Although China faces a constantly increasing number of retractions and underlying systemic research integrity issues, its financial losses attributable to funded-but-retracted publications remain largely unexplored. Drawing on Beall's List and the Retraction Watch Database, we analyzed funding data and article processing charges (APCs) for 82 retracted publications in potential predatory journals (PPJs). Our analyses reveal that approximately USD 0.25 million from 277 research grants, awarded by national, provincial, local, and institutional funders, was spent on APCs for publications subsequently retracted for 10 reasons. Based on these findings on PPJ retractions, we estimate that the total financial loss associated with China-affiliated retracted publications is substantial. Accordingly, we argue that Chinese research funders should recover their research funding wasted on retracted publications, sanction accountable authors of retracted publications, and strengthen their warning systems against predatory publishing. Finally, we call for further empirical research to comprehensively quantify financial losses across all China-affiliated retracted publications and systematically track the presence of Chinese research funders in the retracted literature.
This study contributes to the literature on global inequality in scientific knowledge production by examining how author-country concentration varies with journals' positions in the academic publishing hierarchy. Using a longitudinal dataset of sociology journals from the Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports covering 1997-2022, we distinguish between differences across journals and changes within the same journal over time. The between-journal analysis reveals a U-shaped association between journals' average Journal Impact Factor and average author-country concentration: concentration is higher among journals at the lower and upper ends of the influence hierarchy than among journals occupying intermediate positions. Two-way fixed-effects models provide complementary evidence of a similar nonlinear association between annual changes in Journal Impact Factor and changes in author-country concentration within journals. Together, these findings indicate that the association between journal influence and the geographic concentration of authorship is not adequately summarized by a single monotonic trend and provide a more differentiated empirical account of inequality in global scientific knowledge production.
For scholarly publishers, Generative AI presents efficiency opportunities but critical metadata quality challenges. To determine if AI can replace authors, we conducted a multi-dimensional comparative analysis of 1500 paired scholar-authored and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated keyword sets from high-impact Chinese social science articles, assessing grammatical, semantic and discourse features. Supported by rigorous statistical testing, we found the two approaches represent 'two sides of the same coin'. The AI employed a bottom-up 'intelligent summarization' logic, creating comprehensive sets optimised for discoverability. Conversely, human scholars used a top-down 'artisanal distillation' logic to serve promotionality by crafting conceptually novel terms. Our findings demonstrate that full automation is suboptimal, sacrificing the crucial promotional function that brands research and signals specific contributions. We conclude the ideal path is a synergistic human-AI workflow. This critical curation model enhances metadata by creating keywords that are both comprehensive and conceptually potent.
As author identifier services (AIDs) and academic social networks (ASNs) have become increasingly central to scholarly communication in the last decade, it is important to study how these tools are being used and how far researchers are involved in these services. This study aims to assess the evolution of the presence of researchers from 2019 to 2023, on three AIDs (ORCID, ResearcherID and IdHAL) and on two ASNs (ResearchGate and Academia) categorized by discipline and career advancement in a medium-sized multidisciplinary university in France (University of Caen Normandy). The total number of publications found on each of the five sites studied was assessed to evaluate the ability of these sites to provide an accurate view of the scientific output of individuals and their institution. In this case, for each of the researchers we need to determine whether they had a profile on any website studied, and to record the number of their publications. As main results, the number of profiles has increased across the five sites studied over the period 2019-2023. This increase is very important on two of the five sites studied: IdHAL and ORCID (330% and 159% increase, respectively), while it is more moderate on the other three sites (less than 30%). This illustrates the result of incentive policies implemented in France in recent years concerning IdHAL and ORCID. The analysis of the number of publications on each profile in 2019 and 2023 across the five sites studied showed large differences in terms of the total number of publications included in profiles, highlighting the inability of these sites to qualify a population of researchers by considering the number of publications available on these different sites. To complement this study, future research should consider analysing the content and methods of data entry on these sites, particularly ORCID, as well as the frequency with which this data is updated, especially in relation to the development of different providers in the context of open science.
Key Points Commercial scholarly publishing profits from unpaid peer‐review labour. Researchers and editors provide essential labour without compensation. Peer review is one of the largest forms of unrecognised scholarly labour. Publishers can afford to compensate reviewers. Reviewer compensation is necessary for a fairer and more sustainable publishing system.
