An Elsevier journal on computer applications in biomedicine has retracted 13 papers — including four by a former editor-in-chief — for suspicious authorship changes and erroneous citations.
The articles were published in Computers in Biology and Medicine from 2019 to 2023. The October 15 retraction notices list suspicious changes in authorship, irrelevant citations to the work of authors and peer reviewers and self-plagiarism as reasons for retraction.
In 10 cases, the notice states, an “impartial field expert acting in the role of an independent Publishing Ethics advisor” requested the retraction.
Huiling Chen, a computer science researcher with Wenzhou University in China, who served as coeditor-in-chief of Computers in Biology and Medicine from 2021 to 2024, was an author on four of the now-retracted papers. One, on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease imaging published in the journal in 2021, has been cited 107 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. A PubPeer commenter called the citations in the paper “puzzling.”
“One need not go all the way to the end of the paper to find vapid sentences providing an excuse for a string of unrelated, transactional citations,” frequent PubPeer commenter Hoya camphorifolia wrote in October 2024.
“I do not dispute that citation and authorship concerns can be serious and require an appropriate response,” Chen told Retraction Watch. But Chen said he took issue with “the basis and proportionality of retraction in these cases.”
He told us the citations were added during manuscript revision “when we expanded the introduction, related-work discussion, methodological background, and possible research direction,” and said peer reviewers had asked for more context in the papers. The request “does not relieve the authors of responsibility for deciding which references were necessary and accurately placed,” he said. “In retrospect, the reference lists became overexpanded, and some citations were weakly relevant, redundant, or unnecessary.”
During the editorial process, five authors were added to, and one removed from, an August 2021 article about lupus on which Chen was a coauthor. He said the changes were explained in revision cover letters, but the authors never sought explicit approval from the journal. “Providing an explanation is not the same as obtaining approval, and I recognize that distinction,” he said.
Ali Asghar Heidari and Hamza Turabieh were coauthors on all four of Chen’s retracted papers, tying for the most retractions from the batch. Majdi Mafarja of Birzeit University in Palestine was author on three of the papers. Emails to Heidari’s email addresses affiliated with the University of Tehran and the National University of Singapore bounced back, and he did not respond to an email sent to another email address associated with him. Neither Mafarja nor Turabieh, a data science researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia, responded to our requests for comment.
Turabieh has lost six other papers, according to the Retraction Watch Database.
Chen was named in the notice of a fifth article, in which he handled the review of the manuscript “despite an extensive record of collaboration, including co-publication, with one of the paper authors,” the notice states.
In September, Science of the Total Environment, another Elsevier title, retracted over 100 papers, many for editorial conflicts of interest.
Elsevier’s guidance on duties for editors states editors “must not be involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues.” The page doesn’t define “colleague,” but its guidance for reviewers gives an example of a conflict of interest as “collaborations between the reviewer and author(s) in the previous three years.”
Three of the retraction notices in Computers in Biology and Medicine state the investigation found “the authors were requested by two of the reviewers to insert irrelevant references during the peer-review process.”
A representative from Elsevier declined to comment on the matter, including whether the journal banned peer reviewers or made any changes to the editorial process.
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