An Elsevier journal covering computational work in medicine has withdrawn 13 research papers, four of them coauthored by a former top editor, according to Retraction Watch. The notices, dated October 15, cite questionable alterations to author lists, citations that had little bearing on the studies, and reuse of the authors' own prior text.
The articles appeared in Computers in Biology and Medicine between 2019 and 2023. In ten of the cases, the retraction notice states that a field specialist serving as an independent publishing ethics adviser called for the withdrawal.
Why it matters
The case draws attention to the machinery of peer review itself. Three of the notices say the investigation determined that two reviewers had asked the authors to work in references that had no real connection to the research — a finding that shifts part of the scrutiny onto the people evaluating manuscripts rather than only those writing them.
It also lands at a journal whose leadership is directly implicated. Huiling Chen, a computer science researcher at Wenzhou University in China, was coeditor-in-chief of the title from 2021 to 2024 and is listed as an author on four of the retracted papers. One of those, a 2021 study on imaging in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, has drawn 107 citations, per Clarivate's Web of Science. A commenter on the post-publication review site PubPeer described the references in that paper as "puzzling," Retraction Watch reports.
The scale of the batch is modest next to some recent episodes. Retraction Watch notes that Science of the Total Environment, another Elsevier title, withdrew more than 100 papers in September, many over editorial conflicts of interest. But the involvement of a former editor-in-chief gives this cluster a different kind of weight, raising questions about how much oversight a journal applies to work submitted by the people running it.
What the notices say, and what Chen says
The retraction notices point to authorship lists that changed in ways the journal found suspicious, references that were irrelevant to the subject matter or served the interests of authors and reviewers, and text recycled from the authors' own earlier publications.
Chen disputed the reasoning behind the withdrawals in comments to Retraction Watch. He said he did not deny that problems with citations and authorship can be serious and warrant a response, but he objected to "the basis and proportionality of retraction in these cases."
His account is that the references were inserted while manuscripts were being revised, at a stage when the authors were broadening the introduction, the discussion of prior work, the methodological background and the direction of the research, and that reviewers had asked for more context. He acknowledged that such a request does not remove the authors' obligation to judge which sources were needed and where they belonged. Looking back, he said, the reference lists grew too long and some citations were only loosely connected, duplicated or superfluous.
On the authorship question, Chen was a coauthor of an August 2021 paper about lupus that gained five authors and lost one during editing. He said the revisions were described in cover letters sent with the revised manuscript, but that the authors did not formally ask the journal to approve the changes. He told Retraction Watch that explaining a change is not the same as getting permission for it, and that he recognizes the difference.
A separate notice names Chen in connection with a fifth article. According to that notice, he oversaw the review of the manuscript even though he had a long history of working with one of its authors, including publishing together.
Coauthors and the journal's response
Ali Asghar Heidari and Hamza Turabieh appear on all four of the Chen papers that were retracted, putting them level at the top of the batch. Majdi Mafarja of Birzeit University in Palestine is an author on three.
Retraction Watch reports that messages sent to Heidari's addresses affiliated with the University of Tehran and the National University of Singapore were returned undelivered, and that he did not answer an email sent to another address linked to him. Mafarja and Turabieh, a data science researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia, did not reply to requests for comment.
Elsevier declined to discuss the matter with Retraction Watch, including whether reviewers involved were barred from future work for the journal or whether its editorial procedures were altered.
The publisher's own rules for editors say they must stay out of decisions on papers they wrote themselves or that were written by relatives or colleagues. The guidance does not spell out who counts as a colleague, though its instructions for reviewers give an example of a conflict as working together with an author within the previous three years.
The three notices that mention reviewer requests for irrelevant references suggest the journal's investigation looked beyond the author teams. Whether that leads to changes in how reviewers are screened or how reference lists are checked is unclear; Elsevier has not said.
For now, the 13 papers carry retraction markers, and the four linked to Chen remain among the most cited work to be withdrawn in this episode. What to watch is whether Elsevier answers the open questions about reviewer sanctions and procedural changes, and whether other journals follow with similar reviews of their own back catalogs.
