Dalmeet Singh Chawla

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The screener flagged this particular paper — which has since been retracted — for containing so-called tortured phrases, strange twists on established terms that were probably introduced by translation software or humans looking to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

Chemist in India loses seven papers, blames outsourcing of images

A chemistry researcher in India has had seven of his papers retracted after the publisher concluded that some images in the papers showed “unexpected similarities” or had been duplicated.

The retraction notices, issued in late March by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in the U.K., all state that:

The authors informed the Editor that the characterization of the original samples was outsourced, and they do not have the original raw data for the published results.

Given the significance of the concerns about the validity of the data, and the lack of raw data, the findings presented in this paper are not reliable.

The corresponding author, Dhanaraj Gopi of Periyar University in Tamil Nadu, had several papers flagged on PubPeer starting in 2019, including some that have not been retracted.

Earthquake destroyed data, claims Japanese prof found to have faked results

A professor of cell biology in Japan faked data in an influential cancer study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2019, according to an investigation by Okayama University.

The school, which released a report with its findings last month (in Japanese), found no fewer than 113 instances of fabrication as well as problems with several images in the paper, titled “Genetic manipulation of autonomic nerve fiber innervation and activity and its effect on breast cancer progression.”

The report identified Okayama’s Atsunori Kamiya as being involved in the misconduct and recommended retracting the article, which has been cited 134 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The paper has yet to be retracted, but an editor from the journal said they are looking into the case.

Five years after saying it won’t retract Macchiarini paper, journal does so

In 2018, the journal Respiration was adamant that it wouldn’t retract a 2015 paper co-authored by once-respected transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. Now, the editors at Respiration seem to have changed their mind.

Macchiarini is most well known for his controversial artificial windpipe implants. Seven out of the eight patients who had artificial windpipes implanted from Macchiarini suffered complications after the surgery.

Five years ago, the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden found that Macchiarini and three co-authors of his were guilty of misconduct in the 2015 study, and recommended that it should be pulled.

Thomas Nold, then the editor-in-chief of Respiration, previously told Retraction Watch, however, that the journal decided against retraction:

Exclusive: Australia space scientist made up data, probe finds

A space scientist formerly based at the University of Sydney made up data in an unpublished manuscript, an investigation by the institution has found.

The researcher, Joachim Schmidt, “utilised Adobe Photoshop to make up results,” according to a letter dated Feb. 15, 2023, from Emma Johnston, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of Sydney, to scientists at the University of Michigan who reported complaints in late 2019 about work by Schmidt and his former professor Iver Cairns to the Australian institution.

“Given the above, the Panel found there had been breaches of the Research Code on the part of Dr Schmidt. The breaches were viewed as serious, and the Panel considered them to be sufficiently serious to warrant a finding of research misconduct as defined in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research,” the letter, obtained by Retraction Watch, stated.

How critics say a computer scientist in Spain artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics

Want a higher h-index? Here’s a way – but be warned, it’s a method that will raise some eyebrows.

Take the example of Juan Manuel Corchado, a computer scientist at the University of Salamanca in Spain. He has the 145th-highest h-index in the country. But many of the nearly 39,000 citations are by him to his own work.

This conference abstract, about the Internet of things and blockchain for smart cities, for instance, cites 44 references to Corchado’s own papers out of a total of 322 references. While this conference abstract, presented to a conference about artificial intelligence in educational technology in Wuhan, China, in July 2021, contains the exact same references as the one about blockchain for smart cities.

Other examples of short conference abstracts by Corchado listing dozens of citations to his own previous papers also exist.

Researchers sound alarm on ‘predatory’ rankings

Hey, researchers and universities, want to be included in a new ranking scheme? No problem, just pony up some cash.

Tanvir Ahmed, a postdoc at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says this year has seen a rise in news stories— for example from Bangladesh, Kashmir, and Nigeria — reporting so-called predatory rankings. These come to light due to the lack of knowledge about rankings at universities and the media in certain countries, he says.

Ahmed is referring to AD Scientific Index, which charges $30 USD for an individual researcher to be included in the ranking and an unspecified sum for institutions wishing to be ranked.

How one US organization hopes to make retractions more visible

As Retraction Watch readers likely know, there’s ample evidence that retracted papers — 2,500 per year and growing — continue to attract citations that do not mention the fact the paper has been retracted. Some of that may be because it’s not clear on publishers’ sites and databases that these papers have been retracted or flagged. (That is one of the main reasons we created our database, which now contains more than 30,000 retractions.)

The U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) project would like to make things better. We spoke to Todd Carpenter, NISO’s executive director in Baltimore, Maryland, about the new project, which aims to address the lack of visibility of notices added to published papers.

Retraction Watch (RW): You recently launched the ‘Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern’ project. Why did you do this, and what do you hope to achieve?

Should journals retract when an author is sent to prison for a crime unrelated to their work?

Should a journal retract a paper when they learn that one of its authors has earned a year-long prison sentence for downloading child pornography?

For Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics the answer was no. And experts in publication ethics say that was the right call.

The researcher in question is Jan Joosten, who held the prestigious Regius professorship of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, was convicted of downloading 28,000 child abuse images and videos and placed on the register for sex offenders in France, according to the Guardian.

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