Author: Ivan Oransky

Weekend reads: Academia with and without peer review; bogus journals; rector found guilty of misconduct

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 208. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Academia with and without peer review; bogus journals; rector found guilty of misconduct

Paper on “suspicious activities” on India-China border retracted

U.S. CIA

A journal has retracted a 2020 paper about looking for “suspicious activities” on the India-China border — including an incursion in which 20 Indian soldiers were reportedly killed – citing “legal reasons.”

The abstract in Springer Nature’s Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, which alleges that the soldiers were “brutally killed,” is rife with grammatical and punctuation errors: 

Continue reading Paper on “suspicious activities” on India-China border retracted

Weekend reads: Academic fraud factories; zombie science; ‘Silicon Valley’s new obsession’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 207. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Academic fraud factories; zombie science; ‘Silicon Valley’s new obsession’

‘My egregious delay’: Science journal takes more than three years to retract paper after university investigation

The editor of a Science family journal waited three years before beginning the process of retracting a paper after learning that the University of Wisconsin at Madison had found duplication and mislabeling but no misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported last November, the paper, “The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL mediates nuclear translocation of the epidermal growth factor receptor,” was published in 2017 in Science Signaling. It was retracted this past November, and the notice referred to a university investigation.

That prompted us to submit a public records request on November 12 for the investigation as well as any correspondence between the university and the journal. In a response on January 12, the university denied our request for the report of the investigation, saying that “There is a review still underway at the federal level regarding this issue.” (That is a good reminder of how long the U.S. Office of Research Integrity can take to review such investigations.)

But the university released correspondence between Deric Wheeler, the corresponding author of the paper, and John Foley, the editor of the journal, which we’ve made available here. The thread begins on July 6, 2021 – just one month shy of three years after Foley learned of an investigation into the research – with an email from Foley in which the editor acknowledged “an egregious delay”:

Continue reading ‘My egregious delay’: Science journal takes more than three years to retract paper after university investigation

Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject

“Nailed” doctoral theses on a wall in Biomedicum, Campus Solna, in spring 2021. Photo: Katarina Sternudd

The authors of a paper in a cancer journal have retracted it after acknowledging they lifted parts of it from a thesis about an unrelated topic.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Regulation of RUNX3 Expression by DNA Methylation in Prostate Cancer,” originally published in July 2020 in Cancer Management and Research, a Dove title:

Continue reading Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject

Weekend reads: A White House official’s retraction; ‘bosom peril;’ nonsense with a forged authorship

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 206. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: A White House official’s retraction; ‘bosom peril;’ nonsense with a forged authorship

Frontiers retracts a dozen papers, many more expected

The publisher Frontiers has retracted at least a dozen papers in the last month, after announcing an “extensive internal investigation” into “potentially falsified research.”

Here’s an example of a notice, this one from Frontiers in Endocrinology for “Overexpression of microRNA-216a-3p Accelerates the Inflammatory Response in Cardiomyocytes in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Targeting IFN-α2,” which was originally published in November 2020:

Continue reading Frontiers retracts a dozen papers, many more expected

Authors to correct PNAS ‘nudge’ paper that cites now-retracted article in the same journal

Tobias Brosch

The authors of a paper on “nudge experiments” published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) plan to correct it following questions about some of its conclusions and citations, Retraction Watch has learned.

Following up on comments by Aaron Charlton and Nick Brown, Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman, who is deeply skeptical of the findings, raised several questions about the paper in a post on January 7. Among them were that the paper cites 11 articles by food marketing researcher Brian Wansink, whom Retraction Watch readers may recall resigned from his post at Cornell following an investigation and has had 17 papers retracted, one of them twice.

Gelman also notes that the paper cites a paper by Dan Ariely and colleagues that was retracted in September. We’ll focus here on the inclusion of that reference.

Co-corresponding author Tobias Brosch, of the University of Geneva, responded within hours of Gelman’s post, writing in part:

Continue reading Authors to correct PNAS ‘nudge’ paper that cites now-retracted article in the same journal

Weekend reads: A museum of scientific misconduct?; authorship misconduct; uproar over renamed phyla

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 206. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: A museum of scientific misconduct?; authorship misconduct; uproar over renamed phyla

‘This is really ridiculous’: An author admitted plagiarism. His supervisor asked for a retraction. The publisher said, “nah.”

Behrouz Pourghebleh is perplexed. And also exasperated.

Pourghebleh, of the Young Researchers and Elite Club at the Urmia branch of Islamic Azad University in Iran, noticed a paper published on December 15, 2020 in an IEEE journal that overlapped 80 percent with an article he’d co-authored the year before.

Pourghebleh wrote to Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, the associate editor who had handled the paper, on December 31, 2020, expressing concern. Bhuiyan responded the same day, saying the paper hadn’t been flagged in a similarity check, and that he would contact the authors for a response.

The first author, Karim Alinani, wrote to Pourghebleh less than two weeks later, admitting the plagiarism but citing personal circumstances:

Continue reading ‘This is really ridiculous’: An author admitted plagiarism. His supervisor asked for a retraction. The publisher said, “nah.”