Elsevier looking into “very serious concerns” after student calls out journal for fleet of Star Trek articles, other issues

An undergraduate student in the United Kingdom has taken to task the editors of a purportedly scholarly journal for having published more than 100 papers by a Maltese researcher with a deep affinity for Star Trek.

In a Dec. 8, 2020, letter to the editors of Early Human Development (EHD), Hampton Gaddy, a BA student at the University of Oxford, accuses the journal of having published “a large number of unprofessional articles” by Victor Grech, of the University of Malta. 

Grech is a pediatric cardiologist, and, evidently a huge Star Trek fan. He’s also a prolific author, and seems to have turned EHD into something of a personal fanzine. As Gaddy notes in his letter, Grech has written at least 113 papers in EHD, an Elsevier title, 57 as sole author: 

19 of these 113 articles focus on various aspects of the TV series Star Trek. They generally discuss topics within the series that are relevant to the field of medicine, but the extent of this stops at discussing the potrayals of doctors,2 medical practices,3 medical technology,4 etc., in the series.1 Many of these articles were confusingly published in the category of ‘Best practice guidelines’.

Titles of some of the papers from 2020 alone include:

• Nurses in Star Trek: The fictional role of the nurse in Star Trek, which Grech wrote with Mariella Scerri, an occasional co-author. Its abstract states:

Nurses worldwide have striven to establish nursing as a profession, autonomous but complementary to the medical profession. Literature as far back as the Renaissance demonstrates an overall derogatory attitude toward the nurse’s role. The modern notion of the nurse working side by side the medical practitioner continues to be overshadowed by the heroic medical doctor. This paper will discuss Christine Chapel and Alyssia Ogawa, who arguably are the only two nurses on board Star Trek’s Enterprise, given prominent roles. In various and multiple episodes, their roles reveal a recurrence of the subservient attitude to the medical practitioner. Yet, there seems to be a shift toward a more multi-disciplinarian approach a century later in the ST time-line. The general concept of the nurses’ role is similar and parallels real life – a role subsumed by and subservient to the medical doctor.

• The banality of evil in the occupation of Star Trek’s Bajor, which argues:  

Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele were high-ranking Nazis, two among many who were tasked with implementing the Final Solution. Eichmann’s eventual trial evidenced a dull ordinariness that was famously defined as the banality of evil by the political theorist Hannah Arendt who covered the proceedings. Star Trek’s Deep Space 9 commences with the Cardassian relinquishment of Bajor. One particular episode (“Duet”) focuses on a presumed high-ranking Cardassian labour camp commander who turns out to have been a filing clerk seeking atonement and closure for the deeds he witnessed, on behalf of his race. Yet another episode (“Nothing Human”) in Star Trek Voyager highlights the ethical dilemmas that arise when accessing trials and treatments that were obtained immorally by unethical medical experimentation, and this is reminiscent of callous experimentation by Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz death camp. This paper will explore these subjects and will compare the fictional concentration camp commander and the fictional doctor with Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele respectively. Both episodes serve as reminders, cautionary tales lest we allow history to repeat itself and such atrocities to be relived.

• And Doctors in Star Trek: Non-benevolent and inhumane alien medics, whose abstract reads: 

Doctors in Star Trek’s Federation are invariably depicted as benign and adherent to the ethical tenets that we are all so accustomed to. This does not appear to be the case in alien/other doctors where the narrative changes, such that these alien medics are not bound by the moral strictures to which human doctors are expected to adhere. It is difficult to ascertain why this should be but it may be part of the episode creators’ attempts to impute and reinforce inhumanity and alienness in other non-human species.

The journal also has published 24 papers Grech wrote about COVID-19, Gaddy writes. Although he characterizes most as “fairly benign,” he finds others more troubling: 

One article performs an extremely crude calculation that the pandemic could cause nearly 440 million deaths globally.9 This particular article is listed as having been received and accepted on the same day (23 March 2020), suggesting that it was not peer reviewed. It has since been cited 23 times. Instead of issuing a correction or retraction in the face of the article’s absurd claim, EHD published an ‘update’ by the author one month later that lowered his estimate to 44 million deaths – on the basis of 90% of cases alledgely being asymptomatic. This is not true and never reasonably been thought to been true. This ‘update’ also seems not to have been peer reviewed. Other articles in this more concerning vein include an unoriginal but similarly crude comparsion of the costs of hypothetical coronavirus vaccine side effects versus the costs of COVID-19 mortality.10

Gaddy also complains about 48 papers by Grech that EHD published as “Best practice guidelines” — yet which appear to have little or nothing to do with the practice of anything: 

In sum, they read like a blog or the notes of a university course. 

What’s more, Grech’s papers tend to cite, well, other Grech papers: 

Of the 401 articles that have cited Grech’s work since 2018, 118 were published in EHD. Of those 118 articles, Grech was a co-author on 84 of them. Of the remaining 34 articles that do not include Grech as a co-author, 26 had at least one author affiliated with the University of Malta or its associated hospital.

In an email response to Gaddy’s letter, Catriona Fennell, the director of publishing services at Elsevier, thanked the student for raising the “very serious concerns” and said the journal is reviewing the claims “in accordance with best practices.” Elsevier accounts had tweeted the COVID-19 deaths paper twice.

Grech did not respond to a request for comment.

To be fair to Grech, it’s not at all clear that his penchant for writing papers without much in the way of scientific content is unethical — or even a problem. After all, no one would complain if his preferred outlet were, as Gaddy implies, a blog or personal website. 

Rather, if fault exists here it’s with the journal, its editor, E.F. Maalouf, and the publisher. EHD boasts: 

Established as an authoritative, highly cited voice on early human development, Early Human Development provides a unique opportunity for researchers and clinicians to bridge the communication gap between disciplines. Creating a forum for the productive exchange of ideas concerning early human growth and development, the journal publishes original research and clinical papers with particular emphasis on the continuum between fetal life and the perinatal period; aspects of postnatal growth influenced by early events; and the safeguarding of the quality of human survival.

Somehow, that bold voyage was subject to some major mission creep.

Update, 2200 UTC, 12/12/20: As scite.ai tweeted, one of Grech’s articles about Star Trek appears to have been withdrawn.

However, best we can tell, that withdrawal had nothing to do with Gaddy’s critiques this week. It happened soon after the article’s publication, in February, and the piece was then replaced in March by an article with a different DOI. Elsevier did not link the new version to the withdrawal, which would have been standard practice.

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