headline count is transparent rather than constructed by the definition. The name-cleaning/matching step is a measurement with asserted error direction ('most likely false negatives'); this is an accuracy and validation concern, not circularity, because matching is not defined in terms of the PISS outcome and no parameter is tuned to produce the headline figure. Self-citations (refs 1, 18, 33) support background claims about growth, Discover inclusion, and economic drain; none is invoked to define PISS, set the threshold, or validate the count. There is no fitted-input-called-prediction, no imported uniqueness theorem, and no ansatz justified solely by prior author work. The derivation therefore does not reduce to its inputs by construction.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

4 free parameters · 4 axioms · 2 invented entities

The central measurements rest on a handful of author-chosen thresholds and metadata assumptions. The 33% PISS cutoff and the 55-special-issue worst-offender cutoff are arbitrary but transparent; the economic estimate uses a €2000 APC assumption. No new physical entities are introduced.

free parameters (4)
  • PISS endogeny threshold = 33%
    The paper defines PISS as >33% endogenous articles. The threshold is author-chosen and acknowledged as debatable; all headline PISS counts depend on it.
  • APC cost assumption = €2000 per article
    Used to estimate €33–87 million spent on PISS papers; labeled conservative but not data-backed.
  • Worst-offender minimum scale = ≥55 special issues
    Journals ranked as worst offenders must have published at least 55 special issues (~5/year); this cutoff affects Table 5.
  • BMC post-hoc exclusion window = 2 years
    BMC special issues with publication date span >2 years are excluded as likely post-hoc collections; changes BMC rates.
axioms (4)
  • domain assumption Guest editor names and author lists in publisher metadata and CrossRef accurately identify the same persons after cleaning.
    All endogeny classifications rely on name matching; no validation set is reported.
  • domain assumption Special-issue article membership is correctly tagged in the scraped/web data; post-hoc delisting is rare.
    The paper cites publisher practices that remove special-issue tags, which would create false negatives; they assume this does not overturn their estimates.
  • ad hoc to paper The one-in-three rule is a sensible demarcation of misconduct.
    Acknowledged as debatable; not derived from external policy (existing policies use 25% or 30%).
  • domain assumption Endogeny is a valid indicator for conflict-of-interest abuse by guest editors.
    The paper frames endogeny as a common-pool resource problem; this is a theoretical lens rather than an empirically established causal link.
invented entities (2)
  • PISS (Published in Support of Self, a.k.a. SI-hacked) independent evidence
    purpose: Label for special issues with >33% endogenous articles; central classification used in all prevalence estimates.
    Operationalized with public metadata; other researchers can apply the same rule to other data.
  • Endogeny volume independent evidence
    purpose: Metric for the proportion of endogenous articles in a PISS issue; used to describe abuse intensity.
    Simple ratio computable from metadata.

pith-pipeline@v1.3.0-alltime-deepseek · 11408 in / 12822 out tokens · 126051 ms · 2026-08-03T11:02:07.572308+00:00 · methodology

0 comments
read the original abstract

The recent exceptional growth in special issues has led to the largest delegation of editorial power in the history of scientific publishing. Has this power been used responsibly? We provide the first systematic analysis of endogeny, the practice of publishing articles in ones own special issue. While moderate levels of endogeny are common, excessive endogeny constitutes scientific misconduct, as it stems from a clear conflict of interest. We define special issues containing more than 33% endogeny as SI-hacked. We build a dataset of over 100,000 special issues published in 2015-2025 by five leading publishers. The large majority of guest editors engage in endogeny responsibly, if at all. Nonetheless, despite endogeny policies by publishers and indexers, SI-hacking is endemic. All journals heavily relying on special issues host SI-hacking; more than 1,000 hacked SIs are published each year, hosting tens of thousands of endogenous articles. Egregious SI-hacking is rare, editors exceeding endogeny thresholds mostly to the extent that publishers allow them to. This is not good news, as it reflects a widespread normalisation of guest editor conflicts of interests. Fortunately, SI-hacking can be solved by enforcing existing common sense policies. We provide data and analyses needed for indexers and regulators to act.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2601.07563 by Mark Austin Hanson, Pablo G\'omez Barreiro, Paolo Crosetto.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: prevalence of endogeny across journals and role of publishers. Endogeny is endemic Of the 986,772 special issue articles published by journals hosting PISS in our dataset, 126,596 are endogenous, resulting in an overall mean endogeny of 14.1% – i.e. one in seven special issue papers (excluding editorials) are authored by the guest editors ( [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p006_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: PISS volume for each journal. A) Each bubble represents a journal, with bubble size representing total special issues published between 2015 and 2025 by that journal. B) A numerical summary of the main features of the plot. recommended limits [6,15]. Here, based on the largest dataset of endogeny in special issues to date, we present two key findings: 1) the majority of guest editors use their power respon… view at source ↗

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

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