Ivan Oransky

Elsevier retracts papers when it realizes one of the authors hid fact he was guest editor of issue

A researcher who guest edited an issue has lost two papers after a journal’s publisher discovered that he had changed his name on the manuscripts following submission.

The retraction notices in Computers in Industry, an Elsevier title, for “Evaluation of the green supply chain management practices: A novel neutrosophic approach” and “An integrated neutrosophic ANP and VIKOR method for achieving sustainable supplier selection: A case study in importing field” read the same way:

Weekend reads: Surgeon on trial over experiments; hydroxychloroquine-promoting doctor reprimanded; questions about concussion research

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Authors retract second Majorana paper from Nature
Dermatology journal calls for investigation into Bordeaux-INSERM work
Nanotech group up to nine retractions
Chemistry paper retracted from Science
Journal issues 55 expressions of concern at once

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 221. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Authors retract second Majorana paper from Nature

A year after retracting a Nature paper claiming to find evidence for the elusive Majorana particle that many hope would have paved the way for a quantum computer, a group of researchers have retracted a second paper on the subject from the same journal.

In the August 2017 paper “Epitaxy of advanced nanowire quantum devices,” Erik Bakkers of QuTech and Kavli Institute of NanoScience, Delft University of Technology, in The Netherlands, and colleagues claim that the work is a “substantial materials advancement that paves the road for the first Majorana braiding experiments.” The paper has been cited 189 times, earning it a “highly cited paper” designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But the Majorana story has been unraveling after other physicists began raising questions. In March 2021, the group retracted a Nature paper. That was followed by an expression of concern for related work in Science in July, and another expression of concern in Science in December.

Weekend reads: Should ‘peer reviewers be paid?’; Kim Kardashian and conflicts of interest; scandal costs millions in grants

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

COVID-19-vitamin D paper retracted by Springer Nature journal
Study on reducing parents’ anxiety about children’s circumcision retracted
More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings
What we’ve learned from public records requests. Please help us file more.
Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper
8 years after three papers are flagged — and after losing original correspondence — PLOS ONE retracts

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

COVID-19-vitamin D paper retracted by Springer Nature journal

A journal has retracted a 2021 paper claiming that vitamin D “significantly reduced the inflammatory markers associated with COVID-19 without any side effects” following criticism that led them to “no longer have confidence in the conclusions.”

The paper “Impact of daily high dose oral vitamin D therapy on the inflammatory markers in patients with COVID 19 disease,” appeared in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature journal, on May 20, 2021. The paper earned a correction on August 30, and has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong who has been involved in efforts to clean up the literature around COVID-19 and other subjects, tells us that he told the journal about the errors in early November 2021. Meyerowitz-Katz outlined his criticisms of the paper – which he called “one of the most influential” in the push to use vitamin D for COVID-19 – in a Medium post on April 3.

More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings

The tip came from the leadership of another scientific conference.

Did the Association for Computing Machinery know that they had published the proceedings of a conference with essentially the same name as that organization, IEEE, on the same dates, in the same venue, and with lots of overlapping authors?

The two versions of the meeting – the International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech) – both allegedly happened in Jakarta, Indonesia from Aug. 19-20, 2021, the tipster told ACM.

When ACM dug deeper, Scott Delman, the organization’s director of publications, told us, they saw something that looked familiar because of an investigation that led to a mass retraction of conference proceedings months earlier: A company in China billing itself as a conference organizer had handled all of the peer review.

What we’ve learned from public records requests. Please help us file more.

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

You may have noticed an increasing number of posts over the past few years that contain the phrase “obtained through a public records request.” Some examples:

It’s how we learned that a pharmacology researcher was demoted after a misconduct investigation – and then became chair at another school. That story led to a front-page piece in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
It’s how we learned that a Science journal took three years to do anything about a retraction request made by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The case later led to sanctions from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for the graduate student involved.
It’s how we learned that a child psychiatrist’s research had been suspended indefinitely after one of her study’s participants had been hospitalized. ProPublica later reported that her university had paid back millions in NIH grants because of the incident and others.
It’s how we learned that a professor at The Ohio State University had kept a six-figure job for a year after a misconduct finding.
It’s how we learned that PLOS ONE had failed to retract a paper for three years after a university requested its removal.
It’s how we learned that a PubPeer comment led the University of Michigan to reopen a misconduct investigation.

Weekend reads: White academic’s book about Black feminism pulled; retraction notices as a genre; forget the scientific paper?

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Misconduct, failure to supervise earn researchers years-long funding bans
Is a “Wall of Shame” a good idea for journals?
Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.
Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction
Triple sunrise, triple sunset: Science paper retracted when it turns out a planet is a star

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 219. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Triple sunrise, triple sunset: Science paper retracted when it turns out a planet is a star

Artist’s impression of HD 131399 from 2016 (via European Southern Observatory)

When Kevin Wagner at the University of Arizona and colleagues published a paper in Science about their discovery of a new planet in 2016, it captured the attention of a lot of science writers.

Finding the object – HD 131399 – meant that “astronomers have discovered a planet with an even more exotic sight on its horizon: a triple sunset,” in the words of The New York Times.

Or, as the AP put it, “a planet with triple sunrises and sunsets every day for part of the year.”

Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction

It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year:

Figure 5: There is an overlap between two images taken from different experimental conditions. I’ve added a version below with the contrast enhanced. It’s difficult to match the brightness perfectly, but all of the same structures can be matched between these two sections. Would the authors comment?

Vincent Rotello of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the corresponding authors, responded right away. “Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention,” Rotello wrote on PubPeer. “We take data integrity seriously and are investigating the origin of the image duplication.”

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