Adam Marcus

Springer Nature geosciences journal retracts 44 articles filled with gibberish

Springer Nature has retracted 44 papers from a journal in the Middle East after determining that they were rubbish.

The articles, which showed up in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences starting earlier this year, many of which involve at least some researchers based in China, and from their titles appear to be utter gibberish — yet managed still to pass through Springer Nature’s production system without notice.

The retractions follow the flagging of more than 400 papers by the publisher for concerns about “serious research integrity” breaches in the articles. Those concerns were first surfaced by a commenter on PubPeer and by a group of researchers who have been identifying and exposing nonsense papers.

Astronomer apologizes, withdraws preprint slated for PNAS about impact in the field after criticism

A prominent astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin has withdrawn a preprint and a published paper after critics accused him of perpetuating inequality in the field, saying he is more sorry “than words can say” about the matter and that he is taking a hiatus from his work to allow the controversy to subside. He is also putting publication of a book he wrote on the subject on hold.

At the heart of the controversy was an article by John Kormendy, a specialist in black holes, titled “Metrics of research impact in astronomy: Predicting later impact from metrics measured 10-15 years after the PhD.”

Kormendy published the work last week as a preprint on arXiv before it appeared in PNAS but after he’d received word from the journal that it had been accepted.

According to a summary of the article:

Ivermectin-COVID-19 study retracted; authors blame file mixup

The authors of a study purportedly showing that ivermectin could treat patients with SARS-CoV-2 have retracted their paper after acknowledging that their data were garbled.

The paper, “Effects of a Single Dose of Ivermectin on Viral and Clinical Outcomes in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infected Subjects: A Pilot Clinical Trial in Lebanon,” appeared in the journal Viruses in May. According to the abstract:

Paper on how trans youth come of age is retracted following ethics board investigation

A journal devoted to LGBT issues has retracted a paper on the “process by which transgender youth come of age” because “the reported outcomes can no longer be considered valid.”

The article, “Becoming trans adults: Trans youth, parents, and the transition to adulthood, Journal of LGBT Youth,” was written by Jonathan Jimenez, at the time a graduate student in sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

The paper, which appeared in the Journal of LGBT Youth, was his first solo article, Jimenez tweeted when the publication came online in August 2020, saying he was “unbelievably happy” to share the news.

Report by former Motherisk lab director of cocaine exposure in a child is subjected to an expression of concern

A pediatrics journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2007 paper by a group of Canadian researchers whose leader, Gideon Koren, resigned in 2015 under a cloud after concerns surfaced about the integrity of the data in hundreds of his published studies.

Koren, once a prominent pediatrician and pharmacologist at the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, ran the institution’s Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory, which conducted hair testing for perinatal exposure to drugs and alcohol. In 2015, an investigation prompted by The Toronto Star found serious problems with the tests, which had been used in “used in thousands of child protection cases and several criminal cases.”

Koren stepped down that year, and in 2019 relinquished his license to practice medicine in Ontario. Reporting by the Star prompted Koren’s institution to order a review of more than 400 of his published papers. To date, by our count, journals have retracted five of Koren’s papers, corrected four, and have now issued three expressions of concern.

The newly flagged article, “Chronic cocaine exposure in a toddler revealed by hair test,” appeared in Clinical Pediatrics in 2007. Here’s the notice:

Four years after anesthesiology society’s request, four articles remain unretracted

Three years ago, we wrote that the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists had in 2017 asked several journals to retract a total of nine papers by Yuhji Saitoh, formerly of Yachiyo Medical Center and Tokyo Women’s Medical University.

According to the society, Saitoh had committed ethics violations in 10 articles, three of which had already been retracted and seven of which remained in the wild. (Saitoh had been a frequent co-author with Yoshitaka Fujii, currently our record holder for most retractions by a single researcher — 183 — but the JSA report found that he’d committed misconduct on his own, too. He has 53 retractions, according to our count, placing him seventh on our leaderboard.)

Four of those 10 articles appeared in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia and two others were published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. (The seventh paper, in the Fukushima Journal of Medical Sciences, has since been retracted.)

When authors stop responding to requests for data, a journal retracts

In 2016 Genetic Testing and Molecular Biomarkers published a paper on osteoarthritis by a group at Linyi People’s Hospital in China. Five years later, the authors contacted the journal asking for the correction of a pair of figures — but, as the publisher, Mary Ann Liebert, explained, the new files were “not workable.”

In May 2021, the journal issued an expression of concern for the paper (which, we’ll note, unfortunately sits behind a paywall). And earlier this month, it was retracted. For the rest of the story, read the retraction notice (caution, the following text might contain trigger words for unethical researchers):

Publisher does a “thorough sweep” of alternative medicine journal after a paper is published in error

Last April, the The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine provisionally accepted a paper on the role of music therapy in palliative care settings. Unfortunately for authors, the article did not grab the guest editors of the supplementary issue to which it had been designated.

So far, so good. But a production error caused the paper to appear online — necessitating a retraction when the journal learned that the authors, understandably, had already found another home for their work.

According to the notice:

Scientist blames grad student for gibberish book chapter — a charge she calls ‘crazy’

Guillaume Cabanac

The senior author of a book chapter in the 2020 volume that Springer Nature has retracted for plagiarism has blamed a former grad student from Cuba in the affair — a charge she dismisses as “crazy.”

The chapter was retracted nearly 10 months after readers pointed out passages that had appeared to have been churned out by the fake paper generator Mathgen.

Titled “Ethnic Characterization in Amalgamated People for Airport Security Using a Repository of Images and Pigeon-Inspired Optimization (PIO) Algorithm for the Improvement of Their Results,” the material was ostensibly written by a group at Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez led by Alberto Ochoa-Zezzatti. It appeared in “Applications of Hybrid Metaheuristic Algorithms for Image Processing,” which belongs to the 982-volume (and counting) Studies in Computational Intelligence series.

Last December, commenters on PubPeer including Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé — who will be familiar to readers of this blog for their exposure of nonsensical papers with “tortured” language showing signs of plagiarism — pointed out at least one problematic passage in the chapter:

When ‘out of print’ really means ‘retracted’

Image by eberhard grossgasteiger from Pixabay

We’ve taken publishers to task for disappearing articles without providing readers an explanation for the move. Turns out, they do the same with books, too.

In September 2014, Springer Nature published “Beekeeping for Poverty Alleviation and Livelihood Security Vol 1: Technological Aspects of Beekeeping,” described as:

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