Dozens more research papers must be retracted by a leading UK imprint for education studies if it is to re-establish its reputation as a trusted source of information for teachers, a high-profile sleuth has argued following the retraction of 19 papers over peer review failures.

Nine months after Stephen Vainker first publicly raised concerns about a number of papers published in titles run by the British Education Research Association (Bera), which he claimed contain large amounts of “AI slop”, the society has now announced that its publisher, Wiley, has retracted or will soon retract 19 articles.

Of the retracted papers, the “vast majority (17) of these articles were submitted as part of a guest-edited special section, which has now been cancelled”, Bera explained in a .

The retractions were made, it said, because “the peer review process for a limited number of articles in the British Educational Research Journal (BERJ) had been manipulated by parties that are not affiliated with the journal, [its publisher] Wiley or Bera”.

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However, the Bera statement denied that the retractions had been prompted by the concerns highlighted by Vainker, a school teacher and independent researcher who holds a PhD from the University of Exeter, claiming that the breaches in editorial standards were “uncovered independently”.

In addition, Vainker’s method for detecting low-quality papers potentially written by artificial intelligence – which involved identifying sentences and stock phrases that were used infrequently before 2023 but are now common in academic literature following the advent of ChatGPT – was “methodologically unsound and ethically problematic”, the statement contends.

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“Interpreting features common in global academic writing as evidence of misconduct or AI generation risks implying that any deviation from Anglophone academic norms is inherently suspect,” the association’s statement explained. It argued that “undisclosed AI use does not always indicate fraud or manipulation” and that “editors retain the right to adjudicate when any instance of undisclosed generative AI usage might compromise the conclusions of an article or represent undisclosed methodology or authorship”.

Vainker has rejected Bera’s dismissal of his sleuthing. He pointed out that many of the papers retracted have been flagged by him on his Substack blog and on X as having been likely written using generative AI. He also highlighted that his blog in August 2025 had described the now-retracted special issue as “dodgy” and had questioned at the time how one of the guest editors had managed to peer-review almost one article every working day since 2020 (some 1,788 articles in 2,000 days since 2020).

Describing Bera’s statement as “delusional” and “self-serving”, Vainker explained that he had been told privately that the society was seeking to retract about 40 publications he had highlighted with them. However, containing fabricated references, errors and nonsensical language were still present in Bera literature and required urgent action, he alleged.

“It is an unavoidable fact that Bera has published a lot of low-quality AI-authored articles over the past few years,” writes on his blog, noting that it has “only retracted some papers from one journal”, with three further Bera journals still containing suspect content.

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“It would do well to draw a line between the Bera of the past few years (which has published all this rubbish) and the Bera of the future, which will want to be credible. By making false claims crediting itself with uncovering the problem…and taking no action on obviously unsupportable articles, Bera is failing to draw such a line.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com