Month: July 2024

Weekend reads: A ‘star botanist’ has a retraction; the ‘bizarro world of law reviews’; AI and fake papers

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 49,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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: A ‘star botanist’ has a retraction; the ‘bizarro world of law reviews’; AI and fake papers

How you can help improve the visibility of retractions: Introducing NISO’s Recommended Practice for Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC)

Maria Zalm

Despite their retracted status, problematic articles that present unreliable information, critical errors, non-reproducible results, or fabricated data frequently continue to be propagated in the scholarly literature through continued citations. There are good reasons for citing retracted work, for example to critically discuss the information presented in the article, or in studies pertaining to the field of research integrity. 

However, in the majority of cases, retracted publications continue to be cited as if the retraction had not occurred. In studies of the citation of retracted publications, only between 5% and 20% of citations acknowledge the retracted status of the article or are critical of the article. A lack of awareness of the retracted status of a publication may be a significant contributing factor to the perpetuation of citing the article after the retraction event occurred. 

Previous research has found that the fact an article has been retracted is often inconsistently displayed across different resources, creating challenges for authors seeking out articles to refine their research questions, develop their approaches, or contextualize their findings. The continued citation and inclusion of retracted work without appropriate discussion or acknowledgement of its retracted status in subsequent studies, poses a direct threat to the reliability of the published literature and the overall trust in research and scholarship.

Continue reading How you can help improve the visibility of retractions: Introducing NISO’s Recommended Practice for Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CREC)

Elsevier withdraws plagiarized paper after original author calls journal out on LinkedIn

Sasan Sadrizadeh

In late May, one of Sasan Sadrizadeh’s doctoral students stumbled upon a paper with data directly plagiarized from his previous work. 

Sadrizadeh, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, was the last author on “Supply-demand side management of a building energy system driven by solar and biomass in Stockholm: A smart integration with minimal cost and emission,” published in September 2023 in Energy Conversion and Management.

The paper with matching data, “Optimizing smart building energy systems for sustainable living: A realistic approach to enhance renewable energy consumfaption [sic] and reduce emissions in residential buildings,” appeared online as an “article in press” in Elsevier’s Energy and Buildings in May. 

Continue reading Elsevier withdraws plagiarized paper after original author calls journal out on LinkedIn

‘A threat to the integrity of scientific publishing’: How often are retracted papers marked that way?

Caitlin Bakker

How well do databases flag retracted articles?

There has been a lot of interest recently in the quality of retraction notices and notifications, including new guidelines from the National Information Standards Organization (NISO; our Ivan Oransky was a member of the committee) and a new study which Ivan and our Alison Abritis joined.

In another new paper, “Identification of Retracted Publications and Completeness of Retraction Notices in Public Health,” a group of researchers set out to study “how clearly and consistently retracted publications in public health are being presented to researchers.”

Spoiler alert: Not very.

We asked corresponding author Caitlin Bakker, of the University of Regina — who also chaired the NISO committee — some questions about the findings and their implications.

Continue reading ‘A threat to the integrity of scientific publishing’: How often are retracted papers marked that way?

Food science journal retracts 10 papers for compromised peer review

Farhan Saeed

A research group based in Pakistan has had 10 of their papers retracted from Wiley’s Food Science & Nutrition based on flaws in the peer review process.

According to the notices, which were identical for each article, “the editorial office found unambiguous evidence that the manuscript was accepted solely based on compromised and insufficient reviewer reports.” 

The following articles have been retracted: 

Continue reading Food science journal retracts 10 papers for compromised peer review

‘We authors paid a heavy price’: Journal retracts all 23 articles in special issue

A journal has retracted an entire special issue over concerns the guest-edited papers underwent a “compromised” peer review process. 

In a supplement to Volume 337 Issue 1 of Annals of Operations Research, 23 papers were retracted with the same statement: 

The Editor-in-Chief and the publisher have retracted this article. The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue. An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised editorial handling and peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references or not being in scope of the journal or guest-edited issue. Based on the investigation’s findings the Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions of this article.

The articles in the guest-edited issue, Prescriptive Analytics Using Machine Learning and Mathematical Programming for Sustainable Operations Research, were published between June 2022 and October 2023. 

Continue reading ‘We authors paid a heavy price’: Journal retracts all 23 articles in special issue