Didier Raoult, the French infectious disease scientist who came to prominence for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, has lost two papers for ethics concerns after other scientists flagged issues with hundreds of publications from the institute he formerly led.
When I began my graduate work almost 15 years ago, retractions of papers in academic journals were rare, reserved mainly for clear misconduct or serious errors. Today, rarity has given way to routine, with retractions coming more often and increasingly in bulk.
Sage is not immune to large-scale retractions, nor are we passive observers of their growth. As Retraction Watch wrote, we were “one of the first publishers to recognize large-scale peer review manipulation and begin retracting papers in bulk nine years ago.” Recently, we issued some major retractions; just in the last few months, we put out 37 from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and 21 from Concurrent Engineering. And there are more to come.
While we don’t celebrate this type of action, the news is not all bad. The high numbers of retractions at times reflect a problem of industrialized cheating, but also, as in our case, a belief that rigorous scholarship – robustly reviewed by researchers who are experts in their fields – can and should improve the world. Sage was founded on this principle, and it guides everything we do.
We take our role of vigorously correcting the academic record very seriously because we believe in the scholarly process. We also know that every part of the process is managed by humans with biases (conscious or unconscious), agendas, heavy workloads, and – at times – dubious incentives.
As research integrity manager at Sage, I work to safeguard the credibility of the research published in more than 60,000 articles every year across more than 1,100 journals. In my role, I see a lot of unethical practices: peer review rings, where researchers unfairly influence the review process; paper mills that produce mass-fabricated research papers, and the brazen trend of selling authorship or entire papers on private or public forums. When it comes to preventing and correcting this type of action, much goes on behind the scenes.
Amidst the COVID-19 calamity, one can argue that science is one of the few aspects of the human response that has worked relatively well. However, despite the many advances in preventing and treating COVID-19, there have also been missteps as the world has scrambled to respond to a deadly new pathogen. It has been humbling for the U.S. to lead large high-income countries in per capita deaths from COVID-19 even with its wealth and scientific expertise. We are all too aware of the needless illnesses and deaths that have resulted from misguided political leadership, inadequate preparation, delayed responses, fragile supply chains, health disparities, and vaccine hesitancy. But we will not dwell on these issues here. Rather, we would like to review the COVID-19 pandemic through the prism of the 3R’s of research integrity: rigor, reproducibility, and responsibility. These form the fundamental pillars of the foundation of science. It is appropriate that we devote more attention to the foibles than to the successes so that we can learn from the mistakes and missed opportunities. What could have been done better? What needs to improve?
A diabetes researcher who lost a defamation suit against a journal that marked four of his papers with expressions of concern now has four more papers flagged – by the same journal.
Diabetes, a journal of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), placed expressions of concern on four papers led or co-authored by Mario Saad, of the University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil on October 23.
Saad sued the ADA in 2015 after Diabetes marked four other papers with similar notices. A judge dismissed the suit, and the journal later retracted the papers (for which we recognized them with a DiRT — Doing the Right Thing — award). Saad is now up to 19 retractions, by our count.
A controversial paper on the safety and immunogenicity of an Iran-made COVID-19 vaccine is being investigated by the U.S.-based publisher Wiley, Retraction Watch has learned.
The paper describes the vaccine’s first test in humans, marking the only time results from the clinical development of the homegrown shot have been reported in international journals.
A cancer researcher who lost nine papers in one day as a publisher purged articles offered in “authorship-for-sale” schemes told Retraction Watch he and his co-authors “will soon defend ourselves legally.”
Nine of the 38 articles Frontiers retracted listed Mostafa Jarahian, formerly of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, as a co-author.
When we initially reported on the large batch of retractions, one of Jarahian’s co-authors shared an article from Frontiers indicating the publisher had decided to retract the paper after “concerns were brought to our attention from the German Cancer Research Center regarding the authorship of the article.”
The publisher PLOS appears close to an agreement with a scientist who sued to stop the addition of an expression of concern to one of her articles, according to a recent filing in the case.
Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., filed suit against PLOS in April, as we previously reported.
According to Singh’s complaint, the publisher planned to place an expression of concern on one of her papers after she and her co-authors had requested a correction.
Singh’s suit sought a temporary restraining order and permanent injunction preventing PLOS from publishing the expression of concern, as well as damages and legal fees.
