Ellie Kincaid

“Unapproved euthanasia” of rats in neuroscience study leads to retraction

A 2017 paper describing neuroscience research with rats has been retracted after “data mis-management,” including the mistreatment of the animals, came to light.

The retracted paper was the second by Subimal Datta, a professor of psychology and anesthesiology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to receive a flag for data problems.

The article, “BNDF heterozygosity is associated with memory deficits and alterations in cortical and hippocampal EEG power,” was published in Behavioural Brain Research and has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, published March 31, stated:

High-profile paper that used AI to identify suicide risk from brain scans retracted for flawed methods

In 2017, a paper published in Nature Human Behavior made international headlines for the authors’ claim they had developed a way to analyze brain scans using machine learning to identify youth at risk for suicide.

“It was a big, splashy finding,” said Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. But at a neuroimaging conference soon after the publication, other researchers discussed the study “in kind of a sense of disbelief,” he said.

The 91% accuracy for identifying suicidality that the researchers reported, from a sample size of just a few dozen participants, he said, “kind of went against what we as a field were starting to understand about the nature of these brain phenotype markers based off of neuroimaging data.”

After six years of scrutiny, during which Verstynen attempted to replicate the work but found a key problem, the authors of the 2017 paper have retracted the article.

Wiley and Hindawi to retract 1,200 more papers for compromised peer review

Hindawi and Wiley, its parent company, have identified approximately 1,200 articles with compromised peer review that the publishers will begin retracting this month.

Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of the research division at Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, wrote about the forthcoming retractions in a blog post at Scholarly Kitchen yesterday.

The plan to retract 1,200 articles, which the publisher expects to take a few months, follows Hindawi’s announcement last September that it would retract 511 articles across 16 journals for manipulated peer review. (We’ve tracked 501 retractions from 23 Hindawi journals since the announcement.)

Nearly 20 Hindawi journals delisted from leading index amid concerns of papermill activity

Nineteen journals from the open-access publisher Hindawi were removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science Monday when the indexer refreshed its Master Journal List.

The delistings follow a disclosure by Wiley, which bought Hindawi in 2021, that the company suspended publishing special issues for three months because of “compromised articles.” That lost the company $9 million in revenue.

Clarivate updates its Master Journal List of titles included in Web of Science on a monthly basis. It dropped more than 50 journals from its indexes in March, according to a blog post by Nandita Quaderi, editor in chief and vice president of Web of Science, for failing to meet 24 quality criteria such as adequate peer review, appropriate citations, and content that’s relevant to the stated scope of the journal.

Delisting 50 journals at once is more than usual for Clarivate, and may be the beginning of a larger culling. Quaderi wrote that the company developed an AI tool “to help us identify outlier characteristics that indicate that a journal may no longer meet our quality criteria.” The tool flagged more than 500 journals at the beginning of this year, according to her blog post, and Web of Science’s editors continue to investigate them.

When it takes two university-federal agency letters – and five years – for a journal to retract a paper

In June of 2020, officials from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center of San Francisco and the University of California, San Francisco, sent a letter to the journal Oncogene with the findings of an investigation of scientific misconduct: A paper the journal had published in 2007 contained “falsified data,” and the officials recommended the journal “assess this paper for retraction.”

The 2020 letter – which we obtained through a public records request – was the second time the institutions had alerted the journal. As the officials stated, a previous investigation had found issues in the 2007 paper, and UCSF-VA had communicated “earlier evidence that this same paper had data fabrication and/or falsification constituting research misconduct” to the journal in 2017.

“Even though the journal has been notified after the last investigation and not taken action,” the 2020 letter stated, “they should be notified again because additional research misconduct has been found.”

In fact, a journal staffer was in the midst of discussing the issues in the article with Rajivir Dahiya, the corresponding author and then director of UCSF’s Urology Research Center with an appointment at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

After a sleuth reveals a paper with authorships advertised for sale, it’s retracted

Last August 12th, Nick Wise came across a Facebook post advertising the first, third, and fifth author positions for sale on a scientific paper with the same title as a recently published article.

Wise, a scientific sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions, posted a comment on PubPeer with a screenshot of the advertisement and contacted the publisher of the journal.

Six months later, the article, “Potential application of AlP nanosheet semiconductor in the detection of toxic phosgene, thiophosgene, and formaldehyde gases,” has been retracted. It had appeared in Semiconductor Science and Technology, an IOP Publishing title, and has been cited once.

Meanwhile, the authorship broker says he has left the business.

Wiley paused Hindawi special issues amid quality problems, lost $9 million in revenue

Hindawi, the open access publisher that Wiley acquired in 2021, temporarily suspended publishing special issues because of “compromised articles,” according to a press release announcing the company’s third quarter financial results.

Brian Napack, Wiley’s president and CEO, specifically noted the “unplanned publishing pause at Hindawi” as a factor that “challenged” the company this year.

The pause began in mid-October and ended in mid-January, a Wiley spokesperson told us.

In Wiley’s third quarter that ended Jan. 31, 2023, the suspension cost Hindawi – whose business model is based on charging authors to publish – $9 million in lost revenue compared to the third quarter of 2022. The company cited the pause as the primary reason its revenue from its research segment “was down 4% as reported, or down 2% at constant currency and excluding acquisitions,” the press release stated.

Article retracted when authors don’t pay publication fee

In March 2020, a group of biologists published a paper on the website of an open access journal.

Nearly three years later, the publisher, Wiley, withdrew the article because, according to the withdrawal notice, the authors were “unable to finalize” payment of the fee to publish the version of record, known as the Article Publication Charge or APC.

The manuscript, “Eco-evolutionary factors that influence its demographic oscillations in Prochilodus costatus (Actinopterygii: Characiformes) populations evidenced through a genetic spatial–temporal evaluation,” had appeared on the site of the journal Evolutionary Applications “as an Accepted Article,” according to the notice, but the full text is no longer available online. It had not been indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science before being withdrawn on February 27.

The notice stated that the article

Journal investigating Sodom comet paper for data problems

Fig. 53 from the paper: A simulation of an airburst by physicist Mark Boslough, to which he says incorrect labels were added

A paper that caught flak for its claims that an ancient city in the Middle East was destroyed by an exploding celestial body – and the authors’ suggestion that the event could have inspired the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah – now has an editor’s note acknowledging the journal is looking into concerns about its data and conclusions.

The note follows a litany of criticism on Twitter, PubPeer, and in a “Matters Arising” response, as well as an extensive correction published last year. It appeared just days after Retraction Watch asked the publisher for an update on the case.

The article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” was published in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, in September 2021. It has been cited six times in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and Altmetric shows it has gotten more online attention than most other papers of a similar age.

Soon after the article’s publication, its claims attracted scrutiny on Twitter, as we reported at the time. Mark Boslough, a ~~retired~~ physicist at the University of New Mexico and expert in planetary impacts and airbursts (when celestial bodies explode above the earth’s surface) kicked off the criticism, and other scientists quickly joined in.

Exclusive: Prof stole former student’s identity to edit two journal special issues

A university investigation in Hong Kong found that a professor used the email account of a former student to conduct all the correspondence needed to edit special issues of two journals, Retraction Watch has learned.

The two special issues, which were published last year, are full of articles with the hallmarks of paper mills, said Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford psychologist and scientific sleuth who flagged the matter to the institution involved in the case.

Last November, Bishop emailed the president of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) with the information that Kaifa Zhao, a PhD student at the university, was listed as the lead editor for two special issues of the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, both journals published by Hindawi. The nearly 300 articles in the special issues were “mostly meaningless gobbledegook” that suggested they came from a paper mill, she wrote.

The episode is the latest of many problems involving questionable peer review of special issues – and subsequent retractions – we’ve covered.

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