2025/01/30 by Paul M. Stewart · 1 voice · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · #Copyright and Intellectual Property #Digital and Traditional Archives Management #Library Science and Information Systems
paper · doi:10.1210/clinem/dgaf036
openalex publication_date 2025/01/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
The demographic change in submissions to JCEM over the last decade is very apparent and largely driven by the emergence of China as a scientific superpower. Propelled by increases to budgets for research and development and national infrastructure platforms, China has overtaken the United States and Europe in terms of the size of its research workforce and its published scientific outputs. The Nature Index 2024 Research Leaders lists the leading institutions and countries/territories in the natural and health sciences according to their output in Nature Index journals (1) and shows that in 2023 China surpassed the United States for the first time in biomedical and health disciplines. Perhaps not surprisingly, as the most-cited journal in our discipline and one that is very popular in China, JCEM has statistics that mirror those of Nature journals. Ten years ago, manuscripts from China accounted for 11% of all submissions; by 2019 this had increased to 21%. The data for 2024 show that this figure has now increased dramatically, to more than 50% of submissions. JCEM is totally committed to attracting and publishing the best research in our discipline from around the world. We embrace geographical diversity in our governance (we have editors from 12 countries and editorial board members from 25 countries, with China well represented). We publish outputs from submitting authors based in 42 countries (2023 data). So what is the problem? In a nutshell, quality. Acceptance rates for submissions from China through 2014-2019 were ∼10%, but despite the rapid increase in submissions, the numbers of accepted papers have only modestly increased, such that their acceptance rate is now 6%. We are processing thousands of manuscripts per year from China, the vast majority of them either out of scope or lacking a mechanistic or experimental basis. We commonly see submissions based on single association studies, drawn from analysis of large published datasets such as the UK Biobank or the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, exploring relationships between unexplained and biologically irrelevant variables. Consequently the “reject without review rate” is unacceptably high, bringing with it significant staff time implications as well as diverting editors to “fire-fighting” rather than focusing on content strategy and enhancement of the journal for readers. These problems aside, I want to reassure our community that we are maintaining the quality of our peer review process and what we publish; preliminary data indicate that citation rates for manuscripts published from China are comparable to those published from the United States and western Europe. A pressing global concern is the authenticity of what is submitted. The pressure on emerging researchers to publish, particularly in clinical medicine, is intense in some countries, including China. This has contributed to the growth of “paper mills”—commercial organizations that charge for researchers to be listed as authors on wholly or partly fabricated, ghost-written papers. It is a huge problem and one that is not specific to endocrinology and metabolism. Studies show that some 2% of all scientific papers published in 2022 resembled paper-mill productions (2, 3). China, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia have all come under the spotlight (4), but fraudulent commercial activities are not confined to any single country and solutions must be global. In January 2025 the Chinese government announced a crackdown on paper mills and we await with interest to see the impact that this may have. Identity theft and misuse of identification data are further issues that are eroding one of the bedrock principles of publishing—trust in an individual's identity as a researcher and in their claimed affiliation and publication record. I cannot say with confidence that JCEM has published no fraudulent papers or never been a victim of the paper-mill industry. There are well-validated pointers that raise alarm bells in screening for such malpractice, and we have rejected several manuscripts without review in recent years on the basis of such suspicions. Further stringency will follow as we work with our publishing partner, Oxford University Press, on software screening tools. I do want to reassure all authors and readers of JCEM that we are committed to action. We have tightened our guidance on what research is within scope for JCEM and added the requirement for source documentation on ethics approvals. We have given additional guidance on Mendelian randomization (MR) studies, requiring that authors adhere to the STROBE-MR (STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology) guidelines. We also encourage authors to follow STROBE guidelines for observational studies generally (5). A key underpinning issue that has been identified is the prolific use of noninstitutional email accounts, which allows false self-identification and facilitates identity manipulation by bad actors (6). Our experience from returning to authors literally hundreds of submitted manuscripts that list no author with an institutional email account is that few of them are subsequently returned. More than a year ago, we instigated the requirement that submissions should list at least 1 author with an institutional email account, and we will be tightening this requirement further during 2025. We accept that this will be unpopular in some countries where many junior researchers and PhD students do not currently have access to institutional accounts. This is especially the case for emerging clinical researchers employed by hospitals rather than universities. Of course, we will be mindful of exceptions, but with the understanding that change must be a two-way process. Academic centers of excellence across the world with hospital/healthcare organization partnerships must take greater ownership and accountability for what is submitted to JCEM. From February, either an institutional email address or signoff by all authors with credible identity validation will be required for all authors lacking such validation, so they collectively confirm the identity of those 1 or 2 authors of a paper who unavoidably lack an institutional email address. As always, the submitting author must attest to the authenticity of the research and should ensure that it falls within the scope of JCEM. In our societal move to a digitally driven, “user-friendly” economy, electronic submission systems, researchers, and institutions will have to adapt. The current publishing environment has far too many gaps that have allowed this unprecedented surge of poor-quality manuscripts, some of which are undoubtedly fraudulent. Because no significant original research in endocrinology can be produced without the support and infrastructure of an institution or organization, it is time for all to recognize that employers must take responsibility for the work of their employees—by providing them with the means to identify themselves as legitimate researchers employed by their institution or organization. In short, if the employer is not willing to trust a researcher with an identifier linking them to the organization, why should we at JCEM trust their research? Raising the bar on research quality, reproducibility, and accountability is a strong commitment that goes hand in hand with JCEM being a global platform for knowledge transfer and innovation. The quote “Houston we have a problem” was popularized by the 1995 film Apollo 13. Those of you with an ear for detail will know that this was actually a misquote. The phrase used in the 1970 real life episode by command module pilot John Swigert was “Houston we’ve had a problem here.” Hopefully, concerted action here from all of us will enable our immediate problem to become an issue of the past. The author wishes to acknowledge the support of Endocrine Society Publications Department staff for providing invaluable input to this editorial. The author is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.