Shoddy commentaries—a quick and dirty route to higher impact numbers—are on the rise | Science | AAAS

"On 22 October, an unusual editorial appeared in the journal Neurosurgical Review. “We have made the difficult decision to temporarily pause the acceptance of letters to the editor and commentary manuscripts,” wrote Editor-in-Chief Daniel Prevedello, a brain surgeon at Ohio State University. The publication had been knocked off its feet by an “unprecedented increase” in submitted commentaries that appeared to be “driven by” advances in artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, he explained.

 Neurosurgical Review is not the only journal overwhelmed by commentary articles, a joint investigation by Science and Retraction Watch finds. They now make up 70% of the content in Elsevier’s Oral Oncology Reports, and nearly half in Wolters Kluwer’s International Journal of Surgery Open. At Neurosurgical Review, a Springer Nature title, letters, comments, and editorials comprised 58% of the total output from January to October—up from 9% last year. More than 80% of these commentaries are from South Asian countries, compared with fewer than 20% of research and review articles.

Science and Retraction Watch’s investigation suggests authors, journals, and institutions all benefit from the scheme, which floods the literature with poor-quality publications and casts doubt on metrics of scholarly output and impact. For authors, commentaries can be a quick and easy way to amass publications and citations. Authors “just want a PubMed-indexed article. That’s it,” says Shirish Rao, a recent medical graduate who works at a hospital in Mumbai, India. Commentaries are an ideal avenue because “you don’t really need original data,” so AI tools can generate them in almost no time, explains Rao, who is a member of the Association for Socially Applicable Research, a nonprofit think tank. And because they are rarely peer reviewed, they are typically easier to get into journals than a research paper...."