What would you do if you discovered your name in a list of experts on sex robots despite having never studied sex robots?
That was the situation for one rather panicked researcher who reached out to us in late September after discovering his name among several singled out in a review article for the “greatest number of published works” on sex robots.
Published in February in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the bibliometric analysis of the field aimed “to provide a clearer understanding of the issues surrounding sex robots,” the original article stated.
The article included a list of the 10 authors who the paper claimed published the most articles on sex robot research. Of those, seven are robotics researchers who don’t study sex robots. The remaining three are a cardiologist, a prosthodontics professor and a researcher who we could not find proof exists.
The researcher who contacted us was keen to get the paper, which he called “defamatory,” retracted. While we typically prefer to name sources, and credit any investigative work, we’re honoring his desire to distance himself from the paper and are therefore omitting his name — and the identities of the others named in the article — from our story so as not to increase the chances a search or AI tool will forever associate his name with “sex robots.”
The researcher first alerted HHSC to issues with the paper in late September, according to emails we have seen. The journal, published by Springer Nature, temporarily took the article page down on September 26.
“Given the context, access to the paper was removed as soon as we had undertaken an initial assessment,” Gino D’Oca, the chief editor of HHSC, told us. In a similar move earlier this year, Springer Nature removed a link to a book containing nonexistent references before restoring a retracted and watermarked version days later. The publisher confirmed at the time that removal from the website is part of the retraction process.
Among the issues the researcher identified were discrepancies between the dataset, which contains a list of over 1,000 papers from journals indexed in Web of Science, and the authors’ claims. For example, the authors said IEEE Transactions on Robotics had published 30 papers on sex robots. Our search of the journal yielded no results, and the researcher who contacted us said the journal appeared just once in the authors’ dataset.
The researcher who contacted us had also reached out to someone who does study sex robots, who “confirmed that the paper is fake,” he said. Both researchers, and at least five others, contacted the journal directly to request the retraction, according to a document we have seen.
The journal issued a retraction notice on October 7, stating the analysis “employed inappropriate search terms and formulas, affecting the resulting reported data on the research field, including individual authors and journals.” The text of the original article has been removed from both the website and the PDF.
D’Oca told us HHSC is looking into other work by one of the corresponding authors, Shen Liu. Liu is a psychology researcher at Anhui Agricultural University in Hefei, China, who authored another paper in the journal purporting to use the same dataset as the now-retracted article.
Neither Liu nor co-corresponding author Na Zhang, also at Anhui, responded to our multiple requests for comment via email. The authors agreed with the retraction, according to the notice.
Other issues we spotted include a network analysis of authors that includes three “brought together by their mutual focus on robot-assisted radical cystectomy,” and others who perform nephrectomies. While these bladder and kidney surgeries are robot-assisted, they are unrelated to sex robots. The review also cites at least one work that does not exist and whose only other mention is in another article by Liu.
For their analysis of journals publishing sex robot research, the authors use the term “Influential Factor (IF)” instead of “Impact Factor,” describing the term as a “paramount metric for evaluating scholarly impact.”
The paper has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
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