Peer review runs on trust: an editor sends a confidential manuscript to a stranger and believes the response comes from the expert they invited. When that assumption fails, everything downstream fails with it. Over the past decade, publishers have retracted thousands of articles because the reviews that approved them were written by the authors themselves or by services selling favourable reports. It is one of the most damaging integrity problems in publishing — and one authors can help prevent.
How the fraud works
- Fabricated reviewer identities. The classic method: an author suggests genuine, well-known experts but supplies email addresses they secretly control. The invitation arrives in the author's own inbox, and a favourable review is returned within hours.
- Compromised or impersonated accounts. Real reviewer profiles in a submission system are hijacked, or near-identical addresses are registered to impersonate a known researcher.
- Review rings and paper mills. Organised networks agree to review one another's submissions favourably, or sell packages that include manuscripts, authorship slots and cooperative reviewers.
- Coerced or traded reviews. A reviewer demands citations to their own work, or a group reciprocates approvals.
Why it is hard to detect
A fake review often looks plausible: competent, moderately critical, and delivered promptly. The signals are indirect — a free-mail address for a professor at a major university, a review returned in two hours, unusually uniform phrasing across several reports, or reviewers who exist but have no publication record in the field. Individually these are weak; together they form a pattern, which is why detection usually happens at the publisher level, across many submissions.
What a serious journal does
- Verifies reviewer identities independently — institutional email addresses, ORCID iDs, and publication records, rather than relying on contact details supplied with the submission.
- Never uses suggested reviewers exclusively. Editors add reviewers they sourced themselves.
- Watches for behavioural signals — implausible turnaround times, duplicated review text, and clusters of submissions sharing the same suggested reviewers.
- Investigates and corrects the record when fraud is found, following COPE guidance — which can mean retraction even where the science is sound, because the acceptance decision was corrupted.
What honest authors should do
Suggest reviewers, but suggest them properly: real experts, no close collaborators, and always a verifiable institutional address — never a personal one you can access. Decline any offer of "guaranteed acceptance", "review assistance" or authorship for sale; these come from the same ecosystem. And treat a journal that accepts a paper in days without substantive comments as a warning, not a convenience — that speed is often the sign of a review process that did not happen.