Favorable re-evaluation by Scopus

Retos has been re-evaluated due to a fraudulent attack by a group of authors

Last November we were alerted that there was an increase in the level of self-citations in our journal that was outside the usual parameters. From that moment on, we remained in contact with Clarivate, Elsevier and FECYT, informing them of both the initial situation and all the actions that we initiated immediately. The purpose of these actions was to establish the cause of the disruption and to take appropriate action. Finally, in December we decided to commission an external audit to clarify the situation. From it, among other findings, we identified a network of authors who, in bad faith and in a totally fraudulent manner, acted to try to inflate their scientific records by assigning authorship to works in which they had not participated, in a totally irregular manner. Specifically, and in a breach of trust towards our publication, they systematically proceeded to add (also to exclude in some exceptional cases) authors to the works once they had passed the peer review process and were ready to be published.

At first, a hundred works were identified. Following the protocols set by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), to whose code of conduct Retos had adhered some time ago, the procedure was initiated to put these works under surveillance, with the corresponding note, and to examine all the documentation related to the process of submission, evaluation and correction of originals of these works. In cases where it was possible to identify discrepancies between the original list of authors and the one finally published, the authors involved were asked for explanations, thus initiating the hearing process. A response was received from only a part of them, resulting in almost all cases being unsatisfactory. Therefore, the works were retracted, including an annotation in the original register and publishing a note of retraction in the following issue. In addition, in some cases it was also detected that in a group of these works the list of references cited during the proofreading phase had also been artificially inflated, without this circumstance having been communicated to the journal and without having been detected by the layout designers.

At this point, it should be clarified that, for the most part, these authors had only previously published in Retos, or had done so profusely in it, so the inflation of citations was given by the fact that they self-cited themselves (directly or through co-authors) to other works in Retos.

With all this information, several reports were made, which were updated as more data became known and measures were taken, and were sent to both Clarivate and Elsevier, which had placed Retos under a re-evaluation process in parallel. These reports also incorporated a medium and long-term work plan to, on the one hand, improve the editorial flow in order to close possible cracks that could lead to these practices and, on the other, to continue analyzing what has already been published and that could have been the result of some dishonest practice.

Finally, on December 18, a communication was received from Elsevier indicating that Retos would continue to be indexed in Scopus, as it has been to date (we have reproduced it at the beginning of this notice).

In this month of January, however, a notification has been received from Clarivate in which they indicate that, despite the efforts, among 1254 articles published in 2024 with more than 45000 references, they have found 5 works in which there are 9 citations to references that do not correspond thematically to the citing work and, therefore, their inclusion would not be justified. This being the case, Retos would be, in their opinion, not complying with the indexing criteria in Web of Science and, consequently, it will be discontinued in its databases.

 

Final Manifestation and Retos Commitment

Regarding this, given that in recent days it has been reported that three other Spanish magazines have been removed from this index but sold to commercial publishers outside Spain, from Retos we want, for the sake of due transparency, to inform that:

- Retos has not been sold to any company or commercial publisher. The journal, as since its foundation, has been owned by the Spanish Federation of Physical Education Teachers Associations (FEADEF) and fiscally by JURUFRA since 2022. The editor remains the same, Francisco Ruiz Juan since 2001, everything remains the same, nothing has changed, nor will change.

- - Retos has established an article processing charge (APC) of 250 euros, far from the several thousand euros or pounds that commercial journals are used to charge, and precisely these three journals, Spanish until recently, which have just been “de-indexed” from WoS. Retos does not seek to make a profit with this fee, but simply to cover costs and pay taxes. The rejection rate of Retos for the last quarter of 2024 is 79%, having received a total of 2531 works in 2024 (https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/retos/Informacionestadistica)

- The composition of the editorial and scientific committees has not undergone any change in recent times.

- The geographical origin of the authors has not undergone significant variations, except in 2024, when the vast majority of fraudulent works subject to retraction are precisely located.

- The number of retracted papers in Retos is very far from that declared by other journals belonging to large publishing groups whose de-indexing in WoS has not occurred, despite the upheaval produced by this fact as it occurs on a massive scale (https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/retos/Retractacion)

- Clarivate has at no time provided Retos with information in its possession regarding possible indications of fraud, dishonest conduct or suspicions based on the content of the aforementioned references. We have acted in this process completely blindly. Its reevaluation has always sought to sanction possible faults, rather than correct them. The lack of collaboration contrasts greatly with that shown by Elsevier, which has always offered itself to dialogue and its formative reevaluation, as a result, we have been able to detect and correct all existing frauds.

For all these reasons, we want to convey our firm commitment to continue, as to date, working to make Retos an accessible, relevant and, above all, transparent and honest means of publication in the service of the research community that trusts us to publish their research results.

We also want to inform you that we continue and will continue to work to identify and expel cheaters and fraudsters, they should not have a place among us. As to date, the corresponding reports will be made public, as has been done with the previous ones that can be found at these links:

https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/retos/Retractacion10articulos

https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/retos/retractacion132articulos

https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/retos/Retrataccion3

https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/retos/Retrataccion2

https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/retos/Retractacion1

In addition, seeking the continuous improvement of editorial processes, we have incorporated new procedures.

• A more exhaustive control in the changes of the layout and galleys.
• A control of self-citations in the editorial review, being blind evaluation, the reviewers cannot identify the self-citations.
• A check of citation suitability by external reviewers.
• Control of citations and references according to the content where it is cited and adjusted to the content of the article.
• Perfect control of the authorship and the number of articles published by the same author per year and in each issue.
• Exhaustive plagiarism control.

It should be noted that in the vast majority of these cases the authors of the works were alien to the historical community of the journal, which is, together with the journal, the most affected of these deplorable frauds.

Finally, we can say that the damage caused has been tangential and irrelevant because in the area in which Retos is located and in the geographical scope of the vast majority or all the countries of our authors, an article indexed in Scopus has the same or even more relevance than in other databases. Therefore, our Spanish, Latin American, European or Asian authors will not see any reduction in the visibility and consideration of the works that have been published or will be published in Retos in the future. The trend is that the impact is growing and will end up consolidating Retos in the positions in which it currently holds or improving their ranking. We have come out of this re-evaluation very strengthened, as it has allowed us to make self-criticisms and implement improvements in our work procedures.

Thanking you for your trust, we remain at your disposal for any clarification you may need.