Russian Journals Retract More Than 800 Papers Following Probe

Russian academic journals are retracting more than 800 papers following an investigation by a Russian Academy of Sciences-appointed commission, Science reported. The investigation comes amid concerns in Russian science about plagiarism, self-plagiarism and “gift authorship,” in which academics are listed as co-authors without contributing work. The commission used software to search hundreds of Russian-language journals for text overlap, and manually checked papers that were flagged as suspicious for plagiarism or self-plagiarism. The commission also identified cases of “obscure authorship” in which academics were listed as an author on one version of a paper but not another.