Ellie Kincaid

19 months and counting: Former Hindawi journal still hasn’t marked paper

A journal formerly published by Hindawi has yet to publish any sort of notice on a paper sleuths reported for containing duplicated images 1.5 years ago.

According to Kevin Patrick, the sleuth who contacted the publisher in mid-2023, the episode “might be a useful case study” of the issues facing Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021 and stopped using the brand name earlier this year after retracting thousands of papers and closing journals overrun by paper mills.

The article, “Resveratrol Derivative, Trans-3, 5, 4 ′-Trimethoxystilbene Sensitizes Osteosarcoma Cells to Apoptosis via ROS-Induced Caspases Activation,” appeared in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity in 2021. Clarivate removed the journal from its Web of Science index in March 2023 for failing to meet quality criteria.

In April 2023, Elisabeth Bik left a comment on PubPeer, noting “several figures in this paper look identical to figures in a 2019 paper by some of the same authors,” which had been retracted. “I could not find wording about e.g. a republication of part of that study, and the 2019 paper is not included in the references,” she wrote.

Science places expressions of concern on two articles as Toronto’s Sinai Health investigates

Science has issued expressions of concern for two articles from the lab of Daniel Durocher, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.

The notices, and two more editor’s notes on Nature articles, follow PubPeer comments on several of Durocher’s papers pointing out potentially duplicated images, as described by ForBetterScience. Durocher has responded to many of the comments promising to look into the issues.

Besides his academic positions at Toronto and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, Durocher co-founded Repare Therapeutics, a biotech company with five ongoing clinical trials of potential treatments for cancer.

The two Science articles, “Mitosis inhibits DNA double-strand break repair to guard against telomere fusions” from 2014, and “Orchestration of the DNA-damage response by the RNF8 ubiquitin ligase,” from 2007, together have been cited nearly 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Wiley medical journal retracts dozens of papers for manipulated peer review, with more to come

International Wound Journal, a Wiley title, has retracted 27 papers since June with notices mentioning “manipulated” or “compromised” peer review.

“A comprehensive investigation examining manipulated peer review in this journal is in progress,” a Wiley spokesperson told Retraction Watch. The publisher anticipates retracting more articles as the investigation continues.

The first retraction of the batch, of the November 2023 article “Analysis of the Association Between Serum Levels of 25(OH)D, Retinol Binding Protein, and Cyclooxygenase-2 and the Disease Severity in Patients with Diabetic Foot Ulcers,” appeared June 14. The notice stated Wiley and the journal’s editor in chief “concluded that the peer review process of this article was manipulated” following an investigation by the publisher.

Crossref suspends company’s membership after Retraction Watch report

Crossref, a nonprofit focused on metadata of scholarly publications, has suspended the membership of a company linked to websites which copied the appearance of journals belonging to Elsevier and Springer Nature, among others from major publishers, Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows Anna Abalkina’s reporting on Retraction Watch about the activities of Springer Global Publications, which had used its membership in Crossref to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to papers in 13 journals with similar names to those established by legitimate publishers. The DOIs linked to papers on webpages mimicking the appearance of the original journals.

Springer Global Publications did not immediately respond to our request for comment on the suspension of its Crossref membership. The company previously told us it did not “create, review, or manage the content associated with the identifiers we issue,” and did not publish any journals.

The website of the company has also been suspended by its hosting provider, and is no longer available online.

Company linked to cloned journals of major publishers denies cloning journals of major publishers

After we reported on a new scam to publish papers on webpages remarkably similar to those of Elsevier, Springer, the American Medical Association and other major publishers, the company linked to the clones denied any role in producing the content they contain.

Until we reached out for comment, the company “Springer Global Publication” – which is not affiliated with Springer Nature – had advertised a variety of services on its website, including finding a writer for research papers, editing manuscripts, developing research proposals, analyzing data and managing the peer review process, a collection of services which is a classic attribute of a paper mill. After we emailed them, they removed descriptions of these services from their website, as well as links to papers published in cloned journals, but did not respond before publication of our story.

After our story appeared, we received an email signed by “Administrator – Springergloballtd.com,” in which the company said it did not “create, review, or manage the content associated with the identifiers we issue.”

The company stated:

‘Relieved’: BMJ retracts and replaces article on unexpected weight loss as a sign of cancer

The British Medical Journal has retracted an article examining when unexpected weight loss could be a warning sign of cancer after the authors found an error in their work. The journal published an updated version of the analysis with different conclusions, which the authors think could influence patient care.

The retracted paper, “Prioritising primary care patients with unexpected weight loss for cancer investigation: diagnostic accuracy study,” appeared Aug. 13, 2020. The researchers, led by Brian D. Nicholson, a general practitioner and associate professor in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, England, used electronic health records data to look for people diagnosed with cancer within six months after a recording of unexpected weight loss.

The authors were attempting to replicate their results in another dataset when they found “some differences in the study findings and study population that we could not easily explain,” Nicholson told Retraction Watch. He continued:

Cancer specialist faked data in at least ten papers, VA and UCLA find

A multiple myeloma specialist “recklessly“ falsified data in at least 10 published articles, according to a joint investigation by the University of California, Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine and Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System.

The institutions found Alan Lichtenstein, a former staff physician at the VA, committed research misconduct by reusing images “to falsely represent the results” related to 26 pairs of experiments, according to a notice published in the Federal Register.

At least one of the sets of images in each of the pairs “is inaccurate,” the notice stated. The institutions found Lichtenstein had falsified data in “at least ten” of the 13 articles in which the images appeared, perhaps because the investigators could not determine which images, if any, were original.

Wiley corrects retraction notices for ‘inaccurate’ description of why articles were pulled

The Journal of Biochemical and Molecular Toxicology, a Wiley title, has corrected a pair of retraction notices in which “the reasons for the retraction were described inaccurately,” according to the corrections. The original notices also did not include “the authors’ disapproval of the retraction.”

The retracted articles, “The cardioprotective effects of a combination of quercetin and α-tocopherol on isoproterenol-induced myocardial infarcted rats,” and “Protective effects of caffeic acid on lactate dehydrogenase isoenzymes, electrocardiogram, adenosine triphosphatases, and hematology on isoproterenol-induced myocardial infarcted rats,” both appeared in the same journal in 2011, but in different issues. They have been cited 35 times, collectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In 2020, Elisabeth Bik posted about the papers on PubPeer, pointing out figures in the articles, which have the same corresponding author, were “unexpectedly similar” to each other. “Note that the lanes represent very different experiments,” she wrote.

Engineering publisher pulled 57 papers in a day for peer review ‘irregularities’

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers retracted 57 articles on October 1 for inadequate peer review, according to the publisher.

The papers appeared in the journal IEEE Access between July and September of 2020. The journal is open-access, with a current article processing charge of $1,995. It appears to have published more than 10,000 articles so far this year.

The notices retracting each article were identical, and stated:

eLife won’t get an impact factor, says Clarivate

Clarivate, the data company for scholarly publications, has decided to continue indexing some content from eLife in Web of Science, after reevaluating the open-access biology journal’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them. The journal will not receive an Impact Factor.

Last month, Clarivate paused indexing new content from eLife, citing a policy on “Coverage of journals/platforms in which publication is decoupled from validation by peer review.”

eLife last year adopted a new model in which it publishes every manuscript its editors send out for review, along with the text of the reviews and an editor’s assessment of the significance of the findings in the paper and the strength of the evidence presented. The editorial assessments of the paper can be “exceptional,” “compelling,” “convincing,” “solid,” “incomplete,” or “inadequate.”

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