Frederik Joelving

Exclusive: Cancer researchers in Iran under investigation as questions swirl around dozens of studies

Year after year, a husband-and-wife team at a university in Iran has been publishing studies involving research on cell lines ostensibly purchased from the Pasteur Institute of Iran, in Tehran.

But the couple may never have been in possession of the cells. In correspondence obtained by Retraction Watch, the Pasteur Institute told their employer, Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, only three of the many cell lines described in their publications had been available at the national cell bank over the past decade.

A university official confirmed the two researchers – Fraidoon Kavoosi, an associate professor in the department of anatomical science, and his wife Masumeh Sanaei, an assistant professor in the same department – were under investigation.

Pain researcher in Italy up to seven retractions

A physiatrist in Italy has lost four publications this year after two groups of researchers raised concerns about his research.

The physician, Marco Monticone, a professor at the University of Cagliari, had three papers pulled in 2022, as we reported at the time. Those retractions followed a critique by Cochrane researchers who analyzed data in 10 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) headed by Monticone.

Neil O’Connell, of Brunel University of London, lead author of the critique, told us:

Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold

Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles.

Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications worldwide and can make or break a journal.

WoS is “making a big call here, taking aim at two of the mega-journals that have grown massively in recent years,” said Nick Wise, a scientific sleuth and a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “WoS appears to be one of the only organisations with the power to compel big publishers to act. I don’t think that’s a sign of a healthy academic publishing system, but it’s how things are currently.”

Exclusive: Editorial board member quits over journal’s handling of plagiarized paper

An architecture journal’s “failure to act in a timely and proactive manner” in a case of plagiarism in a now-retracted review article has sparked the resignation of a member of its editorial board, Retraction Watch has learned.

“I am appalled that it took, essentially, from November 2022 until now, September 2024, to resolve what was a fairly straightforward matter,” Dirk H. R. Spennemann, of Charles Sturt University in Albury, Australia, wrote in a Sept. 18, 2024, email to the editor-in-chief of Buildings, an MDPI title.

The offending paper, “A Review on Building Design as a Biomedical System for Preventing COVID-19 Pandemic,” was published in April 2022 in a special issue Spennemann had edited.

But in June of that year, Marco Spada, a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Suffolk in the United Kingdom, informed Buildings the work borrowed heavily from two previous publications without proper citation. Although many sentences had been reworded using synonyms, the plagiarism was extensive and obvious.

Spada had recognized the article, a version of which he had previously reviewed – and rejected – as a referee for Sustainability, a different MDPI journal. Elements such as the title, the order in which the authors appeared and some of the abstract had changed, Spada told us. But it was still the same paper.

“Clearly they managed to outsmart the system,” Spada said.

Swiss medical association accused of forcing publishing subsidiary into insolvency

A Swiss medical publisher has ceased operations, including shuttering nationally prominent journals, after its parent organization, the Swiss Medical Association FMH, allegedly forced it into bankruptcy.

According to information on the website of EMH Swiss Medical Publishers, the Swiss Medical Association FMH holds a 55% stake in the firm. But on Aug. 22, 2024, the FMH’s board terminated its collaboration with the publishing house, including licensing for the association’s journal Schweizerische Ärztezeitung (Swiss Medical Journal), with immediate effect.

“In doing so, [the association] deprived its own company of its livelihood. EMH filed its balance sheet today and thus opened bankruptcy proceedings,” the publisher said in a notice posted on its website on September 4, 2024.

Exclusive: Editor resigns after he says publisher blocked criticism of decision to retract paper on gender dysphoria

A Springer Nature journal has rescinded the acceptance of a paper criticizing the publishing giant’s controversial retraction last year of an article that surveyed parents of children with gender dysphoria, leading an associate editor to resign, Retraction Watch has learned.

According to emails we obtained, the blocked paper was slated to appear as a commentary in a special issue of Springer Nature’s Current Psychology that aimed “to stimulate discussion of all aspects of the ‘unpublication’ of scientific articles.”

“This is the only time I’ve had an accepted paper overruled in 4 years” as an associate editor at this journal, Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University in Florida, one of two guest editors of the special issue, told us by email.

Publisher slaps 60 papers in chemistry journal with expressions of concern

An Elsevier chemistry journal has marked more than 60 papers with expressions of concern amid an investigation involving potential undisclosed conflicts of interest among editors, authorship irregularities and manipulation of peer reviews and citations.

One of the notices, published online April 11 in Chemosphere, reads, for example:

Journal pulls paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering

An Elsevier journal last week retracted a paper by two senior economists who used questionable methods to replace large chunks of missing observations in their dataset without disclosing the procedure.

The move follows a Retraction Watch story published in February that revealed the paper’s corresponding author, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University in Sweden, used Excel’s autofill function and other undisclosed operations to populate thousands of empty cells, or well over 10% of the dataset.

In a guest post on our blog, economist Gary Smith argued Heshmati and his coauthor had “no justification” for not describing what they had done. Smith also commented in an article for Mind Matters that “the solution to an absence of data is not to fabricate data.”

Less than three weeks after our report, Elsevier told us it would pull the study, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries,” which appeared last year in the Journal of Cleaner Production. On May 4, the publisher issued a retraction notice stating:

Give or take a year or two: Case reveals publishers’ vastly different retraction times

On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.”

“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.

Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:

Controversial rocket scientist in India threatens legal action after journals pull papers

A professor of aerospace engineering in India who developed a scientific theory critics call “absolute nonsense” said he is suing journal editors and publishers for pulling three papers he claims could help protect “millions of lives.”

The articles, one in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports and two in Wiley’s Global Challenges, described a highly technical concept eponymously dubbed “Sanal flow choking.” The first was retracted last summer, the other two in March.

“The retractions of our papers are unjustified,” V. R. Sanal Kumar of Amity University in New Delhi told Retraction Watch. “Our legal representatives are actively pursuing a defamation lawsuit against these editors and their illicit agents who were responsible for retracting articles crucial for safeguarding countless lives.”

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