Retraction Watch

Technology journal pulls papers for unauthorized author changes, fictitious emails

An Elsevier energy-technology journal has retracted six papers from 2022 whose authors changed without editorial approval during revision of the manuscripts.

The authors also provided fictitious email addresses during the submission process, but changed them after the papers were accepted, according to retraction notices in the February issue of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments.

While the issues don’t necessarily indicate foul play, authorship changes and the use of non-institutional email addresses can be signs of paper-mill involvement. In 2021, we reported on a website in Iran that listed “articles ready for acceptance,” including one to appear in Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments. The year after our story, the journal pulled the paper, whose author list had also changed at the revision stage.

Most editors at math journal resign over multiple reviews, ‘cloak-and-dagger’ removal of EIC

Nearly two dozen editors of a mathematics journal have resigned after its publisher removed the top editor and implemented a multiple review system, “running roughshod over the standard practices of the refereeing process in mathematics.”

Of the 31 members of the Communications in Algebra editorial board, 23 signed a March 10 resignation letter sent to Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal. In the letter, the editors said the publisher “unilaterally” implemented a system in which more than one reviewer would be expected to look over a paper.

The peer review process in mathematics is more labor-intensive than for other topics, the editors said, including “not only an assessment of the impact and significance of the results but also a line-by-line painstaking check for correctness of the results. This process is often quite time-consuming and makes referees a valuable commodity.” The letter continues: “Doubling the number of expected reviews will quickly either deplete the pool of willing reviewers or vastly dilute the quality of their reviews, and both of these are unacceptable outcomes.”

University of Melbourne opens formal investigation into education researcher John Hattie

The University of Melbourne has opened a formal investigation into the prominent Australia-based education researcher John Hattie, backtracking on a decision months ago that concerns about his work didn’t warrant further scrutiny.

The investigation, confirmed in a letter seen by Retraction Watch, was triggered by allegations made by Stephen Vainker, a teacher and former doctoral researcher in the United Kingdom, who documented what he says are hundreds of instances of plagiarism and data errors across Hattie’s body of work. The investigation also follows our coverage last August.

Vainker also discovered what seems to be a hallucinated reference in one of Hattie’s recent writings, prompting a book publisher to remove it from the work.

Weekend reads: ‘Don’t hate the replicator, hate the game’; Crossref finds 150K incorrect citation links in database; Announcing our Ctrl-Z award

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Stolen economics study retracted following Retraction Watch coverage
Former Mount Sinai postdoc falsified images in grant updates, ORI says
Controversial editorial practices boost plastic surgeon’s publishing empire
Embattled journal brand mistakenly invites out-of-scope researchers to join board

Plus:

Announcing our $2,500 award for researchers who discover errors in their work and take steps to correct the scientific record

In case you missed the news, the Hijacked Journal Checker now has more than 400 entries. The Retraction Watch Database has over 63,000 retractions. Our list of COVID-19 retractions is up to nearly 650, and our mass resignations list has 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):

Embattled journal brand mistakenly invites out-of-scope researchers to join board

Springer Nature has launched a new agriculture journal under the troubled Cureus brand. As part of its launch, the publisher invited at least one researcher with irrelevant specialities to join its editorial board, Retraction Watch has learned.

The new journal comes after Clarivate’s Web of Science delisting the original and long-embattled Cureus Journal of Medical Science in October for concerns about article quality.

The flagship Cureus was founded in 2009 by John Adler Jr., a Stanford University neurosurgeon, as an open-access journal for clinicians who didn’t have grants. Springer Nature acquired the journal in December 2022. In 2024, the publisher launched Cureus Journals — open-access journals on engineering, computer science and business — using the brand name.

Controversial editorial practices boost plastic surgeon’s publishing empire

In the summer of 2022, a researcher in Indonesia submitted a case report to Annals of Medicine and Surgery, one of several open-access journals founded and edited by Riaz Agha, a plastic surgeon and publisher in London. The manuscript, Agha responded, needed various changes to be considered for publication.

Among them: It should cite Agha’s paper on how to write surgical case reports, published two years earlier in the highly ranked International Journal of Surgery (IJS), the plastic surgeon’s flagship publication.

“Thanks Sir,” the Indonesian researcher replied. “I’ve added [the reference] to the manuscript.”

Although practices vary, the journals Agha founded aren’t alone in requiring authors to follow, and sometimes even cite, reporting guidelines. But a conflict of interest can arise when an editor demands authors reference guideline papers published in the editor’s own journals – as Agha does in his instructions to authors, reporting guidelines and editorial correspondence.

Former Mount Sinai postdoc falsified images in grant updates, ORI says

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has sanctioned a former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York for manipulating images in two grant updates and a manuscript.

Chen-Yeh “George” Ke committed research misconduct by intentionally falsifying images in an unpublished manuscript supported by federal funds and by reporting the fabricated results in two research performance progress reports, according to a summary published March 10 on the ORI website and to be published in the Federal Register.

Ke, now a manager at Level Biotechnology in Taiwan, according to LinkedIn, did not return messages seeking comment. A spokesperson from Mount Sinai acknowledged our message but did not comment before our deadline.

Stolen economics study retracted following Retraction Watch coverage

An economics study that was stolen and had its authorship slots sold by a paper mill has been retracted.

The move follows our reporting in January about a researcher in India who took to social media after an academic journal rejected her paper, noting that it had high similarity to a study published by other authors — despite the work being her own.

Vijayalakshmi S, an economics researcher at RV University in Bengaluru, had presented the study at a conference, and had a previous version rejected from a different journal. S concluded her paper was somehow stolen during either of those instances. Another researcher told us at the time that a post he found on Telegram offered authorship slots on S’s study for less than $200 apiece.

Weekend reads: The LLMs ‘willing to commit academic fraud’; ‘peer replication’ instead of review; a ‘spam filter’ for predatory journals

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines
A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction
Controversial comet theory struck by two new retractions
Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper
Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

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):

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

As a hospital librarian, Jessica Waite is typically successful at tracking down elusive articles for clinicians at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in England. So when a colleague couldn’t locate two references in a paper and asked for help, the librarian grew suspicious.

“These were recent references, which usually we have no problem finding,” Waite told us. “I looked at the issues of the journals where the article should have been, and there were completely different articles, so I immediately thought that the articles we had been asked to find were not real.”

The references were from an article exploring mental health integration after bowel diversion surgery published in Digestive Diseases and Sciences (DDS), a Springer Nature title.

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