Retraction Watch

Authors up past 60 retractions amid ongoing investigation

A group of researchers in Iran now have had more than 60 papers retracted for concerns about peer review and plagiarism as a publisher investigates its back catalog. One of the researchers, A. Salar Elahi, now ranks 7th on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

Previously, Elsevier said they would retract 26 papers from the research group at Islamic Azad University in Tehran for fake reviews in 2017 and 2018. The latest batch of 33 retracted papers originally appeared in Springer Nature’s Journal of Fusion Energy as far back as 2009.

Tim Kersjes, head of research integrity at Springer Nature told us in addition to investigating specific concerns as they arise, his unit also is running “ongoing deep-dive investigations to assess published content that has connections with content that has already been retracted for integrity concerns by ourselves or other publishers.” The recent retractions came from such an investigation that is ongoing, he said.

‘A proper editor would be horrified’: Why did a pediatric journal publish articles on the elderly?

In June, a scientist researching sarcopenia came across a relevant paper about treatment for elderly patients with complications from the disease as well as type 2 diabetes. The paper was “very bad,” he told us. “It looked like someone just copied two or three times the same text.”

The scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, became even more concerned when he realized the paper, which had the word “elderly” in its title, had been published in a pediatric journal.

“I started reading other issues of the same journal and noticed that this is a widespread problem: Chinese papers about older adults being published in pediatric journals!” he said.

Exclusive: Prof plagiarized postdoc’s work in now-retracted paper, university found

A political scientist in Canada copied his postdoc’s work without credit in a paper, according to the retraction notice and a university inquiry report.

The paper by Charles Conteh, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, appeared in Sage’s Outlook on Agriculture in October 2023. It has one citation, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

An inquiry by Brock identified plagiarism and uncredited authorship in the article, according to the report finalized this March and seen by Retraction Watch. Failure to give post-doctoral fellows the “opportunity to publish in peer-reviewed journals negatively impacts [them] both reputationally and financially,” the report states.

Elsevier investigating geology journal after allegations of pal review

Elsevier is investigating the journal Geoscience Frontiers after a PubPeer thread flagged an editorial advisor whose articles in the journal were edited by his frequent co-authors.

The editorial advisor, M. Santosh, is a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia and a “Highly Cited Researcher” with more than 1,500 published articles, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The PubPeer commenter, “Desmococcus antarctica,” noted that two associate editors of the journal, Vinod O. Samuel of Yonsei University in Seoul and Erath Shaji of the University of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram, India, are often listed as “Handling Editors” of Santosh’s articles published in Geoscience Frontiers — despite each frequently publishing other work with him.

Giant rat penis redux: AI-generated diagram, errors lead to retraction

In an episode reminiscent of the AI-generated graphic of a rat with a giant penis, another paper with an anatomically incorrect image has been retracted after it attracted attention on social media. The authors admit using ChatGPT to make the diagram.

According to the retraction notice published July 12, the article, by researchers at Guangdong Provincial Hydroelectric Hospital in Guangzhou, China, was retracted after “concerns were raised over the integrity of the data and an inaccurate figure.”

The paper, published in Lippincott’s Medicine, purported to describe a randomized controlled trial that found alkaline water could reduce pain and alleviate symptoms of chronic gouty arthritis.

Weekend reads: The world’s most cited cat; ‘Is peer review failing its peer review?’; Oxford prof accused of stealing research

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 49,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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

‘Mistakes were made’: Paper by department chair earns expression of concern as more questioned

A 14-year-old paper has earned an expression of concern after an anonymous whistleblower found evidence of image duplication in the work.

The authors have had images from several more papers flagged on PubPeer. The corresponding author, Kelly McMasters, is chair of the Hiram C. Polk, Jr., MD Department of Surgery at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky.

The 2010 paper, “Adenovirus-mediated expression of truncated E2F-1 suppresses tumor growth in vitro and in vivo,” appeared in Cancer. It has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Supplement maker sues critic for defamation, spurring removal of accepted abstract

A Frontiers journal has taken down the abstract of a “provisionally accepted” article about harms from an herbal supplement after the company that sells the products sued the first author for defamation.

The author of the paper, Cyriac Abby Philips, a hepatologist at Rajagiri Hospital in Kerala, India, has over 266,000 followers on his X account “TheLiverDoc.” In 2020, another of Philips’ papers about harm from supplements was retracted and removed after the large supplement company Herbalife, whose products the paper impugned, put legal pressure on Elsevier.

Himalaya Wellness, an herbal supplement company which says its products are based on Ayurvedic practices, last year sued Philips for defamation based on his posts on X about the company’s products.

Scopus is broken – just look at its literature category

As Retraction Watch recently reported, three of the top 10 philosophy journals in the highly influential Scopus database turned out to be fakes: Not only did these dubious journals manage to infiltrate the list, but they also rose to its top by trading citations. This news is embarrassing in itself, but it is hardly shocking. Our rankings-obsessed academic culture has proven time and again that it is prone to data manipulation. Rankings for both publications and institutions are routinely hacked by scholars, editors, and administrators who are ready to tweak or even falsify numbers as needed.

The problems with the Scopus journal rankings, however, run much deeper. The issue is not that inflated citation numbers have occasionally propelled impostor journals to the top of the list. Rather, at least in my own field of literary studies, the ranking makes no sense whatsoever: the list is full of journals that have no business being there at all because they belong to entirely different areas of scholarly enquiry, and even when the ranking gets the field right, it systematically places marginal publications close to the top. In what follows, I briefly break down the major ways the Scopus Literature and Literary Theory Ranking is not just skewed but downright nonsensical.

Exclusive: Kavli prize winner threatens to sue critic for defamation

One of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanoscience has threatened to sue a longtime critic, Retraction Watch has learned.

In a cease and desist letter, a lawyer representing Chad Mirkin, a chemist and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, accused Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research.

The demand primarily concerns a letter to the editor Lévy submitted in April to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences regarding an article Mirkin co-authored, “Multimodal neuro-nanotechnology: Challenging the existing paradigm in glioblastoma therapy,” which appeared in the journal in February.

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