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

2026/01/12 by Paolo Crosetto, Pablo Gómez Barreiro, Mark Austin Hanson · 25 voices · 1 citation
#cs.DL

paper · pdf

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.

Citations

• Industry Influence in High-Profile Social Media Research
• The Drain of Scientific Publishing
• Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration
• The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly
• Tackling paper mills requires us to prevent future contamination and clean up the past – the case of the journal <i>Bioengineered</i>
• The oligopoly’s shift to open access: How the big five academic publishers profit from article processing charges
• The strain on scientific publishing
• P-curve: A key to the file-drawer.

Cited by

• The Challenges of Scientific Publishing: An Editor‐In‐Chief's Perspective

Discussions

• We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing sp [bsky, 514 points, 17 comments]
• 🧪 Thousands of special issues are stained with PISS (>33% of articles authored by the guest editor). See @hansonmark.bsky.social's thread below for a brief summary, read our preprint (arxiv.org/abs/2 [bsky, 15 points, 0 comments]
• El Pais covers our paper on guest editors publishing papers in their own special issue, something we denote as Publishing in Support of Self, PISS. Have a read! arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 Want to know i [bsky, 13 points, 0 comments]
• "So Clarivate, DOAJ, and other indexers and watchdogs, you know what to do. Cleanse the pool. Stop the PISS." And MDPI, stop the fraud 🤪 Go check their Special Issues Endogeny Explorer to know if you [bsky, 8 points, 0 comments]
• 2026. "The Issue with Special Issues: when Guest Editors Publish in Support of Self" (PISS) arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 #ResearchIntegrity #ResearchEthics [bsky, 7 points, 0 comments]
• Please, quote also the original article and their authors, active here, which for sure could benefit from your posts: The study here arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 By @paolocrosetto.bsky.social @pagomba.bsk [bsky, 7 points, 0 comments]
• The Issue with Special Issues: when Guest Editors Publish in Support of Self. arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 Thanks @hansonmark.bsky.social for putting the effort in documenting this plague. We need to stop [bsky, 7 points, 2 comments]
• Taking the PISS arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 [bsky, 6 points, 0 comments]
• A new preprint introduces SI-hacking: when guest editors publish excessively in their own special issues. More than 1,000 editors SI-hacked special issues are published each year. According to the aut [bsky, 6 points, 0 comments]
• Este es el estudio original, depositado en #arxiv en el que los investigadores responsables del mismo analizan estos comportamientos inadecuados en la publicación de estos números especiales, a los qu [bsky, 5 points, 0 comments]
• Original paper: The Issue with Special Issues: when Guest Editors Publish in Support of Self: arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 ... The figure legends and section headers in this preprint are superb. [bsky, 5 points, 1 comments]
• PISS journals 😂 arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 [bsky, 5 points, 0 comments]
• Respecto al tema de los números especiales de MDPI recupero este preprint reciente, un análisis exhaustivo y bastante concluyente arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 [bsky, 4 points, 0 comments]
• L'étude en question : arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 Signée @paolocrosetto.bsky.social, @pagomba.bsky.social et @hansonmark.bsky.social. [bsky, 4 points, 0 comments]
• I found this article funny. Publishing In Support of Self (abbreviated to PISS) arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 [bsky, 3 points, 0 comments]
• n 13% of special issues produced by several major publishers in the past decade, guest editors contributed > 1/3 of the papers themselves, according to an @arxiv.bsky.social preprint Article: arxiv.or [bsky, 3 points, 0 comments]
• The Issue with Special Issues: When Guest Editors Publish in Support of Self [hn, 1 points, 0 comments]
• Don't get me wrong, this is a very good paper and covers an important topic, but I can't feel that the authors are taking the PISS - and kudos to them for that 😂. doi.org/10.48550/arX... [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
• Endogeny: the practice of a guest editor publishing a non-editorial article in their own special issue Important ‘special issue endogeny’ dataset of >100,000 guest-edited collections with nearly 1 mil [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
• Interesting discussion on the arXiv today: arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563. This puts into more clear words what I have felt. That special issues are pretty obvious citation grabs by the editors, contributor [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
• - Published in Support of Self (PISS). - In fact... directly or indirectly, moderate or higher levels of endogeny, have always existed. "Making friends" or put oneself on the line by "give to receive" [bsky, 1 points, 1 comments]
• Another problem with "Special Issues" in science journals: Endogeny. #science #peerreview #endogeny arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• arxiv.org/pdf/2601.07563 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• "BMC Genomics wants your money. Study great apes? Get an easy pass through our special issue publication route. We'll peer review it, but implicitly, not as rigorously as we would otherwise." arxiv.or [mastodon, 0 points, 0 comments]
• arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

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