Avery Orrall

Two papers coauthored by a dean retracted, with a third in question

Two papers on a novel approach for flood prediction have been retracted for “substantial overlap” between the works. The authors, including Debopam Acharya, dean of the School of Computing at DIT University in Uttarakhand, India, are contesting both retractions.

The articles, published in 2023, are “FLOODALERT: an internet of things based real-time flash flood tracking and prediction system,” which appeared in Multimedia Tools and Applications, and “An IoT-based system for monitoring and forecasting flash floods in real-time,” from Journal of Earth System Science. They have been cited seven and five times, respectively.

The articles were retracted after a concerned researcher, who also reached out to Retraction Watch, emailed each journal about problems with the papers.

As Springer Nature journal clears AI papers, one university’s retractions rise drastically

Neurosurgical Review has begun retracting scores of commentaries and letters to the editor after getting inundated by AI-generated manuscripts. At the top of the affiliations list: Saveetha University in Chennai, India, an institution that, as we reported with Science in 2023, engages in aggressive self-citation.

At publication time, Neurosurgical Review had retracted 129 papers so far this year. The journal, a Springer Nature publication, paused acceptance of letters to the editor and commentaries last fall.

In December we reported in another collaboration with Science that Neurosurgical Review paused accepting commentaries and letters to the editor last year after getting overwhelmed by submissions that appeared to be generated using large language models (LLMs).

Sage journal retracts another 400 papers

Sage has retracted 416 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), which had a mass retraction of over 450 papers last August.

Before the mass retraction last year, which we covered, Sage paused publication of new articles from the journal, which it acquired when it bought IOS Press in 2023. The journal is now accepting new submissions, according to a Sage spokesperson.

The retraction notice mentions citation and referencing “anomalies,” “incoherent, extraneous text and tortured phrases” and “unverifiable authors and reviewers,” among other signs of misconduct. “These indicators raise concerns about the authenticity of the research and the peer review process underlying the following articles. The Publisher regrets that these were not flagged during the journal’s editorial and peer review processes,” the notice reads.

Most of the researchers are from universities in India and China.

Anatomy of a retraction: When cleaning up the literature takes six years

In 2018, a biochemist in Scotland became aware of image irregularities in two of his papers through comments on PubPeer, each in a different journal. The researcher, Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee, said he alerted his home institution immediately.

In July and October 2024, the papers were retracted.

Emails obtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request show what happened in the intervening six years: Consecutive investigations by Dundee and a funder, then delays as the journals juggled conflicting narratives. In the meantime, the papers continued racking up citations.

Journal updates retraction notice to include plagiarism following Retraction Watch report

The editor-in-chief of a journal updated a retraction notice to acknowledge the data in the paper were “completely plagiarized” following allegations in a letter to the editor that were the subject of a Retraction Watch post last week.

The original retraction, requested by the authors, cited only “major errors in data.” The notice for the October 2023 paper, which is signed by the Indian Journal for Critical Care Medicine (IJCCM) editor-in-chief Atul Kulkarni, now reads:

Following scrutiny of the article further and other facts brought to the notice of the IJCCM, I have decided to change the reason for the retraction. This article is withdrawn after having been found that the data was completely plagiarized (in toto) from the work of another researcher.

Paper retracted after author told journal study was ‘not actually performed’

Nearly 20 years after the publication of a paper on phytoestrogens in postmenopausal women, one of the authors said the study had never been performed, according to a recently published retraction notice.

The retraction is the second for two of the authors. It comes after sleuth Ben Mol and his colleagues initially discovered data similarities between the recently-retracted study and another by the same group, as we reported last year.

The two papers that seem to share data appeared in Fertility and Sterility, an Elsevier publication, in 2004 and 2006.

Researcher alleges group stole thesis data presented at conference

A researcher in India has asked a journal to amend a retraction “for major errors in data” because, he says, the data weren’t wrong – they were stolen.

The October 2023 paper, “Prediction of Weaning Outcome from Mechanical Ventilation Using Ultrasound Assessment of Parasternal Intercostal Muscle Thickness,” was originally published in the Indian Journal of Critical Care Medicine (IJCCM). The journal is published by JP Medical, and is indexed in Clarviate’s Web of Science.

The undated retraction statement says the authors “wish to withdraw the article . . . due to major errors in data.” The DOI no longer links to the article, and the full text is no longer available online.

In a letter to the editor published Nov. 30, 2024 in IJCCM, researcher Sundara Kannan alleged the authors stole his data.

Weekend reads: Retraction counts by country; ‘zombie facts;’ false allegations fell president

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 450. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Who you calling ‘bignose’? Shark paper corrected after species mix-up

Bignose shark
*NWFblogs/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)*

A case of mistaken identity among sharks has led to a correction that changed, among other content, an article’s title, its abstract and the discussion section.

The paper, published in February 2024 in Environmental Biology of Fishes, was originally titled “Expanded vertical niche for two species of pelagic sharks: depth range extension for the dusky shark Carcharhinus obscurus and novel twilight zone occurrence by the silky shark Carcharhinus falciformi.”

But after re-examining the data, the authors concluded: “the dusky shark from the published paper was misidentified, and instead, it is most likely a bignose shark,” according to an October 2024 correction to the article.

Sage slaps more than 100 papers from one journal with expressions of concern

The Sage journal American Surgeon has issued a mass expression of concern for 116 articles.

The expression of concern states the journal “was made aware” of “concerning author activity” on the articles.

Sage is no stranger to mass editorial actions. In 2023, the publisher pulled large tranches of papers at least three times, and last year it retracted over 450 papers from a journal the company had acquired from IOS Press. The publisher was one of the first to begin retracting papers in bulk, primarily to combat manipulated peer review.

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