Retraction Watch

‘Elite cohort’ of biz school scholars and editors scratch each others’ backs, study finds

Academics who publish frequently in two top business journals often have prior working relationships with the editors who handle their papers, according to a new analysis of editor-author relationships at the two publications over the last 15 years.

One journal editor in chief called the results “concerning,” while another thought the analysis was looking for problems on purpose.

The authors of the analysis, Vitali Mindel of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and Raffaele Ciriello of the University of Sydney in Australia, told Retraction Watch in a joint email they had set out to do a bibliometric study of “superstar” scholars in business research. The goal: “to understand the secret sauce behind exceptional productivity and success.”

Dana-Farber settles suit alleging image manipulation for $15 million

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has settled a lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act, admitting researchers used images and data that were “misrepresented and/or duplicated” in support of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health. Dana-Farber agreed to pay $15 million to settle the claim.

Sleuth Sholto David filed the claim in April 2024, about three months after he first posted about the allegations, which played a key role in Dana-Farber’s decision to retract or correct dozens of studies. Authors of some of those papers were among senior leaders of the institution, including president and CEO Laurie Glimcher.

As is typical in such cases, the complaint remained sealed while the Department of Justice investigated. As part of the agreement, David will receive $2.63 million, or 17.5 percent of the settlement.

Exclusive: In reversal, former vice chancellor in Pakistan who was let off hook for plagiarism faces sanctions

Three years after he was let off the hook by a government commission, a former university vice chancellor in Pakistan is facing sanctions for plagiarizing a student thesis in a paper from 2020, Retraction Watch has learned.

Muhammad Suleman Tahir, previously of Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, is now professor and chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Gujrat. According to a report issued on November 20 by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Islamabad, Tahir and his coauthors have been barred from supervising graduate students for three years and also have received a warning for their offense.

Meanwhile, the University of Gujrat removed Tahir from his position as director of the institution’s Advanced Study & Research Board on December 3, according to a notification we obtained.

Weekend reads: Springer Nature retracts papers using ‘bonkers’ dataset; preprint server welcomes AI authors; ethics editors’ COI disclosures ‘insufficient’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

How to juice your Google Scholar h-index, preprint by preprint
One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions
COPE’s involvement leads to retraction of paper on homeopathy for lung cancer
Journal removes funding statement from hormone therapy paper without issuing correction

Did you know that Retraction Watch and the Retraction Watch Database are projects of The Center of Scientific Integrity? Others include the Medical Evidence Project, the Hijacked Journal Checker, and the Sleuths in Residence Program. Help support this work.

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

Journal removes funding statement from hormone therapy paper without issuing correction

A Cell Press journal quietly removed part of a funding statement from a paper related to gender-affirming hormone therapy that the authors say was included in error. Experts called the move “worrying.”

The authors of the paper, which appeared in Cell Reports on September 23, gave estrogen therapy to male monkeys to better understand how hormone therapies used in gender clinics might affect the immune system.

The research drew attention from several conservative news organizations, some of which called the project “disturbing” and alleged the work cost millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health funding.

COPE’s involvement leads to retraction of paper on homeopathy for lung cancer

A journal that last year corrected a paper claiming to show a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer has now retracted the article after the Committee on Publication Ethics got involved in the case.

The extensive correction and an accompanying editorial, published in September 2024 in The Oncologist, came two years after the Austrian Agency for Scientific Integrity asked the journal to retract the article due to concerns about manipulated data, we reported at the time.

The retraction notice, published November 24, acknowledged the watchdog agency’s retraction request. It also noted the previous corrections and expression of concern for the article, which originally appeared in October 2020.

One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions

The head of a nuclear physics institute in Kazakhstan now has 21 retractions to his name — most of them logged in the past year — following dozens of his papers being flagged on PubPeer for data reuse and images showing suspiciously similar patterns of background noise, suggesting manipulation.

Maxim Zdorovets, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Astana, has written or coauthored 480 papers indexed on Scopus, and one analysis puts him as the third most cited researcher in Kazakhstan. His prolific publication record has been linked to Russian paper mills, though those claims are unverified. Zdorovets has defended his work in a series of online posts, arguing the imaging similarities come from technical issues and that his own analyses prove image manipulation did not occur. He did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.

The latest retraction for Zdorovets came last month when Crystallography Reports retracted a study containing electron microscope images “highly similar” to those published a year earlier in a now-retracted paper in the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry by a similar group of authors. Both papers also included images that closely resemble ones Zdorovets and his colleagues presented at a nanomaterials conference in Ukraine in 2017. In each instance, the images were meant to be showing different materials.

How to juice your Google Scholar h-index, preprint by preprint

A screenshot of Yousaf’s Google Scholar profile before it was removed.

Muhammad Zain Yousaf, a postdoc at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, became a scholar of note overnight. Or so it would seem, based on his now-defunct Google Scholar profile: From a modest 47 in 2022 and around 100 in 2023, Yousaf’s citations jumped to 629 in 2024. His h-index, a measure combining publication and citation numbers, took off accordingly, reaching levels typical of a senior academic.

But another researcher smelled a rat and took a closer look at Yousaf’s publications. In just two days, Yousaf had uploaded 10 short documents to TechRxiv, a preprint server hosted by the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, or IEEE. Each of the documents was chock-full of self-citations. In five cases, Yousaf was an author on all 37 papers in the reference list; the rest of the time, his publications made up nearly two-thirds of the reference list.

“Many of these documents appear to be low quality, as evidenced by their lack of coherence and technical quality,” the concerned researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, said of the preprints in an email to TechRxiv last December.

Weekend reads: ‘The fall of a prolific science journal’; Clinical trials by ‘super-retractors’; ‘How to Study Things That May Not Exist’

Giving Tuesday was this week, and, like many organizations, we asked for your support. The work we do is funded in part by your donations. If you value our work in rooting out scientific fraud and misconduct, exposing serial offenders, spotlighting how to fix broken systems — and bringing you this newsletter — please consider showing your support with a tax-deductible donation.

I support retraction watch

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases
Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change
The case of the fake references in an ethics journal
Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching‘
Glyphosate safety article retracted eight years after Monsanto ghostwriting revealed in court
Nature paper retracted after one investigation finds data errors, another finds no misconduct

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

Nature paper retracted after one investigation finds data errors, another finds no misconduct

Nature has retracted a paper on melanoma after an investigation by the journal found issues with data that rendered certain results statistically insignificant. A separate institutional investigation concluded misconduct wasn’t involved, the lead author says.

The research behind the article, published in April 2016, was conducted in the lab of Ashani Weeraratna, then at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. The paper has been cited 332 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study investigated how the tumor microenvironment affected the spread of young versus aged cells.

An editorial investigation found some results in a figure were “no longer statistically significant, which affects the conclusions about therapy resistance,” according to the October 29 retraction notice. The inquiry also found “several errors in image and source data consistency,” as well as errors with the sample numbers given in the original study.

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