Peer Review Scandal: Journal Retracts Tourism and Globalization Study

A widely cited 2019 study examining how tourism and globalization drive environmental degradation in developed countries has been retracted, with the journal’s Editor-in-Chief and the publisher concluding that the peer review process leading to its publication appears to have been compromised. The retraction notice, published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research, formally withdraws the article “The effects of tourism and globalization over environmental degradation in developed countries,” which had appeared in the journal’s volume 27, pages 7130 to 7144, after its initial online release on 27 December 2019. According to the notice, the Editor-in-Chief no longer has confidence in the integrity of the article, a determination that stems not from disputes over the underlying data or methodology but from a failure in the safeguards that are supposed to protect the scholarly record.

The original research, authored by Daniel Balsalobre-Lorente of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, Oana M. Driha of the University of Alicante, Muhammad Shahbaz, then affiliated with the Beijing Institute of Technology and COMSATS University Islamabad, and Avik Sinha of the Goa Institute of Management, addressed one of the most actively debated questions in environmental economics. The study sought to quantify how the expansion of international tourism, combined with the deepening of economic, political and social globalization, affects measures of environmental degradation across a panel of developed economies. Research in this area typically employs econometric techniques to disentangle the competing effects of tourism-driven growth, trade openness and institutional integration on carbon emissions and related environmental indicators, and the paper had become part of a substantial body of literature informing policy discussions about sustainable tourism and climate mitigation in advanced economies.

Retractions of this kind are rare relative to the total volume of published research, but they play a critical role in the self-correcting machinery of science. When an editor retracts a paper because peer review appears compromised, the implication is that the manuscript may not have received the independent expert scrutiny that journals promise, raising the possibility that the paper’s route to publication was engineered or manipulated rather than earned on scientific merit. In such cases the retraction does not necessarily assert that the findings are wrong. Instead, it signals that the provenance of the publication can no longer be trusted, which in practice means that the scientific community should treat the article’s conclusions as unverified. The distinction matters, because findings can sometimes be independently reproduced even when the publication process itself was tainted.

Notably, the retraction notice records that the authors disagree with the decision. This disagreement places the case within a familiar and contentious category of research integrity disputes, in which publishers act to protect the record while authors maintain that their work stands on its own evidentiary foundations. Author objections to retractions are not unusual, and journals generally proceed with retraction when the evidence of compromised process is sufficiently serious, while noting the authors’ position in the public notice. The published record of the retraction is itself a document of the scientific process: it does not accuse the authors of wrongdoing, nor does it detail the specific mechanism by which the peer review is alleged to have been compromised, but it makes clear that the concerns surfaced after publication and were judged serious enough to warrant full withdrawal of the article.

The case sheds light on the broader structural pressures confronting academic publishing. Peer review is a voluntary, labor-intensive system in which busy researchers evaluate manuscripts for free, and journals with high submission volumes and rapid publication schedules have historically struggled to verify the identities and independence of reviewers. Compromised peer review can take several forms, including review reports submitted by authors themselves under fabricated or coerced reviewer identities, colluding reviewer rings that approve one another’s manuscripts, and email accounts registered to review on behalf of real researchers without their knowledge. Publishers have responded over the past decade with tighter verification of reviewer identities, stricter use of institutional email addresses, and automated screening of submission metadata, but determined actors have repeatedly found new workarounds, and post-publication detection has become an essential line of defense.

For environmental science specifically, the integrity problem carries particular weight because the field feeds directly into policy. Studies on tourism and environmental degradation inform decisions by governments and international organizations about sustainable tourism strategies, carbon pricing, transport policy and the design of climate commitments. When a paper on these topics is retracted, citing authors are expected to remove it from the evidentiary basis of their own work or at minimum flag its retracted status. Meta-analyses and literature reviews that incorporated the study’s estimates may need to be revisited. Citation databases including Scopus and Web of Science flag retracted articles, and many journals now use automated screening to catch citations of retracted work before publication, though the lag between retraction and the correction of the citation record can stretch over years.

The retracted article’s topic also illustrates why such studies attract intense scrutiny. The relationship between globalization and the environment is empirically complex. Economic globalization can accelerate emissions by expanding trade, aviation and energy-intensive production, but it can also diffuse cleaner technologies and environmental standards across borders. Tourism generates transport emissions and local environmental pressure, yet tourism revenue can fund conservation and shift economies away from heavier industry. Disentangling these channels requires careful panel econometrics, typically involving tests for cross-sectional dependence, unit roots in panel data, and estimation methods robust to heterogeneity across countries, such as panel quantile regression or common correlated effects approaches. Any credible contribution to this literature must defend not only its data sources but the rigor of its econometric identification, which is precisely the kind of judgment that independent peer review exists to provide.

The retraction notice was published on 22 September 2026, nearly seven years after the original article appeared online in late December 2019. That interval is characteristic of how post-publication concerns unfold in practice. Investigations into compromised peer review routinely take years, involving correspondence between the journal, the publisher’s research integrity group, the authors’ institutions, and sometimes external forensic analysts. Publishers must weigh the reputational and legal risks of retraction against the harm caused by leaving a compromised paper in the literature, and institutional investigations can proceed slowly, particularly when authors are affiliated with universities in multiple countries, as is the case here, with institutions in Spain, China, Pakistan and India represented among the author list. The multi-country authorship underscores the increasingly international character of environmental economics research and the correspondingly international character of the oversight challenges it faces.

Springer Nature, the publisher of Environmental Science and Pollution Research, follows the retraction guidelines issued by the Committee on Publication Ethics, which recommend that retraction notices be clearly linked to the retracted article, state who is retracting and why, and remain permanently attached to the record. In line with that practice, the retracted article remains accessible online but is now watermarked and linked to the retraction notice, so that any reader or indexing service encountering the paper will immediately see its withdrawn status. The journal, a leading venue in environmental pollution and sustainability research, publishes hundreds of articles annually, and its editors have carried out multiple retractions in recent years as part of wider publisher-led integrity sweeps affecting papers with compromised review trails.

For researchers, the lesson of this case is twofold. First, the credibility of an empirical result depends on more than the elegance of its modeling; it depends on an intact chain of independent verification, and a broken link anywhere in that chain can unravel the entire publication. Second, the scientific community’s response to integrity failures is increasingly systematic rather than ad hoc: flagged papers are investigated, notices are standardized, citations are tracked, and retractions, once stigmatizing rarities, are now understood as a necessary instrument for maintaining the reliability of the literature. Readers and policymakers consulting research on tourism, globalization and environmental degradation should therefore check the current status of any study they rely upon, and treat retraction notices not as an ending but as an important form of scientific communication in their own right.

Subject of Research: Retraction of a study on the effects of tourism and globalization on environmental degradation in developed countries due to compromised peer review

Article Title: Retraction Note: The effects of tourism and globalization over environmental degradation in developed countries

Article References: Balsalobre-Lorente, D., Driha, O. M., Shahbaz, M., & Sinha, A. (2026). Retraction Note: The effects of tourism and globalization over environmental degradation in developed countries. Environmental Science and Pollution Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-026-38249-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11356-026-38249-y

Keywords: retraction, peer review, environmental degradation, tourism, globalization, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, research integrity, Springer Nature, developed countries, environmental economics, carbon emissions, publication ethics