When Peer Review Took a Holiday: The eCAM Retraction Scandal

Science is supposed to be self-correcting. Papers get reviewed, checked, challenged – and only then published. That’s the idea, anyway. But the practice often looks different. Between 2022 and 2024, that system didn’t just creak a little, it fell over rather dramatically.

At the centre of the mess was a Hindawi journal with the reassuringly serious name Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (eCAM – we have discussed it repeatedly on this blog, e.g. here and here). What followed was one of the largest clean-ups in modern publishing: hundreds of papers retracted from eCAM, and more than about 10,000 from the publisher’s full catalogue.

The reason?

Investigations had uncovered widespread manipulation of the publication process.

A big part of the story involves “paper mills.” These are businesses that will, for a fee, produce a scientific paper with your name on it. No inconvenient need for actual experiments or real data or the nuicance of writing. Using a mix of recycled material, fabricated results, and increasingly AI-generated texts, these outfits can churn out papers that look perfectly respectable, at least until someone reads them closely. Think of it as fast food for academic careers: quick, convenient, and not especially good for long-term health.

Another key ingredient was the journal’s abundant use of “special issues.” These are themed collections of papers run by guest editors, usually experts invited to oversee a niche topic. In theory, this can be a great idea. In practice, it turned out to be a bit like handing over the keys to your flat and hoping nobody throws a party.

Investigations found that, in some cases, the system had been even more seriously gamed. Fake or compromised editors, reviewer suggestions pointing to non-existent experts, and tightly coordinated “peer review rings” meant papers could sail through the process with both ease and speed.

The whole thing started to fall apart when research integrity teams and independent sleuths noticed odd and concerning patterns: identical images appearing in different papers, statistical results that didn’t add up, and peer reviews that seemed to happen at impossible speed. At that point, Wiley, which by then had acquired Hindawi, stepped in and took a much closer look. The result: mass retractions, suspended special issues, and a lot of nearly identical retraction notices politely stating that the “peer review process had been compromised.”

The fallout hit so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) hard. As we all know, SCAM is an area that already faces plenty of skepticism; discovering that a sizable chunk of its literature had effectively skipped quality control didn’t help. More broadly, the episode exposed a structural problem: when publishing lots of papers becomes the goal – for journals and researchers alike – quality tends to quietly take a back seat.

After all this, the journal eCAM more or less ground to a halt. It stopped accepting new submissions, and its future as an active journal remains uncertain. Its archive is still online but now dotted with retraction notices that read like a greatest hits album of publishing failures. Meanwhile, the publisher has tightened the processes,verifying reviewer identities more carefully, restricting special issues, and deploying tools to catch suspicious patterns earlier.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the system eventually did what it’s supposed to do: spot the problem and correct it. But the episode is a reminder that science doesn’t run on trust alone; it runs on verification. And when that verification slips, things can go wrong at scale, and with surprising speed. Or put another way: peer review works … as long as the “peers” actually exist and know their business.