Eighteen months after the editor in chief of a Springer Nature journal received allegations of plagiarism – and more than a year after the editor apparently decided to retract it – the article remains intact and the journal’s investigation has not yet concluded.
The paper, “Robotic Standard Development Life Cycle in Action,” was published in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems in November 2019. It has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate Analytics, five of those since the journal received the allegations.
A rheumatologist was suspended from a professional society and his license to practice medicine was threatened after he raised concerns about data manipulation in a published study for which he recruited patients, according to documents seen by Retraction Watch.
Fayad alleged that the researchers tested patient samples multiple times and used a mix of old and new values in their analysis. After he reported his concerns to the journal and then the university, which both concluded that they could not confirm or refute his allegations, he has faced apparent retaliation, including the suspension of his membership in the Lebanese Society of Rheumatology.
In comments to Retraction Watch, the corresponding author for the study noted that the two investigations did not find data manipulation, and said the issue was “based on a background of personal and professional conflicts.”
In March, an editor at PLOS ONE noticed something odd among a stack of agriculture manuscripts he was handling. One author had submitted at least 40 manuscripts over a 10-month period, much more than expected from any one person.
The editor told the ethics team at the journal about the anomaly, and they started an investigation. Looking at the author lists and academic editors who managed peer review for the papers, the team found that some names kept popping up repeatedly.
Within a month, the initial list of 50 papers under investigation expanded to more than 300 submissions received since 2020 – about 100 of them already published – with concerns about improper authorship and conflicts of interest that compromised peer review.
A chemistry database of crystal structures has marked nearly 1000 entries with expressions of concern after finding they were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill.
The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) added notes to 992 structures in its database, according to a notice posted to its website in May. And a crystallography researcher tells us the impact on the field could be significant.
This week, Nature reported on two institutional reports that found scientists in Carlo Croce’s cancer research lab at The Ohio State University had committed research misconduct including plagiarism and data falsification.
Another institutional investigation directed at Croce did not find he committed research misconduct but did identify problems with how he managed his lab, according to Nature.
A civil engineering researcher will soon have 12 retractions to his name after a data sleuth notified journals of issues with image reuse in the papers.
Jorge de Brito, a professor at the University of Lisbon, has lost four papers in Construction and Building Materials, two in the Journal of Building Engineering, of which he had been editor-in-chief, and another in Engineering Structures since we reported in March on retractions for a pair of researchers in Iran with whom de Brito had coauthored papers.
Kyoto University is recommending retraction for five papers by a former botany researcher there after an institutional inquiry turned up evidence of fraud.
The investigation of Lianwei Peng, who left the school in May 2011, found 11 images had been manipulated in the papers, according to a press release. The corresponding author on all five papers, Toshiharu Shikanai, may face disciplinary action, the university’s statement said.
Shikanai’s faculty page at Kyoto University, shown here in an archived snapshot from November 2020, now bears a message that “the requested page cannot be found.”
A journal has retracted 30 papers that “could be linked to a criminal paper mill.” The move comes six and a half months after Retraction Watch published an investigation into the operation.
The investigation, by Brian Perron of the University of Michigan, high school student Oliver Hiltz-Perron, and Bryan Victor of Wayne State University, identified nearly 200 published papers with apparent links to a Russian company named International Publisher. Many of those articles were published in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, or iJET, and the researchers notified the journal of their findings.
In an announcement about the retractions and each retraction notice, iJET editors specifically cite the investigation and Perron’s communications.
The Lancet has overtaken the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, according to Clarivate’s 2022 update to its Journal Citation Reports. And the jump wasn’t subtle: The Lancet’s impact factor – a controversial measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited on average – more than doubled from last year.
Lancet can thank the COVID-19 pandemic for its surge.
In separate news, Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation, and warned a half dozen others.
As we’ve written in posts on previous years’ reports:
A postdoc at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine who the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found engaged in research misconduct while a postdoc at another institution has been awarded an NIH grant just months after being sanctioned.
The postdoc, Shuo Chen, didn’t admit or deny the ORI’s findings, but agreed to one year of supervision for any research funded by the U.S. Public Health Service, which includes the NIH, as we’ve previously reported.
That year began on Feb. 28, 2022, and less than four months later Chen was awarded a coveted and competitive K99 “pathway to independence” grant for “Elucidating circuit mechanisms of brain rhythms in the aging brain” on June 15, according to NIH RePORTER. The $135,945 grant is from the National Institute on Aging.
Chen is listed as a postdoc on the lab website of NYU School of Medicine neuroscientist Zhe Sage Chen (no relation), and also appears in a 2021 photo of members of György Buzsáki’s NYU lab. The grant abstract mentions training in the labs of Zhe Sage Chen, Buzsáki, and Thomas Wisniewski, director of NYU Langone’s Pearl I. Barlow Center for Memory Evaluation and Treatment and its Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
We emailed Shuo Chen for comment but have not heard back. NYU Langone Health media relations sent us this statement after we reached out to Zhe Sage Chen for comment:
