Dalmeet Singh Chawla

Complaint from engineering software company prompts two retractions

An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used its software without a valid license.

Both retracted papers were published by Ain Shams Engineering Journal in the last couple of years by different authors based in Egypt. Both papers used FLOW-3D, software that is used to simulate the dynamics of liquids and gasses, which is developed by the firm Flow Science, Inc., in Santa Fe, N.M.

Tom Jensen, vice president of Flow Science, told Retraction Watch the firm offered the authors of both studies to legalize their version of the software by purchasing a license.

But the company didn’t receive a response, Jensen said, despite informing the researchers a retraction would be sought from the journal without a valid license. “We offer greatly reduced prices for licenses for academic institutions and we have numerous academic users around the world,” he added.

Springer Nature journal has retracted over 200 papers since September

Optical and Quantum Electronics, a Springer Nature journal, has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse.

According to the notices, which have similar wording, the retractions come after the publisher identified problems with the articles including compromised peer review, inappropriate or irrelevant references, and nonsensical phrases, suggesting blind use of AI or machine-translation software.

“These investigations are based on intelligence from past work alongside whistleblower information,” Chris Graf, director of research integrity at Springer Nature in Oxford, UK, told Retraction Watch. But Graf declined to share the specifics of the inquiry: “We need to keep details of these investigations confidential to ensure that we do not inform the efforts of individuals who may engage in unethical activities.”

1 in 7 scientific papers is fake, suggests study that author calls ‘wildly nonsystematic’

In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career.

Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said.

The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies — collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies — that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output.

‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers

Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. So he took to PubPeer, an online site where scientists often discuss papers, to raise his concerns.

An author of the study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure out the problem. A month later, when Aquarius, a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, revisited the paper, the figure had been replaced without any note that the publisher had fixed the issue.

Aquarius once again took to PubPeer to express his concerns. “I don’t see any notification when looking at the landing site for the paper: no erratum, corrigendum or a simple log-entry that something has been changed,” he wrote, noting that he had informed Elsevier, the journal’s publisher about the issue. In July, the journal issued a corrigendum for the paper.

“I was quite a bit upset about it,” Aquarius told Retraction Watch. “It takes away one of the key elements for any reader to be critical, namely that you know what has happened.”

Pakistan university’s pharmacy department chair notches two retractions

Kashif Barkat, who heads the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Lahore in Punjab, Pakistan, has had two of his studies retracted and two more corrected, all for issues related to images in the papers. Several more of his studies are flagged on PubPeer for similar reasons.

According to the retraction notice for one of the retracted articles, which appeared in Polymer Bulletin in 2020, Barkat does not agree with the journal’s decision to pull the paper.

The paper, “Understanding mechanical characteristics of pH-responsive PEG 4000-based polymeric network for colorectal carcinoma: its acute oral toxicity study,” has been cited three times so far, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction note, issued in June, reads:

Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct

One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.

The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.

Researchers found only 8,515 articles published the figure captions and the image’s metadata banners, both of which are needed to determine whether the correct microscope is listed in papers. Metadata banners usually contain important information about the experiments conducted, including the operating voltage of the microscope and the instrument’s model and parameters.

Of these papers, 2,400 (28%) listed the wrong microscope manufacturer or model, raising questions about the integrity of the conducted research.

Journal taking ‘corrective actions’ after learning author used ChatGPT to update references

An interdisciplinary journal says it will take “corrective actions” on a paper following a thorough investigation on a paper for which one author used ChatGPT to update the references.

Krithika Srinivasan, an editor of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space and a geographer at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, confirmed to Retraction Watch her journal is finalizing what actions need to be taken. After the probe concluded, Srinivasan says she submitted her recommendations to Sage, the journal’s publisher, who will take actions in line with their policy.

What’s clear from the probe, she says, is that “none of the incorrect references in this paper were ‘fabricated’ in the sense of being made up or false.” She notes that the original manuscript was submitted to the journal with the correct references but “the errors were generated when one of the other authors (without the knowledge of the submitting author) used chatGPT (instead of regular referencing software) to insert the citations and reference list.”

Norway university committee recommends probe into the country’s most productive researcher

Filippo Berto, by ONOLO – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2019, Filippo Berto was hailed as Norway’s most productive researcher, publishing a new study on average every two to three days.

Five years on, a committee appointed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where Berto, a mechanical engineer, was based until last year, is recommending that the institution carries out an in-depth investigation into his work following a complaint by Per Steineide Refseth, a librarian at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences in Rena.

Rune Nydal, a philosopher at NTNU who leads the independent research integrity committee that met May 14 partly to discuss the complaint about Berto’s work, told Retraction Watch it is recommending NTNU’s rector conduct an in-depth probe into Berto’s papers and release a public statement on the outcome.

How thousands of invisible citations sneak into papers and make for fake metrics

In 2022, Guillaume Cabanac noticed something unusual: a study had attracted more than 100 citations in a short span of less than two months of being published.

Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, initially flagged the study on PubPeer after it was highlighted by the Problematic Paper Screener, which automatically identifies research papers with certain issues.

The screener flagged this particular paper — which has since been retracted — for containing so-called tortured phrases, strange twists on established terms that were probably introduced by translation software or humans looking to circumvent plagiarism checkers.

But Cabanac noticed something weird: The study had been cited 107 times according to the ‘Altmetrics donut,’ an indicator of an article’s potential impact, yet it had been downloaded just 62 times.

Prominent nanoscientist retracts paper after PhD students flagged error

The authors of a 2018 nanoscience paper have retracted the article after three doctoral students highlighted a problem with its methods.

The 2018 study attracted media attention for suggesting that nanospears, microscopic structures similar to splinters, may be useful in delivering gene therapies.

Paul Weiss, a nanoscientist and a corresponding author of the paper, announced the retraction on Twitter April 5, the same day the retraction notice appeared. Weiss holds several academic positions, including Presidential Chair of Chemistry and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

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