When is it worthwhile to report academic misconduct of a referee?

Question

Sometimes academics become aware of misconduct of other academics. Reporting it can backfire if it comes off as petty squabbling to senior people. It’s also not clear that reporting misconduct often leads to a change in behavior. So I wonder: how do you decide when it’s worth reporting something?

Context: Author A cited the research of author B in the arXiv version of a pure math paper. The paper has now been published and the citations to B were removed and replaced by citations to later work of an author C who seems hostile to B. I asked A what happened and he explained that their referee forced them to remove the citations to B, and to insert statements that I pointed out are mathematically incorrect. The referee further forced the authors to write an incorrect literature review that credits the work of B to others who provably did it years later. I have a pretty good idea of who the referee is, and I think he regularly does this. I wonder if it’s worthwhile to bring the situation to the attention of the handling editor, who perhaps would like to know that this referee is using his position to pump up his own work, tear down that of other authors, and add mathematical mistakes to papers. On the other hand, the editor might think this is a waste of his time, and maybe the best option for me is to just ignore this kind of behavior from the bad referee.

Answer 1

Firstly, a referee cannot force an author to do anything. They can ask in their reviews, but an author can refuse, and outline the reasons they are refusing. It is then up to the editor to choose whose position they support. If it is the case that an author is unable to publish a paper, without adding an incorrect reference, even after pointing this out to the editor, then this is at least as much a problem of the editor as it is the referee.

What this means is that if the editor couldn't be bothered to look into it when the authors said so, it's unlikely they will do so when an unrelated third party does.

The problem here is that the claims being made are likely to be questions of academic judgement that require expertise in the field to rule on (thing a is mathmatically incorrect. Reference b is talking about the same thing as reference c, but years earlier). You are then in the situation where either the editor has the expertise to judge, but has failed to do so so far (in which case, your intervention will make little difference), or does not have the expertise to judge, in which case, how are they to tell who is correct, you or referee B?

This is generally why in situations like this, a judging body (such as a misconduct tribunal or an editor) will only make a judgement when there is a clear failure of process, not of judgement.

To summarise: I think it may have been worth the authors pushing back (they don't have to say the referee is malicious, just that their suggestions are incorrect). I don't think anything is to be gained by a third party complaining here, unless an allegation can be substantiated that requires no expert knowledge to judge.

Answer 2

I think the answer can depend on a lot of other things:

What kind of resolution would you be satisfied with? In particular, would you be happy if the editor just decides not to use that referee in the future? This would be a relatively easy thing for the editor to do as all they have to do is not do something. Of course this can make it harder to find referees but editors already avoid asking potential experts for a lot of reasons and make do. Also by intervening you are essentially saying "This person did a bad job refereeing, I could do a much better job" so maybe the editor will ask you for similar papers in the future. On the other hand, for the editor to try to do anything else (inform others of the referee's bad behavior or even get them somehow formally sanctioned for academic process) would be much more difficult process and involve figuring out when it is appropriate to de-anonymize an anonymous referee report.

To what extent did the author A argue during the refereeing process? Typically when one differs with a referee's comments one offers a counterargument and if the referee refuses to accept a reasonable counterargument (or refuses to agree to disagree on a matter of opinion) one can escalate to the editor. If author A already did this, then additional arguments from someone else are not so likely to succeed. But if author A was a junior mathematician who didn't realize they could do this or was too intimidated to, and can explain why to the editor, then I think an editor would be willing to consider the argument.

Can author A send you the referee report, and what arguments did the referee make? If the referee made some plausible scientific argument for why B's contributions were irrelevant it might be hard to convince the editor that something untoward was going on. But if they just said to delete these references without explanation, or made some argument you can unambiguously disprove, it might be easier.

Do you know why the referee has such an apparent vendetta against author B? If this is motivated by some clearly personal non-scientific dispute, and you can explain why you think this, that would be more convincing.