Some weeks ago, in early January, I saw a story in the Irish Independent about Brian Lucey, a Professor in Trinity Business School. That story was subsequently featured in Retraction Watch which you can read if you can’t get past the paywall at the Irish Independent. It seems that 12 papers written by Professor Lucey were retracted after having been published in journals run by Elsevier for which Prof. Lucey was Editor in which capacity he made the final decision to publish them. Quoting from Retraction Watch:
“We can confirm these papers were retracted from 19 December to 23 December 2025,” an Elsevier spokesperson told us. “We uphold the highest standards of rigor and ethics in our publishing to protect the quality and integrity of research. Editors can publish in their journals as long as they are compliant to our policies. Please refer to our Publishing Ethics policies for further information regarding editorial conflicts of interests.”
The most surprising thing I learnt from this is that Elsevier apparently has a Publication Ethics policy!
Anyway, according to this piece by Chris Brunet, which includes a list of all the retracted papers, it seems this story has escalated considerably since January. The 12 papers mentioned above, all with Brian Lucey on their author list, had accumulated over five thousand citations between them. Prof. Lucey published 56 papers in 2025 – that’s a rate of more than one a week – raising suspicions that he has been adding his name to papers to which he made a minimal contribution. The previously-mentioned source also contains allegations of serious academic misconduct and other ethical violations, including the creation of a publishing and citation cartel.
Prof. Lucey has now been removed as an Editor from 5 journals: International Review of Financial Analysis, the International Review of Economics & Finance, Finance Research Letters, Financial Management, & Energy Finance. I don’t know if Prof. Lucey is subject to an internal investigation at Trinity College, Dublin, but he should be.
This episode is symptomatic of a commercial academic publishing industry which is rotten to the core, but which nobody seems willing to do anything about. I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that Elsevier owns Scopus, which passes itself off as a quality control agency for academic journals. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so outrageous.
In the Dark 