Wiley and Hindawi to retract 1,200 more papers for compromised peer review

Hindawi and Wiley, its parent company, have identified approximately 1,200 articles with compromised peer review that the publishers will begin retracting this month. 

Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of the research division at Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, wrote about the forthcoming retractions in a blog post at Scholarly Kitchen yesterday.

The plan to retract 1,200 articles, which the publisher expects to take a few months, follows Hindawi’s announcement last September that it would retract 511 articles across 16 journals for manipulated peer review. (We’ve tracked 501 retractions from 23 Hindawi journals since the announcement.)

Continue reading Wiley and Hindawi to retract 1,200 more papers for compromised peer review

Five years after saying it won’t retract Macchiarini paper, journal does so

Paolo Macchiarini

In 2018, the journal Respiration was adamant that it wouldn’t retract a 2015 paper co-authored by once-respected transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. Now, the editors at Respiration seem to have changed their mind.

Macchiarini is most well known for his controversial artificial windpipe implants. Seven out of the eight patients who had artificial windpipes implanted from Macchiarini suffered complications after the surgery

Five years ago, the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden found that Macchiarini and three co-authors of his were guilty of misconduct in the 2015 study, and recommended that it should be pulled. 

Thomas Nold, then the editor-in-chief of Respiration, previously told Retraction Watch, however, that the journal decided against retraction: 

Continue reading Five years after saying it won’t retract Macchiarini paper, journal does so

A high-quality cloned journal has duped hundreds of scholars, and has no reason to stop

Anna Abalkina

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases. 

In 2021, I created an alert on Scopus to keep me updated about new publications in the Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences, which had been hijacked by fraudulent publishers. I wanted to know if unauthorized content from this hijacked journal ended up in the index. 

However, I forgot about the alert until last month, when I received three notifications from Scopus regarding new publications in the journal.

These notifications included lists of a dozen papers indexed in Scopus, all of them originating from the hijacked version of the journal. Inspecting the profile of the journal showed that probably more than 55 papers from the hijackers are currently indexed in Scopus:

Continue reading A high-quality cloned journal has duped hundreds of scholars, and has no reason to stop

‘Sad but necessary’: Ant researchers pull fossil paper over errant claim

An army ant, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorylus#/media/File:Dorylus_gribodoi_casent0172627_dorsal_1.jpg

A group of insectologists is receiving praise on social media for retracting a 2022 paper in which they claimed, erroneously, it turns out, to have discovered a novel ant fossil. 

The paper, “An Eocene army ant,” appeared in November in Biology Letters, a Royal Society title. The authors were led by Christine Sosiak, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. The paper has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to Sosiak and her colleagues:

Continue reading ‘Sad but necessary’: Ant researchers pull fossil paper over errant claim

Weekend reads: Scientist suspended for 13 years; a fraud buster; editor home bias?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are more than 39,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNoteLibKeyPapers, 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Scientist suspended for 13 years; a fraud buster; editor home bias?