Yes, you read that headline right.
In January 2021, we reported that The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (JSCR) would soon be retracting two papers because a graduate student had committed misconduct in the work.
The journal – the official research publication of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NCSA) – did retract the papers, according to a notice posted to PubMed and on the title’s site, both dated March 2021.
But that didn’t stop one of the articles – which had first gone online in December 2019 – from appearing in the February 2022 issue of the journal, without any indication it had been retracted, as Universidad Autónoma de Madrid professor Carlos Balsalobre noticed yesterday:
Balsalobre suggests that paying reviewers would have prevented this bizarre tale. Paying reviewers may have a lot of arguments for it, but in this case the problem seems to be that the publisher – Wolters Kluwer – was asleep at the switch.
That’s what we concluded from an exchange with the journal’s editor in chief, Nicholas Ratamess – whom, we should note, responded quickly to our inquiries in the middle of the Super Bowl, an event that we imagine might draw the attention of someone who studies exercise and sport.
Ratamess was just as confused as we and Balsalobre were:
This manuscript has been retracted. Below is the PubMed link showing the retraction. I am not sure why it is not listed on our web page but I will immediately contact our publisher to put up the retraction notice..
We pointed out that the second paper is indeed marked retracted, but doesn’t have a link to the retraction notice. Ratamess said he would have that fixed, too.
Retraction Watch readers may recall that a now-retracted 2013 article in the JSCR was at the center of a lawsuit filed by Crossfit against the NCSA. That suit was settled last year. The editor in chief at the time the 2013 article was published stepped down in 2017 after 30 years at the helm, at which point Ratamess took over.
This is hardly the first time that a publisher flubbed the record of a retraction. In 2018, librarians at the University of Minnesota showed that in the mental health literature, “Of the 812 records for retracted publications, 40.0% (n=325) did not indicate that the paper had been retracted.” And just last week, we reported that Elsevier had marked more than 100 papers “withdrawn” instead of “retracted,” leading PubMed entries to be inaccurate and missing large “retracted article” banners.
Still, we can’t immediately recall a case in which a publisher retracted a paper that had been published ahead of print and then published it in an issue without marking it as retracted.
Of course, if you want to know whether a paper has been retracted, you can always use our database, which includes far more retractions than any other platform and powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero.
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