The sudden death of a 27-year-old woman in the Romania offices of MDPI, a major open-access publisher with a worldwide presence, has grabbed national headlines and raised questions about the conditions under which the firm’s employees work.
Local newsreports said the woman had initially fainted in MDPI’s Bucharest office on Friday, October 4, but that her superiors refused to call an ambulance or let her go home after she revived. She later collapsed again and died from a heart attack after efforts to resuscitate her failed, according to the reports.
But in an interview with Retraction Watch, a colleague of the deceased woman, identified as Maria Alexandra Anghel, contested the media’s account of events.
“At a time when scientists and scientific research are already being criticised by persons who identify science with technology and who deplore some of the consequences of technology, dishonesty among scientists causes unease among scientists themselves and regretful or gleeful misgivings among publicists who are critical of science.“
Daryl Chubin wrote that in 1985 — a time when institutions we now take for granted, like the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, did not yet exist. We asked him to reflect on what has happened in the intervening four decades.
The phrase “misconduct in research” today is a quaint reminder of how much science has been captured by for-profit, politicized, international interests. As a four-decades-removed social researcher of misconduct, I marvel at how an investigation industry has emerged to monitor, analyze, report and decry the mischief around us. This “watcher community” represents an industry in an era of science most of us never envisioned.
In the days before the Office of Research Integrity, many accused researchers and their academic institutions were grasping for an accountability structure that was fair to all parties — adhering to due process – and swift in its resolutions. Good luck! Today, the headlines in Retraction Watch reflect a publishing industry seemingly under siege—awash in retractions, plagiarism, AI mischief, undeclared conflicts of interest, whistleblowing, and a subset of ills that are dizzying and disconcerting to degrees never seen before.
Retraction Watch monitors an industry ever more self-conscious about misdeeds in research, from analysis to interpretation to reporting. By setting the threshold low, it focuses on misdeeds that may be rare in a particular field, but substantial when aggregated across fields. Yes, there is a risk of overgeneralizing from statistical anomalies, but readers care about violations that sully “their” field.
An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction.
As we reported in August, the editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later.
Editors of a psychology journal have published a lengthy apology for failing to identify “biased” language and information in a paper about racial prejudice of Tibetan children against Han Chinese.
The authors listed affiliations with institutions in China, Australia, and Canada. The article describes experiments measuring the empathy – or lack thereof – Tibetan children expressed for characters with Tibetan or Han Chinese names who experienced either social or physical pain.
Optical and Quantum Electronics, a Springer Nature journal, has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse.
According to the notices, which have similar wording, the retractions come after the publisher identified problems with the articles including compromised peer review, inappropriate or irrelevant references, and nonsensical phrases, suggesting blind use of AI or machine-translation software.
“These investigations are based on intelligence from past work alongside whistleblower information,” Chris Graf, director of research integrity at Springer Nature in Oxford, UK, told Retraction Watch. But Graf declined to share the specifics of the inquiry: “We need to keep details of these investigations confidential to ensure that we do not inform the efforts of individuals who may engage in unethical activities.”
A public health journal has retracted an article on unintentional pesticide poisonings a year after the authors enlisted a lawyer’s help to fight the decision.
The authors listed affiliations with the Pesticide Action Network, a collection of organizations opposed to pesticides. In their review, they declared unintentional pesticide poisoning “a problem that warrants immediate action.”
The retraction notice cites a letter to the editor from employees of pesticide manufacturer Bayer, and the trade organization CropLife International, which criticized the analysis. The authors stood by their findings in a response, stating the critics “do not seem to have understood our estimation method.”
In January 2022, The Oncologist switched publishers from Wiley to Oxford University Press.
Last month, the journal issued an extensive correction for one of its most popular articles, a 2020 paper that describes results of a clinical trial the authors claimed found a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer.
The article page that remains on Wiley’s website, however, does not reflect the recent correction.
A nanotube researcher in Japan has earned 13 retractions, with more to come, after an extensive investigation by the country’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) revealed widespread misconduct in his work.
AIST’s investigation found Naohiro Kameta, senior principal researcher at the Nanomaterials Research Institute located in AIST’s Ibaraki campus, fabricated and falsified dozens of studies. He was apparently dismissed from his role following the findings.
The institute first learned of the problems in Kameta’s work in November 2022, according to a translated version of the investigation report. Initially, they looked into five papers, but eventually expanded their scrutiny to 61 articles on which Kameta was the lead or responsible author.
