Search Results for: cyril byrne

Hindawi reveals process for retracting more than 8,000 paper mill articles

Over the past year, amid announcements of thousands of retractions, journal closures and a major index delisting several titles, executives at the troubled publisher Hindawi have at various times mentioned a “new retraction process” for investigating and pulling papers “at scale.”  The publisher has declined to provide details – until now.  So far in 2023, … Continue reading Hindawi reveals process for retracting more than 8,000 paper mill articles

What happened when a group of sleuths flagged more than 30 papers with errors?

Retraction Watch readers may recall the name Jennifer Byrne, whose work as a scientific sleuth we first wrote about four years ago, and have followed ever since. In a new paper in Scientometrics, Byrne, of New South Wales Health Pathology and the University of Sydney, working along with researchers including Cyril Labbé, known for his work … Continue reading What happened when a group of sleuths flagged more than 30 papers with errors?

Semi-automated fact-checking for scientific papers? Here’s one method.

Wouldn’t it be terrific if manuscripts and published papers could be checked automatically for errors? That was the premise behind an algorithmic approach we wrote about last week, and today we bring you a Q&A with Jennifer Byrne, the last author of a new paper in PLOS ONE that describes another approach, this one designed to … Continue reading Semi-automated fact-checking for scientific papers? Here’s one method.

Meet the scientific sleuths: More than two dozen who’ve had an impact on the scientific literature

Over the years, we have written about a number of the sleuths who, on their own time and often at great risks to their careers or finances, have looked for issues in the scientific literature. Here’s a sampling:

Project to “fact check” genetic studies leads to three more retractions. And it’s just getting started.

A project to identify studies doomed by problematic reagents has triggered three more retractions, bringing the total to five. Jennifer Byrne, a scientist at the University of Sydney, who developed the the idea of double-checking the nucleic acid sequences of research materials — thereby ensuring studies were testing the gene in question — told Retraction … Continue reading Project to “fact check” genetic studies leads to three more retractions. And it’s just getting started.

What turned a cancer researcher into a literature watchdog?

Sometime in the middle of 2015, Jennifer Byrne, professor of molecular oncology at the University of Sydney, began her journey from cancer researcher to a scientific literature sleuth, seeking out potentially problematic papers. The first step was when she noticed several papers that contained a mistake in a DNA construct which, she believed, meant the … Continue reading What turned a cancer researcher into a literature watchdog?