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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Paper co-authored by Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi to be marked with expression of concern
- Catch and kill: What it’s like to try to get a NEJM paper corrected
- Paper co-authored by sleuth Elisabeth Bik marked with expression of concern
- What happened when a psychology professor used a peer-reviewed paper to praise his own blog – and slam others’
- Former medical school dean earns sixth retraction
- Elsevier journal retracts nearly 50 papers because they were each accepted on the “positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report”
- ‘Mugged by stealth’: Team finds their paper has been plagiarized not once, but twice
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 266. There are more than 36,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Journal eLife ends ‘accept or reject’ role for peer reviewers.” We asked what that means for retractions.
- “What’s a journal for?”
- “Dozens of papers co-authored by Nobel laureate raise concerns.” Earlier, we reported on Gregg Semenza’s retractions.
- Are sleuths the Fouquier-Tinvilles of science?
- “A conference on academic freedom to which the uninvited are unfree to attend is a parody.”
- “Can transparency undermine peer review?”
- “Investing In The Science Of Science: What Medicare Can Teach The NIH About Experimentation.”
- University of Kansas “names new vice provost for diversity following plagiarism scandal.”
- “Scientists are not routinely sloppy, clinicians don’t usually cheat, and clinical research is generally well designed. So why is it so hard to reproduce results?”
- “Unfortunately, there will likely always be a small number of bad scientists.”
- “No compelling evidence indicates that [COVID-19] preprints provide results that are inconsistent with published papers.”
- “A professor’s research flew under the radar for years. What finally got him fired?”
- “[P]ublishing internationally limits the visibility of Chinese research for the national Chinese scientific community, and the restriction is even worse for immediate access.”
- “Cheating in sports vs. cheating in journalism vs. cheating in science.”
- What can be done about cheating in research? Lex Bouter has some suggestions.
- “Is peer review failing?” Our Ivan Oransky talks with Elisabeth Bik and Clare Kenyon of Cosmos.
- “TPP’s Tsai Pi-ru resigns despite denying plagiarism.” And “National Taiwan University to tighten thesis supervision after political scandals.”
- A priest with 23 retractions is accused of plagiarizing again.
- “Fewer Sandwich Papers, Please.” A plea from a chemistry professor.
- “The dream of ‘editormetrics’ – Why a FAIR dataset of journal editors would benefit all researchers.”
- “We found that more than half of the preregistered studies we assessed contain omitted hypotheses (N = 224; 52.2%) or added hypotheses (N = 227; 56.8%), and about one-fifth of studies contain changed hypotheses (N = 82; 19%).”
- “Clinical trial coordinators sentenced to prison after data falsification scheme.”
- “Retraction inaction: How the pandemic has exposed frailties in scientific publishing.”
- “Current results indicate that submitted or pre-printed manuscript versions and their peer-reviewed journal version are very similar, with main (analysis) methods and main findings rarely changing.”
- “Fostering a research integrity culture: Actionable advice for institutions.”
- “Lawyer is sanctioned for lifting passages from opponents’ motion; copying was ‘neither slight nor subtle.‘”
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What a pathetic excuse for journalism.
Interesting and bizarre article from a group of three Frontiers guest editors. Multiple articles submitted to their special issue were rejected, not by themselves, but by chief editors who determined the articles were out of scope for the issue. They ended up resigning and ceding control of the special issue.
How bizarre, one of the most spectacular case of imposture, the Banat’s Journal of Biotechnology (https://www.bjbabe.ro) – (Web of Science Core Collection, Emerging Sources Citation Index) simply disappeared from the web! Not affiliated, the domain bought by a private person, classified in the field of Animal Sciences (https://www.citefactor.org/journal/index/157/banats-journal-of-biotechnology), but (falsely mentioned as) edited by a department of “Exact Sciences” and having as editors some agronomists, chemists, mechanical engineers, with international editors with no affiliation etc. The citations seems to be an ode dedicated to members of the Romanian publishing team, a team of enterprising friends! It is not at all clear how WoS/Clarivate could accept this hoax!
Yes, but somehow different. Using public simple tools as Waybackmachine, you will find that:
– The domain expired on October 22nd, 2022 (“Domain Name: bjbabe.ro; Registered On: 2012-09-21; Expires On: 2022-10-20; Registrar: Claus Web SRL; Referral URL: http://www.clausweb.ro; DNSSEC: Inactive; Nameserver: ns.clausweb.ro”). Just in time.
– The problem is that a Core collection indexed Journal, since Jan.-Jun. 2015, can not evaporate. Why would that happen since everyone who published here would want as many citations as possible?
– The Exact Science Department existed in the University of Agricultural Sciences in Timisora untill 2013 September, but if you google, you will find this department mentioned as the home-editor for BJB after this date;
– After 2013 September 27th, the jurnal doesn’t appear on the Timisora university website among scientifical local publications. The library section (https://biblio.usab-tm.ro/reviste/) does not mention any print issue in its periodicals collection. (Why?) A search with the journal ISSN on https://portal.issn.org/ gives 0 results.
– All e-volumes of the journal mention “Publisher: Timisora, Romania” and not the university in Timisora (there are some universities in this city, Google says).
– The Banat Biotechnology Journal stoped at issue 22 (2020, December), but the WaybackMachine shows many modifications in 2021 and 2022! Someone may ask why. I have some hypotheses but I have no time to investigate.
So, with the disappearance of the journal from the web few days ago, its publishers and editors proceeded de facto to a stealth retraction. Clarivate, EBSCO, CABI etc. should respect this choice and do the same (and retract any citation of any article published in Banat Biotechnology Journal) since in extenso articles are no more available.
In conclusion, is nothing “spectacular”, just another case of fraud in nowadays science. Except the unit of measure is not the article, but the journal.