Elsevier shuts down its finance journal citation cartel
chrisbrunet.com293 points by qsi 7 hours ago
293 points by qsi 7 hours ago
It doesn't surprise me it happens within the Elsevier ecosystem. Elsevier has a long tradition of scientific misconduct and scientifically immoral behavior (see Wikipedia).
The operating margin of Elsevier is around 40% which is huge! At the end mostly paid by tax-payer money.
Personally, I never review or publish with Elsevier.
I am skeptical it is a problem isolated to Elsevier. Given the LLM craze now prioritizes open access, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2025/08/28/deep-research-and-open..., it would not surprise me people start gaming MDPI in the same way for example.
You are in very very good company. The British mathematician Timothy Gowers famously boycotts Elsevier also
https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...
One of the reasons why in Germany universities were able to collectively negotiate better open publishing deals with Wiley and Springer, but Elsevier just flat out refused to agree to any better terms for three years.
(See Project DEAL: https://deal-konsortium.de/en/agreements/elsevier)
Elsevier is certainly evil, but I would say the root issue is the practices of the institutions where these "authors" are employed. This kind of thing is academic misconduct and should result in them losing their jobs.
This goes deeper than the institutions, actually. The KPI for many (non-industrial) researchers is the number of publications and citations. That's what careers and funding depends on.
Goodhart's law states "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", and that's what we see here. There is a strong incentive to publish more instead of better. Ideas are spread into multiple papers, people push to be listed as authors, citations are fought for, and some become dishonest and start with citation cartels, "hidden" citations in papers (printed small in white-on-white, meaning it's indexed by citation crawlers but not visible to reviewers) and so forth.
This also destroys the peer review system upon which many venues depend. Peer reviews were never meant to catch cheaters. The huge number of low-to-medium quality papers in some fields (ML, CV) overworks reviewers, leading to things like CVPR forcing authors to be reviewers or face desk rejection. AI papers, AI reviews of dubious quality slice in even more.
Ultimately the only true fix for this is to remove the incentives. Funding and careers should no longer depend on the sheer number of papers and citations. The issue is that we have not really found anything better yet.
As for an alternative, how about using the social fabric of researchers and institutes instead? A few centuries of science ran on it before somebody had the great idea to introduce "objective" metrics which made things worse. Reintroducing that today would probably cause a larger spread in the quality of research, which is good: research is kind of a "hit-driven industry" - higher highs are the most important thing. The best researchers will do the best research, probably better without carrot and stick than with.
What the guarantee is that folks won't abuse this system in the same way they do the citation system? The recommendation letter system is often abused for the pettiest of reasons...
There is no guarantee. The current system is also not a guarantee for good results, though.
A few centuries of science of white males. While I agree that the system with ”objective metrics” has a lot of problems, but just removing it would bring us back to the old days when almost all science was done by a few privileged white men.
Almost all science was done by "a few privleged white men" because Europe and the Americas were the only places that had modernized with large central states, university systems, and educational systems. Even in that scenario before the "objective metrics" of the post-war system came about, we still had people like Madam Curie and Ramanujan being able to work with stellar results. The idea that somehow academia would stonewall all of the non-whites is absurd.
What you describe is still a problem with the institutions, because it is ultimately the institutions that provide the incentives (in the form of jobs). You're right that they're using bad metrics, but it is the institutions who are making those bad decisions based on the bad metrics.
There are lots of better things, like people making hiring and firing decisions based on their evaluation of the content of papers they have actually read, instead of just a number. If someone is publishing so many papers that a hiring committee can't even read a meaningful fraction of them, that should be a red flag in itself, rather than a green one.
It's true that hire and tenure decisions are under the institution's control. But a lot of funding comes from external sources, and most public funding uses some sort of publication-based metric. There are exceptions, but that's the game. The CV of your PhD's is often judged by the publication list and the corresponding citations. That's research institutes where they might go, other universities, large companies etc. will look at this. It's difficult to change this system as isolated player, and coordinates efforts so far failed on the "what else" question.
A problem with the public sector in this instance is it has money to spend, but no way of allocating it particularly well.
It will just pick the best allocation metric it has available, even if that metric would never stand up to scrutiny in the private sector, or any more directly measured domain, public or private.
I think the state could simply allocate money to long-lived scientific institutions and let the experts there handle things as long as there is no obvious corruption.
To dig even deeper into the problem: you have to get a large number of institutions to agree to stop this at once, none will voluntarily risk their (generally) working pipeline and system first. It disrupts a lot of different things and takes them out of the currently established model that everyone still uses to measure success. It reminds me of how most people who say “well not everyone should go to college!” Are obviously omitting “…except for my kids of course.” It borders on an expressive response, it’s not something anyone wants to actually take action on.
There’s not a whole lot to gain for the individual or even the institution unless they hit an absolute home run on the first try that also shows positive results very quickly. More than likely the decision will be questioned at every turn
There's imperfect ways to work with goodhartable metrics. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fuSaKr6t6Zuh6GKaQ/when-is-go... talks about some of them (in the context of when they go bad).
The incentive to disprove bad science ought to be greater.
Exactly. There should be much greater incentives to (in)validate prior publications. That is what science is about.
The needle is beginning to move on this I believe: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00321-5
Evil Seer would be a good anagram if only Elsevier did any of the actual [re]viewing themselves
I've heard of Chris but not too well. This guy does not f*c$ around, don't get on his bad side.
The state of research is dire at the moment. The whole ecosystem is cooked. Reproducibility is non-existent. This obvious cartel is a symptom and there should be exemplary punishment.
Publishers are commercially incentivized to simply maximize profit and engagement. The main actors are academics and most of them try to uphold the high standards and ethics. Yes there is free-riding, backstabbing and a lot of politics but there is also reputation and honesty.
A few academics give academia a bad name, at the worst possible time and when society needs honest, reliable, reproducible and targetted research the most.
About Chris, this 3.5 years old post made me wonder what he's all about. https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/this-princeton-economics-profe...
I have no doubt that there are honest academics who publish research which actually contributes to humanity's corpus of knowledge. Whether that is some new insight into the past, observations on nature and man's interaction with it, clever chemical advances, or medical innovations which benefit mankind. People who publish works which will be looked upon as seminal and foundational in a decade or two, but also works which just focus on some particular detail and which will be of use to many researchers in the future.
But I can't shake the impression that a lot, perhaps the vast majority, of science consists of academics (postdocs and untenured researchers in particular I suppose) stuck in the publish-or-perish cycle. Pushing pointless papers where some trivial hypothesis is tested and which no one will ever use or read — except perhaps to cite for one reason or another, but rarely because it makes academic sense. Now with added slop, because why wouldn't you if the work itself is already as good as pointless?
The system, as you say, is fucked.
Most scientists want to do good science. They get intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in doing so. But with any large group of people there will be a few bad faith actors that will manipulate any exploit in the system for their own personal benefit. The problem here is that 'the system' of academic appointments, and even more importantly, funding sources, are built around this publishing metric. This forces even the good faith scientists to behave poorly because it was a requisite to even being able to exist as a working researcher.
Elsevier had no reason to stop this. Inflated citations mean higher impact factors, and higher impact factors justify higher subscription prices. Lucey published 56 papers in one year, the publisher got better metrics to sell. Hard to call that a rogue actor..
> Elsevier had no reason to stop this
If Elsevier had no reason to stop this, why did they stop this?
They had no reason to stop this until it became publicly embarrassing for them.
Right — and once someone is pumping out 56 papers/year, the journal becomes dependent on their output. Who in the chain is going to flag a problem that looks like productivity from every direction?
We need open publishing. This is why Elsevier etc... use an outdated business model.
That Elsevier now also runs more into fake-articles and fake-research, all fueled by the money-addiction, just adds to the problem (and also invalidates Elsevier's model, by the way - why do we now have to deal with fake science that is costly? That is Elsevier's business model). I fail to see why taxpayers money has to go into private companies for research already financed by the taxpayers. We are paying twice here, Elsevier.
Spot on, and beyond the 'double-dipping' business model of "academic publishers" like Elsevier and Springer, there’s a massive systemic issue: taxpayers fund >90% of foundational research, only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top and then lock it behind patents for decades. Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.
"only for private pharma/bio/tech firms to add a thin layer of additional research (or design) on top"
Citation needed.
Go to market cost billions and takes a decade. Doesn't sound like a thin layer. I'm not disputing fundamental research in academia is an essential fuel to keep innovation engines running. But the contributions of biotech is not "thin".
> Another example of how private interests are offloading the risk and costs to taxpayers while privatizing all the rewards.
Another example of government leaders choosing to not spend taxpayer money to pay for the expensive trials to get medicine approved for use.
Another example of voters voting for government leaders that campaign on privatizing the rewards in exchange for the promise of lower taxes.
Any taxpayer subsidized industry or subject is a massive magnet for this sort of "complex business that you can't dumb down or eli5 without making it look like a racket because it's fundamentally a racket with responsibility diffused to obfuscate it" stuff because taxpayer money has the most distant of principal agent problem and the government optimizes for "cog in the machine with blinders" employees and silo'd organizations who only care about their own ass so nobody ever takes a step back and says "hey the taxpayer is getting ripped off" until the ripoff is so obvious the taxpayers leann on the politicians.
Academia is basically outdated, or needs incredible reform.
Industry and youtubers are making significant scientific progress. (I'm mostly joking about youtubers, but it does happen)
I think Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are A-list.
Who in Industry is making meaningful progress in the field of maths? How about astronomy? Particle Physics? Psychology? Sociology?
I'd wager that I could name basically any field which does not have immediately obvious and proven ways to make money with through research.
Two of these are not like the others.
One of the things that is so deceptive is the way so many people think that ways to make money need to be both obvious and proven.
Of course you have to be very good at math or natural science to be able to figure out how to support your own research so you can get way more accomplished than you could at a unversity.
All others need not apply.
Most universities wouldn't act on your application anyway, if you got very far without being on the academic track, that could make lots of people look bad who would prefer to keep the status-quo more restrictive.
Edit: The threat to the status-quo must have gotten bigger than I thought, defensive reactions are popping up quicker than ever.
I have to be honest, I do not understand what you want to say with your comment.
My point is that outside of fields which can somehow make money through research, not much scientific progress is made outside of universities. I don't see how you address this.
Very legitimate question.
I address it with my whole life.
It would have taken my whole life if I had stayed and gotten my PhD anyway, so why not?
People can't expect dramatically different approaches to research to do anything but make it difficult for deep understanding between them.
You really have to have an open mind.
I see raw scientific progress that many outside of instiutions do not recognize, because so many brilliant experimentalists do not have institutional credentials.
So I had a head start and took advantage of it, kept giving chemistry lessons to colleagues as they went through graduate school.
Even invented something really cool in one of their labs when I wasn't even a student any more.
Naturally I have the greatest respect for PhDs in general because that in itself is a major achievement.
But I wouldn't have gotten this far in such a non-industrial environment, core industriousness might just be a differentiation factor.
It took a long time but eventually I came to the point where I just do science every day because I'm a scientist, and make money as a byproduct of what I do.
No different than a university lab where 90% - 99% of your experiments will never pay off, if you can't handle it under a variety of financial and/or institutional situations you might need to look at reasons why like I did.
Plus with a lifetime of more intense experimentation than if I had a PhD (really do not compare myself to others) I've got zillions of financial opportunities with chemicals in particular. The most important thing turned out to be curtailing the desire to make as much money as possible, most of this stuff is toxic.
Any kind of treadmill could have led to a much worse outcome.
That is kind of my point. Outside of a few fields (some branches of chemistry certainly being one of the exceptions) will someone pay you to do your research.
I just pulled up the newest published math paper from arxiv. No one except universities will pay you to research "Quenched path limits and periodization stability for tilted Brownian motion in Poissonian potentials on Hd"
Just because your specific thing you are interested in researching has value to the free market, doesn't mean that all are so lucky.
This was getting obvious even before the 1970's when university attendance went wild.
>Academia is where B/C-list performers pretend they are A-list.
The ones having top credentials and little more have gotten more & more outnumbered by more capable thinkers every decade, it's been nothing but circling the wagons which ends up creating more of an insular environment for those who love eminence and an exclusive status more than anything else.
fraud here is real, but
> a good journal—it has an 18% acceptance rate
is this supposed to be read as sarcasm?
amusing when the quality of a journal is measured by denying papers. kind of reminds me of one of the last People I (Mostly) Admire interviews, with Michael Crow of Arizona State https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-new-kind-of-university where he critiques elite universities as measuring their value on how many students they reject, which ultimately makes them infeasible as institutions to distribute knowledge as much as possible
This is the academic industrial complex.
Much like the military industrial complex and the healthcare industrial complex they exist to fleece people via cartel.
> On Christmas Eve, 9 “peer-reviewed” economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher.
It is becoming clearer and clearer that peer review is a systematized band wagon fallacy.
It relies on the belief that one’s peers in a competitive field, presented with new ideas and evidence, will simply accept it.
And yet, “science progresses one funeral at a time” is an old joke.
“Peer review” is an indication an idea is safe for granting agency bureaucrats to fund, not an indication of its truth, validity, or utility.
I feel like my papers are better for having gone through peer review, and I'm a better researcher for having had a few rejections. Of course the reviewers can't hover around in your lab watching everything you do. But even if reviewers can't check the validity of the evidence in your paper, they do a pretty good job ensuring that the claims you make are supported by the evidence you present. That's a valuable if imperfect guardrail! What would be the alternative?
Peer review has never been an indication of truth, validity, or utility.
It's only ever been an opportunity for other scientists (ideally more competitive than they are today) to see if they can spot some methodological problem.
Almost hoped for an analysis about what, how, and why happened, but it turns out that Elsevier has little to do with the story and the author had a Twitter spat with someone years ago and is now celebrating the fact that the other side has been shown to do what? for which some of their papers had been retracted. Yes, I'm as confused.
Publishers have the final say in appointing editors in chief (EIC) and editors. So they bear the ultimate responsibility for holding editors accountable.
A lot of people are to blame here, but Elsevier is definitely among them.
I get it, but the post is literally "I don't like this guy, he has fucked up, I'm happy". Elsevier is mentioned mostly to explain from how high the guy has fallen. Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers, what does it say about the field, nor about the policies that are compromised by it. Nor it explains how Elsevier is affected from all of this and what will change.
It is a personal shitpost and I'm not sure what is interesting about it.
Elsevier editor published his own papers in the Elsevier journal bypassing peer review.
There are three magazines involved so this is only part of the story.
Well, I was in a rush writing that. I omitted the fact that not only did he publish his own papers bypassing peer review, he also set up a citation mill with a number of other Elsevier journals and was apparently involved in other shady business. It's detailed in the article... There is a personal component to it, but that's a very minor part of the article which documents the various misdeeds.
> Not a single line about what is the issue with those papers
Well that's a blatant lie. Here's a quote for you:
> After submitting that draft to the Elsevier finance ecosystem, that draft was scrubbed from SSRN, and in the final published version, an additional author (Samuel Vigne) was added as a new author, with an “equal contribution” statement
That's EXTREMELY BAD. It's someone approaching your team after the research is done and asking to be put on the paper in exchange for publishing it.