Ellie Kincaid

Sage retracting three dozen articles for ‘compromised’ peer review

Sage Publishing is retracting 37 articles from an engineering journal after finding “indicators of third party involvement” in the peer review process.

The publisher’s investigation continues, and more papers may be retracted, a spokesperson for the company told Retraction Watch.

A single retraction notice lists the links of the 37 papers to be retracted from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering. The notice states:

Journal editors resign, strike in dispute with Wiley over ‘business model that maximises profit’

The editor in chief of a Wiley journal has resigned, saying the publisher recently has “seemed to emphasize cost-cutting and margins over good editorial practice.”

Most of the journal’s associate editors are in the midst of a work stoppage protesting the same issues. After Wiley responded to the associate editors in a way they found “troubling,” the editors replied with a list of 12 demands, and a deputy editor in chief tendered her resignation.

Editorial boards of at least three other journals have recently resigned en masse, or threatened to resign, amid similar disputes.

Michael Dawson, editor in chief of the Journal of Biogeography, published a blog post announcing his resignation on June 21. In it, he wrote:

Journal asks scientist to step down from editorial board after sleuth’s comments linked him to paper mill

An engineering researcher has stepped down from an editorial board at the request of a journal’s leadership following a sleuth’s comment on a Retraction Watch post linking him to paper mill activity.

Masoud Afrand, an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran, was, until recently, on the editorial board of the journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements. He also was listed on the website of Scientific Reports as a member of the journal’s editorial board in the subject of mechanical engineering.

He now has neither position. He has not responded to our requests for comment.

Journal to retract papers that cost its impact factor and spot in leading index

A journal that didn’t get an impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified unusual citations in several articles will retract the offending papers, according to its editor.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports due to citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations, also known as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.”

Specifically, Clarivate identified five papers published in Genetika in 2021 that had been cited by 22 papers published in the journal Bioscience Research in 2022, Snezana Mladenovic Drinic, the editor of Genetika, told Retraction Watch. Clarivate also suppressed Bioscience Research this year, meaning that the journal did not receive a new impact factor either.

University finds former lecturer with two retractions plagiarized in seven publications

A former lecturer in the modern languages department of the University of St Andrews in Scotland committed plagiarism in seven papers published between 2014 and 2022, according to the results of an institutional investigation.

The university posted a statement on its website about the outcome of the investigation that did not name the researcher, who Retraction Watch has learned is Ros Holmes.

Holmes has two retractions in our database, both for plagiarism.

Editorial board member dropped from journal site after Retraction Watch-Undark report links him to paper mill

The journal Scientific Reports removed a scientist linked to paper mill activity from its editorial board last year, but didn’t take his name off the web page until last month, after a Retraction Watch-Undark story pointed out his association.

The former editorial board member, Masoud Afrand, is an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran.

In our story, Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan, cited Afrand as an example of researchers seemingly associated with paper mills who manage to get editorial positions at reputable journals. Afrand, he said:

Editors of public health journal resign over differences with publisher

The co-editors in chief and most editorial board members of the journal Critical Public Health have resigned their roles to start a new, independent journal, citing differences with their publisher, Taylor & Francis.

“While there are inevitable tensions for a critically oriented scholarly journal that is also a commodity marketed by a commercial publisher, over the last year or so it has become increasingly difficult to hold together these two different versions of the journal,” co-editors Judith Green of the University of Exeter in the UK and Lindsay McLaren of the University of Calgary in Canada said in a press release announcing the mass resignation.

“It is simply a relationship that hasn’t worked out and we need to find other ways to continue the spirit of the community,” McLaren told us.

Scientist sues publisher to block expression of concern

A gastroenterology researcher has sued a scientific journal to stop it from publishing an expression of concern for one of her papers.

Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., is the middle author of “Cyclooxygenase pathway mediates the inhibition of Na-glutamine co-transporter B0AT1 in rabbit villus cells during chronic intestinal inflammation,” published in PLOS ONE in September 2018. The article has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

We previously reported that the corresponding author of the paper, Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Edwards School and chair of its department of clinical and translational science, told us he had contacted PLOS to request a correction to the article.

Science paper marked with expression of concern after readers pointed out data issue

A paper published in Science two years ago has been flagged with an expression of concern while the editors give the authors a chance to correct a data issue identified by two different readers.

“Light-induced mobile factors from shoots regulate rhizobium-triggered soybean root nodulation,” was published in September 2021 and has been cited 43 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notice, published today, states:

“Truly devastating”: Four journals won’t get new Impact Factors this year because of citation shenanigans

Clarivate, the company that assigns journals Impact Factors, this year will not give four journals updated versions of the controversial metric used by many institutions and publications as a shorthand for quality.

The journals will remain indexed in Web of Science, but won’t have an Impact Factor for this year in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports.

According to Clarivate, Marketing Theory, a SAGE title, has been suppressed for self-citation. Three other journals have been suppressed for citation stacking, sometimes referred to as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.” The other journals are as follows:

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