(ETA: See Update 5, below, from Springer.)
An article published recently in Synthese caught the eye of a few Daily Nous readers.

Remember the game, “which one of these is not like the others?” Give it try on this selection of the latest articles the journal published:

Did you spot it? Spoiler below…

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If you picked “The intervention effect of poetry appreciation on Chinese seventh-grade students’ negative emotions: a case study of modern Chinese poetry” then congratulations, you didn’t overthink this.

Here’s the abstract of the paper, by Ying Wang of Wuhan University:

In China, children entering middle school are confronted with puberty, environmental changes, and increased academic pressure, all of which significantly increase the likelihood of experiencing psychological issues. Children’s mental health is crucial for their future development, and exploring efficient and cost-effective intervention methods is worth pursuing. This study selected 102 Shanghai middle school freshmen aged under 14 years as subjects to verify the intervention effect of poetry therapy on children’s negative emotions. The intervention materials are modern Chinese poems selected from the Chinese Ministry of Education’s mandatory reading list for primary and secondary school students. The results show that modern poetry therapy has a significant effect on children. This paper explores the emotional regulatory mechanism of poetry for children from the perspectives of literary defamiliarization and the subconscious in psychology. Poetry therapy may formally enter the field of professional attention in psychological counseling and group counseling for children in the future.

As one reader gently put it in an email to me, “The topic, which deals with the effects of poetry appreciation on students’ emotions, appears entirely unrelated to the scope of Synthese.”

The article was also listed as having a remarkably enviable turnaround time: received on April 14th, 2025 , accepted on April 15th, and published on April 22nd:

I got in touch with the editors-in-chief of Synthese, which is published by Springer Nature, to ask what happened. Had this article really been accepted? Was this some kind of technical glitch? A clerical error? Had Synthese been hacked?

According to one of the editors, Otávio Bueno (Miami), the publication of the article was a mistake. As of this morning, a note accompanies the article on the journal’s website saying that the article “was published in error and will be retracted and removed.” It also says that “the author and Editors in Chief bear no responsibility for this mistake.”

So it was mistake—but how did it happen? Was it a one-off incident or part of a broader problem? Do editors and publishers need to be on guard about a particular kind of recurring issue? Currently it is unknown.

Professor Bueno writes that the editors and Springer are conducting an investigation “so that a clear picture about what exactly happened emerges” and “so that we can also make sure that something like this doesn’t ever happen again.”

(If something like this has happened at a journal you edit, and you know why it happened, perhaps you can share that in the comments.)

UPDATE 1: A couple of readers in the comments have pointed to a possibly similar episode with the Logic Journal of the IGPL, an Oxford University Press journal. It published “A review and future trends of precision livestock over dairy and beef cow cattle with artificial intelligence“. Apparently the article was published six months ago, yet it remains on the journal’s website and among its listed publications.

At least it’s open access!

“This article has nothing to do with logic!”
“Well you get what you pay for.” 

It also may hold the record for quickest turnaround time for an article ever submitted to a philosophy journal not edited by Robert Goodin, and certainly the record for the quickest acceptance:

Received, revised, and accepted all in one day! Now that’s the kind of efficiency we need to see more of, people.

UPDATE 2: And another one in Topoi. Also open-access. Is it too soon to start wondering if open-access status is playing a role here, either as a technical problem or (more cynically) related to the open-access fees authors pay to publishers? (This article appears to lack submission date info.) See Update 3.

UPDATE 3 (4/28/25): Update 2 was mistaken. Fabio Paglieri, editor-in-chief of Topoi, provides a correction in a comment. An excerpt from his comment:

Topoi, as the name suggests, happens to be dedicated exclusively to thematic collections, since its inception in 1982: so, it has been a while… One of the current collections is dedicated to the topic of “Technology, Nature, and Wellbeing in Contemporary Societies” (further details here: https://link.springer.com/collections/jfgdaiiecg), and it constitutes a deliberate experiment for the journal, with my full endorsement: whereas Topoi, by its very nature, has always been open to all philosophical schools and areas, as well as remaining quite liberal in integrating also contributions from other disciplines, if deemed philosophically relevant (again, it’s part of the stated mission of the journal, here: https://link.springer.com/journal/11245/aims-and-scope), with this collection we have elected to try publishing in a philosophical journal a series of papers that (i) we believe raise important philosophical points, but (ii) are authored mostly by non-philosophers, (iii) do not necessarily match the typical description of a “philosophical paper”, whatever that might be, and (iv) are selected by a team of guest editors that are not professional philosophers. If some philosophers will see this as a sign that Topoi has succumbed to the dark side of the “unfortunate empirical turn” taken by philosophy in recent years (to quote another commentator to this trend), so be it – although they shouldn’t worry, really, because for the time being this is intended only as an isolated experiment, not a change in our general editorial policy. Regardless, this was a deliberate choice, not an incident or an oversight: anyone is free to applaud or boo it, but I would appreciate if it was not retold as “the curious incident of the editor of Topoi that didn’t bark in the night”, since nothing of the sort happened here. 

Professor Paglieri also provides the submission, revision, and acceptance date information for the article in question.

I appreciate him taking the time to comment here. I apologize for not checking up on this example before mentioning it in an update to the post.

UPDATE 4 (4/28/25): I have no idea whether the following is actually related to the publication of the Synthese article in the original post, or any Synthese article for that matter, so please refrain from drawing any conclusions along those lines. Still, I thought it worth sharing. A reader from China informs me that it is not uncommon, if you’re an academic on social media there (e.g., RedNote), to see ads about services that facilitate publication in academic journals. Whether these services actually exist, or whether the ads are merely for attracting suckers, I do not know. But, this reader supplied one such ad that mentions Synthese specifically:

According to the reader, the text under “SYNTHESE” reads:

Zone/Partition: Zone 1
Impact Factor: 1.3
Self-Citation Rate: 15.4%
This journal accepts submissions in both humanities and social sciences and is indexed in SCI, SCIE, and SSCI. The average review period is one month—fast and lenient (“又快又水“). The acceptance upon submission can be almost guaranteed!

The reader ads: “又快又水” is translated as “fast and lenient” to convey the informal tone implying fast and easy acceptance, though “watered-down”(水) could also fit depending on context. See here for one such ad. Again, I emphasize that I am not aware of any evidence that connects such ads or the supposed services they describe to the publication of any article in Synthese. 

UPDATE 5 (5/1/25): The explanation: human error. Ties Nijssen, Executive Publisher of Springer Journals, provided an account of what happened.

He reiterates that the article “was published in error and will be retracted, and I would like to emphasize again that the Author and Editors in Chief bear no responsibility for the mistake.” He then provides a bit more detail about what happened:

After the EiCs make a final decision, Springer Nature confirms accept decisions in the editorial system. This enables us to do a final check on the metadata of the article, for example whether it belongs to a special issue or collection. Reject decisions do not need any action but appear for a short time in the same overview. Due to an unfortunate human error that happened at the same day, two articles with a final reject decision were executed as being accepted for publication. Unfortunately, this included the article in question that had been rejected without review because it was out of scope for Synthese. The other article in the same category that was also incorrectly categorized as being accepted for publication, was identified when the error became apparent and has not been published. To be sure no other manuscripts were involved we have checked all publications since 2021 and have found no other mistakes.

He adds:

This is an exceptional situation. I have worked at Springer Nature on Philosophy journals for over 15 years and, to my knowledge, this is the first time it has ever happened. It is deeply regrettable, particularly with regards to the author, who had nothing to do with the mistake that caused this publication, and, of course, for the journal. Last year Synthese invited over 12,000 reviewers who completed almost 4,000 review reports. With the reviewers help, the EiC’s work with authors to improve their articles via revisions, all with the aim of publishing relevant and trustworthy research for the community.

Publishing an article by accident is a serious mistake and from the moment we were made aware, we have prioritized addressing the problem and ensuring it does not happen again.