I have a Google alert set up so that when someone cites an article listed on my Google Scholar profile, it sends me an email with the author’s name and a link to their article. I use the free service to keep up with the literature, see where new articles are being published, and find authors doing work similar to mine. For someone interested in working within a community practice, these kinds of alerts are meaningful.
In late October 2025 I got such an alert and didn’t recognize the author’s name. The title of the article was remarkably similar to one I had co-authored. I downloaded the article and read it with a sinking feeling. The author had reconstituted our research, down to exactly copying each question of our national survey, and presented it as original research. I had not experienced something like this before and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.
I sent a letter with my co-author to the editor of the journal, to request their review of the published piece, giving specific examples of duplication between our article and this new piece. The editor and publisher acknowledged our letter quickly, saying that they would look into it. We received an email about a month later, saying that they would be consulting a lawyer and asked for our permission to send our letter to the author of the article; we assented to this. The editor and publisher notified us when the author had responded to the points raised in our letter, attaching her response. The editor and publisher noted that they had again consulted legal guidance, and suggested we resolve the issue with a corrigendum that would include an apology and an acknowledgment to us as authors. In our response to this suggestion we listed our original specific examples of duplication and noted that the author’s responses did not sufficiently address any of them; we requested that the article be retracted. The editor and publisher agreed and sent us the expected wording of the retraction. Four months later (six months total), the article has now been retracted.
With the editor we only addressed the major issue of our work being replicated and presented as original but there were several other concerning issues with the quality of the manuscript. The most striking quality issues were found in the Methods section and in the report of the results of the survey. The author notes that the study “involved a comprehensive survey,” but does not tell us about their sampling method. The author states that a link was sent to “email distribution lists for the Association of Research Libraries” and “posted to discussion forums for the American Library Association” but the reader doesn’t know how many lists or forums, what the names of the lists or forums are, how many people are on those lists or in those forums, or what the recruitment language may have been.
In the Results section the author does not report how many respondents there were to the survey. The reader does not know, therefore, what the response rate for the survey is or how to put the findings into context of the larger population. I would have expected to see in the Results section the number of attempted survey completions, the number of surveys completed, and how the results would be analyzed; none of that was stated. Without that number, the findings reported (example: “…87 (39%) said that they did not regularly read the full content of research articles”) don’t have meaning because with each finding the author reported, the number of responses was different. One may guess from this that the author was analyzing each question independently from the others but without that information from the author themself, a reader can’t be confident in their understanding of the results reported.
I would have expected a peer reviewer to flag any of these basic issues during the review process, but they seem to have been missed. I noticed in the footer of the first page of the article the manuscript initial submission date: 9/11/2025, and the date the revised manuscript was received: 10/11/2025. That means that in one month the article was sent for peer review, reviews were completed, a summary of requested changes was sent to the author, and the author wrote and submitted a revision; in the library field that is a shockingly brief period of time for any review process.
