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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
A cancer researcher who was terminated from one postdoc position and resigned another faked data in multiple papers and grant applications, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
ORI found that Yiorgos (Georgios) I. Laliotis “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally and knowingly falsifying and/or fabricating data, methods, results, and conclusions” in three published papers and two applications for grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The findings were based on Laliotis’ own admissions as well as reports from The Ohio State University and Johns Hopkins University.
As we’ve previously reported, Ohio State terminated Laliotis from his postdoc position in November of 2021, and he apparently resigned from another postdoc position at Johns Hopkins University that same month. Whether both universities employed him at the same time is unclear.
Laliotis has also been charged in Franklin County, Ohio – home to Ohio State – with forgery, identity theft, and telecommunications fraud in connection with allegations he created a fake email address in the name of Philip Tsichlis, his PI at Ohio State, and used it to send letters of recommendation purportedly from Tsichlis to prospective employers. Laliotis has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
After reading an economics paper that claimed to document an increase in the rate of rape in European countries following the passage of prostitution bans, a data scientist had questions.
The scientist, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent a detailed email to an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, which had published the paper last November, outlining concerns about the data and methods the authors used.
Among them: the historical rates of rape recorded in the paper did not match the values in the official sources the authors said they used. In other cases, data that were available from the official sources were missing in the paper, the researchers didn’t incorporate all the data they had collected into their model, and a variable was coded inconsistently, the data scientist wrote. (We’ve made the full critique available here.)
Given the consequences the conclusions of the article could have for people in the sex industry, the data scientist wrote, “I hope that someone takes this very seriously and looks into it the [sic] validity of the analysis and the data they used.”
Earlier this year, a financial advisor published a paper purporting to find that his colleagues who had pursued accreditation as “Certified Financial Planners” (CFPs) were more likely to engage in misconduct.
What the paper didn’t mention: That he had sued the CFP Board, the organization that offered that certification, and given up his own CFP marks “over a dispute regarding the integrity of the CFP Board’s disciplinary process,” according to a correction to the article published in April.
“The editors have determined its disclosure would not have impacted the peer review process, but it has since been added to the article for the benefit of readers,” the notice stated.
One of the first studies of long COVID has been retracted and replaced seven months after editors marked it with an expression of concern citing “data errors.”
The original paper, “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study,” was published in The Lancet in January 2021. It was “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19, according to an editorial published simultaneously, and has been cited more than 2,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The World Health Organization, for example, cited it in several documents.
Last November, the article received an expression of concern stating that a researcher had contacted the journal about inconsistencies between that study and a paper published in August 2021, also in The Lancet, describing the same cohort of patients after one year of follow up.
