Retraction Watch

Editors of criminology journal resign amid concern about review times

The top editors of a criminology journal have stepped down after the society in charge of the publication assessed concerns about manuscript review times.

The board of the American Society of Criminology decided “a change of leadership was required due to some ongoing operational issues with the Criminology journal,” according to an announcement on the society’s website. “We appreciate the contributions of the prior editors.”

Kelly Vance, associate director of the society, said the organization had no further comment beyond the announcement.

$1.5 million program targets changes to academic incentives

The incentive systems that drive academic research underlie nearly every story we write: publication counts for promotion, pressure to produce positive results, hitting certain metrics, and so on. Critics have long called for change in these systems, but support for such change is hard to come by.

Several organizations are now putting more than $1 million toward reimagining hiring, promotion and tenure at U.S. universities. The program, called the Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge, is seeking proposals for “bold, creative strategies to develop academic reward systems that foster a collaborative, responsive, and transparent research environment.”

Organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), the program will offer grants at two funding levels — $50,000 or $250,000 — over two years. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Dana Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have provided the funding, which totals $1.5 million.

Weekend reads: Science publishing a ‘hot mess’; AI microscopy ‘indistinguishable’ from real; social media as a bellwether for retractions

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Duke scientists lose eight papers for alleged image manipulation
Sleuth unearths citation, authorship issues at earth sciences journal
Former student who ran paper mill up to 11 retractions
Journal issues speedy retraction in less than a day for ‘inadvertent mistake’
Wiley retracts study stolen by reviewer, following Retraction Watch coverage

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 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?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Wiley retracts study stolen by reviewer, following Retraction Watch coverage

A Wiley journal has retracted a paper more than a year after a researcher reported the work was hers and had been stolen by a reviewer for another journal.

As we reported in July, Shafaq Aftab, now a lecturer at the University of Central Punjab in Pakistan, contacted Wiley in September 2024 after discovering a paper published in one of its journals, Systems Research and Behavioral Science (SRBS), was the exact work she submitted to a different journal a year earlier.

The retraction notice, issued October 1, states an investigation found “significant unattributed overlap with an unpublished manuscript” and data the authors provided to the journal were “insufficient to resolve the concerns.” Subsequently, “additional scientific errors were identified in the manuscript,” according to the notice.

Journal issues speedy retraction in less than a day for ‘inadvertent mistake’

We don’t know if it’s the fastest retraction ever, but the speed is nonetheless notable: A journal retracted a paper 22 hours after a sleuth raised concerns about the article.

On August 9 just before noon, John Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and journal editor in Australia, reached out to two journals to notify them of image similarities he had flagged on PubPeer.

Loadsman asked the authors to clarify the “apparent identity” of a figure in a 2023 paper in Experimental Biomedical Research. The figure resembled one in a different paper by the same authors “representing different experimental conditions,” he wrote in his PubPeer comment. The second paper appeared in Wiley’s International Journal of Endocrinology in 2019.

Former student who ran paper mill up to 11 retractions

A former bioinformatics student who operated a paper mill while at the University of Manchester has lost another paper, bringing his total to 11 retractions.

Sameer Quazi had been enrolled in the school’s “PGCert” program in clinical bioinformatics, as Retraction Watch reported in January when the university released a statement saying an investigation found he “was running a paper mill.” The investigation panel had requested the retraction of 10 papers, but didn’t say which ones.

Quazi’s most recent retraction, a 2023 paper on antimicrobial agents, appeared in the MDPI journal Antibiotics. According to the September 12 notice, the journal was “unable to verify the identity, contribution, or affiliations of a number of the authors listed on this manuscript, nor could the origins of the study be confirmed.” The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Sleuth unearths citation, authorship issues at earth sciences journal

Carlos Conforti Ferreira Guedes, a geology professor at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil, came across a paper in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences earlier this year with irrelevant, and in some cases nonexistent, references.

Made-up citations can indicate the use of generative AI in crafting the paper – but another detail caught his attention as particularly odd: The researchers on the paper, a study on the transformation of the Brazilian coastline, all listed affiliations in India. Guedes reached out to one of the editors-in-chief of the journal at the time, Andres Folguera, on March 10 to notify the journal about the issues.

As Guedes and his colleagues noted in a May 19 blog post on the Brazilian Association for Quaternary Studies (ABEQUA) website, “there were no citations of work conducted in Brazil or by researchers who had previously worked in the region.”

Duke scientists lose eight papers for alleged image manipulation

Eight papers by two emeritus researchers from Duke University have been retracted in recent months for alleged image duplications. Although the researchers had worked at the university for decades, Duke officials have not responded to repeated inquiries about the retractions.

The papers were published between 2004 and 2014 in The Journal of Cellular Biochemistry and PLOS One. According to the retraction statements, the articles contained images and figures that appeared similar or identical to others in the same paper or published elsewhere.

The two researchers, Salvatore Pizzo, a former chair of Duke’s Department of Pathology, and his colleague Uma Kant Misra, spent much of their careers studying prostate cancer. From 1993 to 2015, Pizzo and Misra published 70 papers together, with 26 where they are the only authors. Pizzo did not respond to repeated emails from Retraction Watch asking for comment. Misra died Sept. 18.

Weekend reads: U.S. EPA tells scientists to stop publishing; ‘unreliable’ Tylenol research; Alzheimer’s paper retracted

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

University email addresses no longer effective bulwark against fake peer review
Study on apple cider vinegar for weight loss retracted after many raise concerns
Second study using ‘Tin Man Syndrome’ X-ray under scrutiny following Retraction Watch inquiry
Math has publication fraud, too
Authors defend retracted paper on vitamin D and COVID-19 critic called ‘deeply bizarre‘
Taylor & Francis threatens legal action against anonymous group’s ‘highly defamatory’ claims

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Taylor & Francis threatens legal action against anonymous group’s ‘highly defamatory’ claims

Taylor & Francis has threatened legal action against an online group that has made allegations, based largely on vague insinuations rather than evidence, about the publisher and a member of its research integrity team.

The group, ScienceGuardians, is an anonymous organization whose website serves as what they call an online “journal club.” On X, it has been posting so-called “investigations” of several sleuths, publishers and organizations, what it calls “perpetrators of the PubPeer Network Mob.” Its targets have included sleuths Kevin Patrick and Reese Richardson, and others such as Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp, and its posts are often amplified by those whose work has been questioned on PubPeer or retracted.

On September 7, the group published a string of claims on X about Nick Wise, a sleuth who joined Taylor & Francis in January as a research integrity manager. The ScienceGuardians post characterized the move as Wise “infiltrated” the publisher’s research integrity office. The post states he is responsible for 1,300 posts on PubPeer (which we have noted he does under his real name), and, ScienceGuardians claims, more than 100 others under the name “Simnia avena.”

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