Ellie Kincaid

Elsevier’s Scopus to continue indexing MDPI’s Sustainability after reevaluation

Scopus has completed its reevaluation of MDPI’s journal Sustainability and will continue to index the title, according to the publisher.

As Retraction Watch previously reported, Scopus, a product of Elsevier, had paused indexing articles from Sustainability at the end of October while reevaluating whether to include the journal. Removal from the index can lead to a decline in submissions because universities and funders use Scopus to create journal “whitelists.”

The reevaluation process concluded January 4, according to Stefan Tochev, CEO of MDPI.

‘We should have followed up’: Lancet journal retracts article on hearing aids and dementia after prodding

When Jure Mur, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, realized the replication of a published study he was working on as a “sanity check” wasn’t producing matching results, his first reaction was “annoyance,” he said.

He assumed the mistake was his own, and he’d have to thoroughly check his work to find it. “Only after double- and triple-checking my code did I start suspecting an error in the original paper,” Mur told Retraction Watch.

Mur emailed the authors of the article several times, but they never responded to him, he said. He next contacted the editors of The Lancet Public Health, which had published the original paper, “Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort,” in April 2023.

Exclusive: MDPI journal undergoing reevaluation at Scopus, indexing on hold

Elsevier’s Scopus database has paused indexing content from Sustainability, an MDPI journal, while it reevaluates whether to include the title, Retraction Watch has learned.

Please see an update on this post.

Other MDPI titles were reevaluated in 2023, and its mathematics journal Axioms is no longer included in Scopus’ nearly 30,000 titles. Clarivate also delisted two MDPI journals, including the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, from its Web of Science index earlier this year, meaning those journals will no longer receive impact factors.

Universities and funders use Scopus to create “whitelists” of journals in which authors are encouraged to publish, so removal from the index can influence submissions.

In 2022, Norway removed Sustainability from its list of journals that researchers get credit for publishing in, and Finland followed suit at the beginning of 2023. In the announcement of its decision, the Finnish Publication Forum wrote:

Publisher donating author fees from retracted articles to charity

What should happen to the millions of dollars publishers rake in from authors whose work is later retracted?

Guillaume Cabanac, one of the developers of the Problematic Paper Screener, has repeatedly suggested publishers donate such revenue to charity.

And now one is doing just that.

The top ten stories at Retraction Watch in 2023

Each year since 2013, we put together a roundup of the 10 most-read stories we published on the blog over the past 12 months.

This list doesn’t have some of what you might think are the biggest stories of the year—Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation and retractions, allegations of fraud against Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, and the unraveling of the claimed discovery of a room-temperature superconductor. Or more recently, allegations of plagiarism, with associated corrections, by Harvard president Claudine Gay.

When other outlets are paying a lot of attention to a retraction-related story, we think it’s a better use of our limited resources to focus on stories they’re missing. This year, that included a prominent nanoscientist who retracted a paper after PhD students found an error, the delisting of 19 Hindawi journals from a leading index, and a Yale history professor whose first book misrepresents primary sources, according to other scholars. (And if you want to help us cover even more stories in 2024, it’s not too late to make an end-of-year tax-deductible contribution!)

The following list reflects the stories that grabbed our readers’ attention the most in 2023:

What analyzing 30 years of US federal research misconduct sanctions revealed

A U.S. federal agency that oversees research misconduct investigations and issues sanctions appears to be doling out punishments fairly, according to researchers who analyzed summaries of the agency’s cases from the last three decades.

But the authors of the study also found more than 30 papers the ORI said should be retracted have yet to be.

The researchers looked for associations between the severity of penalties the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) imposed on scientists it found responsible for research misconduct and their race and ethnicity, gender, academic rank, and other qualities. The researchers published their findings in late November in Accountability in Research, as the agency is in the process of revising its key regulations,

According to the new analysis, ORI’s sanctions correlated with factors indicating the seriousness of the misconduct, such as being required to retract or correct publications, but not with demographics.

“We did not find evidence of bias,” Ferric Fang, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of the study’s authors, said.

Fang, also member of the board of directors of The Center For Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent nonprofit organization, told us:

Hindawi reveals process for retracting more than 8,000 paper mill articles

Over the past year, amid announcements of thousands of retractions, journal closures and a major index delisting several titles, executives at the troubled publisher Hindawi have at various times mentioned a “new retraction process” for investigating and pulling papers “at scale.” The publisher has declined to provide details – until now.

So far in 2023, Hindawi has retracted over 8,000 articles – more than we’ve ever seen in a single year from all publishers combined. And Hindawi is not done cleaning up from paper mills’ infiltration of its special issues, according to a new report from its parent company, Wiley.

Reckoning with Hindawi’s paper mill problem has cost Wiley, which bought the open-access publisher in 2021, an estimated $35-40 million in lost revenue in the current fiscal year, Matthew Kissner, Wiley’s interim president and CEO, said on the company’s most recent earnings call. Wiley will stop using the “Hindawi” name next year, Kissner told investors.

The publisher has issued a whitepaper, “Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing,” which explains “what happened at Hindawi” and the process the company developed to investigate and retract thousands of articles from special issues.

Former Stanford president retracts Nature paper as another gets expression of concern

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned earlier this year after an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a paper from Nature. The journal’s editorial office marked another of Tessier-Lavigne’s articles with an expression of concern.

The two Nature papers – which have together been cited more than 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – were among five the university investigation examined on which Tessier-Lavigne was the principal author. The other three have been retracted – two from Science and one from Cell. In a statement posted to his lab website July 19, Tessier-Lavigne wrote that he planned to correct the two papers in Nature.

The retracted article, “APP binds DR6 to trigger axon pruning and neuron death via distinct caspases,” appeared in 2009. It has been cited 816 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The retraction notice stated:

Journal retracts 31 papers, bans authors and reviewers after losing its impact factor

A journal that lost its impact factor and spot in a major index this year has made good on a promise to retract dozens of papers with “compromised” peer review.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified signs of citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations. Clarivate also dropped Genetika from its Web of Science index for failing to meet editorial quality criteria.

Clarivate’s actions followed a blog post by scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik about what she called the “Iranian Plant Paper Mill, which included 31 papers published in Genetika.

BMJ retracts article about effect of UK sugar tax after authors find error

The British Medical Journal has retracted an article that found UK households bought 10% less sugar in the form of soft drinks after the government started taxing the manufacturers on the sugar in their products.

The authors of the paper found an error in their analysis when following up on the work, and republished a corrected version – with less flashy results – in BMJ Open.

The original article, “Changes in soft drinks purchased by British households associated with the UK soft drinks industry levy: controlled interrupted time series analysis,” appeared in March 2021. It has been cited 84 times in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, as well as by media outlets and by policy documents for the UK government and World Health Organization.

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