The journal a publication ethics watchdog threatened with sanctions for taking years to retract articles will pull four more related papers, Retraction Watch has learned.
Last July, the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) sent a warning letter to Elsevier regarding 10 papers by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who hold positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions, that the publisher had said it would retract three and a half years ago.
As we reported previously, seven of the papers were retracted from Journal of the Neurological Sciences in December 2023.
Following our reporting on COPE’s letter to Elsevier, the publisher has decided to retract the remaining three articles, plus a letter regarding one of the retracted papers, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.
Andrew Grey, a professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who first contacted the Journal of Neurological Sciences about concerns with Sato’s papers in 2017, told us the move is “a good outcome for publication integrity, albeit long overdue. I am sure we will never know what happened to cause the absurd delay.”
Elsevier has not responded to repeated requests since January 12 for comment about these four upcoming retractions.
The work of Grey and colleagues Alison Avenell and Mark Bolland to expose problems in Sato’s research has led to more than 120 retractions, but in a recent analysis they found publishers have yet to assess nearly a third of the papers about which they have raised concerns. Yesterday, Science published a detailed report on the saga to date. “Retractions come slowly—often years after complaints arise, if at all—in part because journals may defer to institutional investigations, which can be slow, unreliable, or absent,” Science noted. “Journals’ decisions also lack transparency.”
In June 2020, after Elsevier hadn’t acted on his concerns and Grey sought help from COPE, the publisher said it would retract the 10 papers he had flagged. When it still hadn’t years later, and had apparently stopped responding to COPE’s inquiries, the organization sent Elsevier a warning letter stating that the journal’s behavior was “inconsistent with the standards that we expect from COPE members.”
The publisher subsequently retracted seven of the articles, but in a January 12, 2024 email seen by Retraction Watch, Mihail Grecea, a senior expert in publishing ethics at Elsevier, wrote that COPE’s letter hadn’t included “a detailed enough ‘Summary of concern’ which would grant for retraction” of three of the papers.
Grey informed Grecea that Kurume University had recommended retracting one of them for authorship misconduct, and the other two articles shared coauthors with that paper.
“More broadly, 119 of Dr Sato’s publications have now been retracted,” Grey wrote. “Why should readers have any confidence that any of his remaining publications are reliable? In the absence of robust evidence of reliability, they should all be retracted.”
He requested Elsevier also retract a letter, “Reply to Davie and Sharp: different mechanisms of bone metabolism between patients with stroke and with spinal cord injury,” that Sato and his coauthors had written in 1999. Grey wrote:
It refers to the now-retracted paper J Neurol Sci 1998;156:205–10, and cites 7 other retracted papers (refs 5-11) by the Sato research group.
It is rather clearly not reliable.
Grecea responded:
Given the rather scarce evidence regarding the three papers in the document provided by COPE, I tried to contact myself the Kurume University and the Futase Social Insurance Hospital (both listed by the three papers as the affiliations of the authors of the three papers).
Kurume University has responded at the end of December and I am currently working on the three retractions. I would estimate the 3+1 retractions to appear online around the end of this month.
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Perhaps excessive publication should be a negative sign; so many of those cited here have more publications than I imagined possible.
A proven serial offender (lead author) might have all their prior publications banned? Perhaps a listing of retracted authors and their institutions could help, much like Beals former list of predatory journals.
The lack of transparency and excessive delay from Elsevier is outrageous. It seems a judicial and marketing strategy to wait for the claims to be forgotten and/or spread throughout the years as to minimize their retractions by year metric. An offenders list and also publishers ethic metrics would be useful I think.