An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction.
As we reported in August, the editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later.
The following papers have now been retracted:
Continue reading Plagiarizing papers retracted from engineering journal after Retraction Watch report
In June of last year, Salvador Pineda received an email from a researcher at Zhejiang University in China informing him one of his articles had been plagiarized.
The researcher pointed Pineda to a paper, “A robust optimization method for optimizing day-ahead operation of the electric vehicles aggregator,” which appeared in Elsevier’s International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in November 2021. The article, by researchers at the University of Lahore, Pakistan, contained several figures copied from Pineda’s 2020 paper “An efficient robust approach to the day-ahead operation of an aggregator of electric vehicles,” as well as similar text.
Pineda, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Málaga in Spain, immediately wrote to the journal’s editor-in-chief, who said he’d retract the article, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.
Yet the article remains intact, more than a year later, with the publisher blaming the delay on staffing changes at the journal.
Continue reading A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.
A physiology journal has retracted two papers after an institutional investigation found a heart researcher falsified data and figures in the articles.
A committee at the Ohio State University found Govindasamy Ilangovan, an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the school, falsified figures and reused data, according to the retraction notices published in Heart and Circulatory Physiology, a journal of the American Physiological Society.
The two papers, “Heat shock protects cardiac cells from doxorubicin-induced toxicity by activating p38 MAPK and phosphorylation of small heat shock protein 27,” and “HSP27 regulates p53 transcriptional activity in doxorubicin-treated fibroblasts and cardiac H9c2 cells: p21 upregulation and G2/M phase cell cycle arrest,” first appeared nearly 20 years ago. They have received 132 citations in total, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The notices detail how Ilangovan repurposed and relabelled Western blots from both published and unpublished works. One of the figures also was “inaccurate” due to “addition of false bands” in a Western blot, but the notice did not explicitly attribute the problems with the figure to Ilangovan.
Continue reading Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation
When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work.
“It’s so blatant,” Payne, an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, posted on X.
Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere.
“I had imagined they would just keep submitting it to new journals until it got accepted, because it was so brazenly plagiarized that they clearly didn’t care,” Payne told Retraction Watch.
Months later, Payne’s worry was justified. The paper, by researchers at First Moscow State Medical University, in Russia, appeared in Wiley’s Proteomics in May.
Continue reading A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.
A team of physicists has retracted a paper from Science after they discovered mistakes in their data and statistical analysis when following up on their work.
The paper “A room-temperature single-photon source based on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms” published in 2018, garnered 117 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Of these, 97 citations came after the authors corrected the paper in 2020 to adjust for updated calibrations, which they said did not affect the conclusions of the article.
This correction was unrelated to the reasons for retraction, said corresponding author Tilman Pfau, a professor of physics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.
Continue reading Authors retract quantum physics paper from Science after finding mistakes
On a Friday in July, Laura Schaefer Googled herself to find her ORCID researcher ID for a paper submission.
To her surprise, a paper popped up with her name in a journal she’d never published in. Her surprise quickly turned to concern – had someone copied one of her articles?
As she searched the site where the work appeared, she found more articles with her name, covering subjects she had never written about and with co-authors she didn’t know.
“[I] became angrier the more I found, and also started feeling really violated that someone had used my name and title to put forward something that wasn’t scientifically rigorous,” Schaefer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, said.
Continue reading ‘Violated’: Engineering professor found her name on four papers she didn’t write
In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief.
Eleven years later, one of the bunch, “Inflammatory Bowel Disease as a Risk Factor for Colorectal Cancer,” has been retracted.
The decision took “a ridiculously long time,” Bik said. “Perhaps they forgot to act, perhaps they lost my email, perhaps they thought it was too much trouble to check, or perhaps they were not sure what to do back in 2013, when I contacted them.”
Continue reading Cancer paper retracted 11 years after reported plagiarism
A group of researchers in Iran now have had more than 60 papers retracted for concerns about peer review and plagiarism as a publisher investigates its back catalog. One of the researchers, A. Salar Elahi, now ranks 7th on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.
Previously, Elsevier said they would retract 26 papers from the research group at Islamic Azad University in Tehran for fake reviews in 2017 and 2018. The latest batch of 33 retracted papers originally appeared in Springer Nature’s Journal of Fusion Energy as far back as 2009.
Tim Kersjes, head of research integrity at Springer Nature told us in addition to investigating specific concerns as they arise, his unit also is running “ongoing deep-dive investigations to assess published content that has connections with content that has already been retracted for integrity concerns by ourselves or other publishers.” The recent retractions came from such an investigation that is ongoing, he said.
Continue reading Authors up past 60 retractions amid ongoing investigation
A political scientist in Canada copied his postdoc’s work without credit in a paper, according to the retraction notice and a university inquiry report.
The paper by Charles Conteh, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, appeared in Sage’s Outlook on Agriculture in October 2023. It has one citation, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
An inquiry by Brock identified plagiarism and uncredited authorship in the article, according to the report finalized this March and seen by Retraction Watch. Failure to give post-doctoral fellows the “opportunity to publish in peer-reviewed journals negatively impacts [them] both reputationally and financially,” the report states.
Continue reading Exclusive: Prof plagiarized postdoc’s work in now-retracted paper, university found
In an episode reminiscent of the AI-generated graphic of a rat with a giant penis, another paper with an anatomically incorrect image has been retracted after it attracted attention on social media. The authors admit using ChatGPT to make the diagram.
According to the retraction notice published July 12, the article, by researchers at Guangdong Provincial Hydroelectric Hospital in Guangzhou, China, was retracted after “concerns were raised over the integrity of the data and an inaccurate figure.”
The paper, published in Lippincott’s Medicine, purported to describe a randomized controlled trial that found alkaline water could reduce pain and alleviate symptoms of chronic gouty arthritis.
Continue reading Giant rat penis redux: AI-generated diagram, errors lead to retraction