European Respiratory Society Partners with Signals to Strengthen Research Integrity Across Its Journals

The European Respiratory Society (ERS) is partnering with Signals to strengthen research integrity across its journal portfolio.

ERS staff were particularly concerned about an increase in hallucinated references, some of which had not been caught until the post-acceptance stage. Through the pilot, Signals was able to identify several cases of fake references, and now all references are screened for validity at submission — saving manual effort and ensuring that problem papers can be addressed before peer review.

As part of the rollout, the editorial team can now access 30+ integrity and quality checks within their workflow through Signals’ ScholarOne integration. Each check is powered by the Signals Data Graph, which surfaces clear reasoning behind every signal so editorial teams can filter out submissions with integrity issues quickly and spend their time publishing the high-quality research that matters to their community.

Elin Reeves, Director of Publications at ERS: “We’ve found Signals easy to use, and it’s helped us to identify research integrity issues that we normally wouldn’t spot until peer review or later. We look forward to continuing to work with the Signals team.”

Elliott Lumb, co-founder of Signals: “The ERS team has been highly engaged from the beginning of the pilot, and their feedback has already helped us improve Signals Manuscript Checks. The society does important work for the respiratory research community, and we’re pleased to continue supporting them in maintaining high-quality publications.”