I think I got a load of fraudulent comments on an article I submitted

[MedSchoolRat]

Medical/public health study.
With a large very long-established publisher.
Journal is not indexed in Pubmed, though...
I'm a very experienced 1st author.

I submitted an article to a low rank journal because it's an unpopular study design, kept getting desk rejects, & we just want it published, we can get free APC in this journal (must have Gold Access).

5 reviews. They read like stock phrases and from someone who didn't read the actual article. The phrasing is very very generic and could apply to almost any study design. Not bot or AI, but rather literally a combination of preset phrases that could apply to most articles. Only one comment sounds specific to my article (and even that is unreasonable). Examples are "All the references in Introduction are old" (reality, 10/12 references in Introduction are < 5 years old, and the others are important.) or "Study locations not described" (they are described, in great detail) or "Introduction has lots of acronyms not explained" (they are explained).

One review is made up of 2 comments, comprising about 5 words:
"Rev#2. Poorly structured results. Inadequate Discussion."

Have you heard of this? Where a journal doesn't bother to get real reviewers, they just issue a load of stock phrases that would probably improve most articles if actioned?

It is the weirdest Fing experience. I am so torn whether to give up on the journal or just shrug and do responses. Some of which will be "That is incorrect..."

well there are a bunch of journals which are pretty notorious for doing almost no review. maybe this is a version of the same. try writing something irrelevant in response to the irrelevant comments and see if it gets accepted anyway?

but I'm not sure I'd want to submit a paper to a journal that really can't manage a review process at all and isn't indexed in PubMed. Why not just publish the paper as a preprint and leave it at that?

I've done the preprint.
Yeah, I submitted to the journal & then realised I should check about pubmed.

I've never found a (health theme) journal by a reputable publisher that wasn't in Pubmed before.
However, This one IS indexed in Scopus (just found it).

The whole purpose of my job is to publish. I don't have another purpose. Ok, so the odd media interview. But the whole basis of my job is to add to the pubs list. And the only justification I can make for my hours being spent analysing the data & writing up this study was that I could add it to the pubs pile.

I am so tempted to write a sentence like "This journal is smelly pants" in the middle of the article but no.... must resist that temptation.

Having found it in Scopus I think I'll proceed now. It's going to be the shirtiest reply I've ever written in a resubmission, though.

Will be very interestd if others suspect that they have encountered such fraud.

Do you think they might have got Chat GPT to do it?

ChatGPT is verbose though. It doesn't ready like that. I think it's more like they had a bunch of stock phrases, chose a random number of those chosen at random.