Review mills

Introduction

TipDefinition

Review mills use reviewers with established credentials who write boilerplate reviews containing generic and vague recommendations that can be tracked across different peer review reports. Review mills generally serve only one purpose, which is to include coercive citation requests in their peer review reports to inflate citation counts for the reviewer’s own publications or for those of collaborators within the review mill network (McIntosh et al. 2026).

Key resources

Note“The review mills”

Explanation of the problem by Oviedo-García (2024)

Bibliography

McIntosh, Leslie D., Anna Abalkina, Achal Agrawal, et al. 2026. “Forensic Scientometrics (FoSci) Report 2026: Understanding, Detecting, and Documenting Manipulation in the Research Ecosystem.” Version 3. Preprint, Figshare, July 17. 1012969 Bytes. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32178456.v3.

Oviedo-García, M. Ángeles. 2024. “The Review Mills, Not Just (Self-)plagiarism in Review Reports, but a Step Further.” Scientometrics 129 (9): 5805–13. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-05125-w.

Oviedo-García, M. Ángeles, René Aquarius, and Dorothy V. M. Bishop. 2026. “Gaming the Peer Review System: Evidence for a Review Mill in Medicine Highlights the Need to Ensure Reviewer Integrity.” Accountability in Research 33 (6): 2640012. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2026.2640012.

Piniewski, Mikołaj, Ivan Jarić, Demetris Koutsoyiannis, and Zbigniew W. Kundzewicz. 2024. “Emerging Plagiarism in Peer-Review Evaluation Reports: A Tip of the Iceberg?” Scientometrics 129 (4): 2489–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-024-04960-1.