Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: OpenAI’s preprint dump; Taylor & Francis to leave Informa; arXiv’s preprint cap

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Editor-in-chief resigns amid probes of alleged citation manipulation, data errors
Wildlife journal issues corrections for missing ethics statements
A paper suggested a paleontologist’s fossil was a forgery. He wants it retracted
OpenAI withdraws three preprints 1 day after releasing 722 manuscripts on unsolved math problems.
‘Cerebral torment’: IOP retracts nearly 100 conference papers for tortured phrases

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 450 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 67,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is approaching 700, and our mass resignations list has more than 50 entries. We keep tabs on all this and more. If you value this work, please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation. Every dollar counts.

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Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

‘Cerebral torment’: IOP retracts nearly 100 conference papers for tortured phrases

IOP Publishing has retracted nearly 100 papers from three of its conference proceedings after the articles were flagged for containing tortured phrases.

Tortured phrases are rephrasings and synonyms — often awkward and nonsensical — substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors. For example, one of the retracted papers described “savvy lattices” and “shrewd homes” instead of “smart grids” and “smart homes.” Tortured phrases pre-date AI technology.

The recent batch includes 29 retractions from Journal of Physics: Conference Series; eight from Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science; and 43 from Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering.

OpenAI withdraws three preprints a day after releasing 722 manuscripts on unsolved math problems

Less than 24 hours after OpenAI posted over 700 preprints describing major math results by an internal AI model, the company has withdrawn three of the manuscripts for errors.

On Oct. 6, OpenAI published 722 preprints in a GitHub repository about purported progress in solving 372 math problems in geometry, computer science, algebra and other subjects. The company called the release an effort “to push the frontier of human knowledge and enable further progress in mathematics.”

But on Oct. 7, OpenAI announced the withdrawal of three manuscripts because of a sign error. The error invalidated an argument in one manuscript and the construction used by two dependent papers, according to the announcement. Each of the withdrawn papers carry notices explaining “the gap,” and that OpenAI has “revised 14 other manuscripts with proof repairs, corrected statements, clearer hypotheses and dependencies, and one correction to an obsolete citation.”

That an error cascaded into three of the OpenAI manuscripts is not surprising, said Alex Townsend, an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University in Ithaca. He suspects there will be more errors found, he said.

A paper suggested a paleontologist’s fossil was forged. He wants it retracted.

An artist’s reconstruction of a mosasaur first described by Nicholas Longrich and colleagues in 2021.
*by Andrey Atuchin, 2020, in: N.R. Longrich et al/Cretaceous Research 2021*

Nicholas Longrich would like to set the record straight.

The paleontologist at the University of Bath in England and his colleagues described what they believed to be a new species of marine reptile in 2021, based on a Moroccan fossil found in a mine. But in 2024, another group of researchers questioned the fossil’s authenticity, pointing out the arrangement and orientation of its teeth “most likely result from forgery” based on published photos and documented alteration in other specimens from that region.

Late last year, Longrich and colleagues published CT scans of the original fossil as well as a new specimen of the species, saying it demonstrated their discovery was genuine. Longrich told us he sent the raw CT data confirming the sample “is authentic” to The Anatomical Record, which had published the critique, seeking an expression of concern or retraction of that paper.

Wildlife journal issues corrections for missing ethics statements

In what one sleuth called a “systemic failure,” a wildlife journal has issued corrections to a handful of papers not for an error in the articles but to include an item that wasn’t: ethics statements.

The most recent such correction in the European Journal of Wildlife Research (EJWR) was on September 8. According to the notice, authors of a March article on mammal diversity in Mexico provided additional information on the camera trapping method employed in the study — namely, that their research did not require approval from an animal ethics committee.

At least three other similar corrections have appeared in EJWR in the last four years, with several more articles with missing ethics statements flagged on PubPeer by commenter “Pseudotocinclus tietensis.” For example, for a 2021 paper on “understanding human controversies on the return of the wolf through the use of socio-cultural values,” which included a survey of nearly 1,500 people, Pseudotocinclus pointed out the ethics approval section for the paper says “Not applicable.”

Editor-in-chief resigns amid probes of alleged citation manipulation, data errors

The editor-in-chief of The Egyptian Rheumatologist has resigned following claims of questionable citation practices and improper peer review at the journal.

At least three publishers are also investigating alleged data errors in papers in other journals by the former journal editor, Tamer Gheita, and his research group. Gheita, a professor of rheumatology at Cairo University in Giza, has denied the claims, calling the complaints “subjective” and “malicious.”

The Egyptian Society of Rheumatic Diseases (ESRd) started investigating Gheita in June following concerns about his editorial practices at the society’s journal, including unusually rapid peer-review timelines and questionable citation patterns, according to Bassel Elzorkany, interim editor-in-chief for the journal. Elzorkany told Retraction Watch the ESRd board temporarily suspended Gheita, and Gheita resigned shortly afterward.

Weekend reads: China intensifies crackdown on misconduct; AI flooding medical journals with ‘meaningless’ research; Sham scientific societies

If your week flew by — we know ours did — catch up here with what you might have missed.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal investigating paper on heart device with registration number for wrong trial
When open data are misused
‘Hot mess’ paper questioning CO2 and climate change gets retracted
Announcing the First Research Accountability Reporting Fellows: Our collaboration with The Open Notebook.

We’re honored to be the subject of a paper published this week: Retraction Watch is “a significant example of the long‐anticipated, but little‐realised, idea of watchdog science journalism,” Declan Fahy writes.

I Support Retraction Watch

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

‘Hot mess’ paper questioning CO2 and climate change gets retracted

The paper refers to air temperature data as “obtained by NASA from satellites” and claims the main areas of warming depicted in this figure do “not fit in with the main industrial centers in the world!”
*S.A. Harris/Atmosphere 2023*

A paper that called into question many central data linking carbon dioxide to the rapidly warming climate has been retracted for “significant concerns,” including “unsupported conclusions” and “inaccuracies” in the interpretation of the data.

The paper, published in August 2023 in the MDPI journal Atmosphere, was written by Stuart Harris, a former geography professor at the University of Calgary. It has 26,000 views and was mentioned 869 times on the social media platform X, according to Altmetric. It was also covered by the climate skeptic website The Daily Sceptic. The article was cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

“It is a hot mess,” Marcus Sarofim, a climate scientist at Johns Hopkins University, told Retraction Watch. “I certainly don’t think this paper has any business being in the peer-reviewed literature.” He also pointed out the paper was submitted and accepted in under a month, saying the short timeframe “is always a bad sign.”

When open data are misused

*Credit: HALUSTD from Popspixel via Canva*

When Dorothy Bishop was asked to review a paper for a small neuroscience journal in August, she could tell from the abstract the authors had used a dataset she had first published four years ago on the public repository OpenNeuro. The dataset contained raw functional MRI scans from 50 participants, taken while they completed language-related tasks such as thinking of words and matching words to pictures.

“I was curious that somebody had already analyzed it, because it’s a hefty dataset that would have taken a lot of work to analyze,” Bishop, an emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, told Retraction Watch.

She quickly found problems in the manuscript. The description of the dataset didn’t match what she and her colleagues had actually done, and several references didn’t support the claims they were cited for. “There was clearly something seriously wrong,” she said. The editor was also suspicious, Bishop said, and the paper was eventually rejected. But Bishop believed the authors would try to publish the manuscript elsewhere, so she did a broader search of their names.

Journal investigating paper on heart device with registration number for wrong trial

The publisher of a European Heart Rhythm Association journal is investigating a paper that lists the incorrect registration number for a clinical study of a widely used but controversial heart implant.

The paper, published in EP Europace in May, described a prospective study of the Watchman FLX, from Boston Scientific, for a procedure called left atrial appendage occlusion (LAAO) in 400 people with abnormal heart rhythms. The authors concluded the device was “feasible, safe, and resource efficient, achieving high procedural success and low complication rates.”

Cardiologists have warned of caveats with the device and the LAAO procedure itself, mainly that early studies found LAAO caused a “significantly higher rate of a primary composite endpoint that included stroke, systemic embolism, cardiovascular/unexplained death, and major bleeding.” A study earlier this year found LAAO with a Watchman device increased rates of stroke and other complications when compared to oral medications.

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