IJRS Journal Article Retractions

Thursday, 16 November, 2006

Beinga journal editor, I am concerned about the quality of the articles we publish, but have to balance this against the maintenance of a throughput of appropriate material. Add in to the mix the management of 1 internal reviewer, 1 cartographic reviewer and 2 external reviewers, and it all makes for alot of effort to publish one article.

The whole “quality” issue came starkly in to focus recently with the publication of a “Statement of Retraction” by the International Journal of Remote Sensing. If you read the statement you will see that not one, but three, papers have been retracted from publication (Sidenote: not sure if you can physically retract something that’s already published; I guess it’s more like disowning) where the same (ish) group of authors substantially reproduced material that had already been published (i.e. plagiarised). This really does highlight the whole peer-review process. It’s not perfect by any means, but does provide a good way of assessing the “worthiness” of research. So it is a case of selecting reviewers with care and passing a careful editorial eye over the results. What I find slightly strange is that several of the papers plagiarise were themselves published (earlier) by IJRS. Not quite sure what was going through the minds of the authors….