The Issue with Special Issues: when Guest Editors Publish in Support of Self

2026-01-12

AI Summary

This study exposes the prevalence and systemic threat of guest editors excessively publishing their own work in special issues—a form of academic misconduct termed “Publishing In Their Own Special Issues” (PISS). Drawing on a dataset of over 100,000 special issues from five major publishers between 2015 and 2025, the research introduces the PISS concept and establishes a 33% endogeneity threshold to identify self-serving editorial practices. Through large-scale data collection, identification of endogenous articles, and statistical analysis, it reveals that more than 1,000 special issues annually exhibit signs of PISS, involving tens of thousands of such articles—indicating a scale and normalization comparable to outright research fraud. The study further proposes actionable regulatory policies, offering empirical foundations and intervention pathways for indexing agencies and research governance bodies.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Imperfect Information
• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation

Abstract

The recent exceptional growth in the number of special issues has led to the largest delegation of editorial power in the history of scientific publishing. Has this power been used responsibly? In this article we provide the first systematic analysis of a particular form of abuse of power by guest editors: endogeny, the practice of publishing articles in ones own special issue. While moderate levels of endogeny are common in special issues, excessive endogeny is a blatant case of scientific misconduct. We define special issues containing more than 33% endogeny as Published in Support of Self (PISS). We build a dataset of over 100,000 special issues published between 2015 and 2025 by five leading publishers. The large majority of guest editors engage in endogeny responsibly, if at all. Nonetheless, despite endogeny policies by publishers and indexers, PISS is comparable in magnitude to scientific fraud. All journals heavily relying on special issues host PISS, and more than 1,000 PISS special issues are published each year, hosting tens of thousands of endogenous articles. Extreme PISS abuses are rare, as the majority of PISS occurs at moderate levels of endogeny. Since the scientific literature is a common pool resource this is not good news, as it reflects a widespread normalisation of guest editor misconduct. Fortunately, PISS can be solved by setting easily enforceable commonsense policies. We provide the data and analyses needed for indexers and academic regulators to act.

Problem

• special issues
• guest editors
• endogeny
• scientific misconduct
• PISS

Innovation

• special issues
• guest editor misconduct
• endogeny
• Published in Support of Self (PISS)
• scientific publishing ethics