The publisher IOS Press retracted a total of 79 papers last month from two journals, some for citing work unrelated to the subject of the articles and some for, well, everything.
The retraction notice in one of the titles, the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems reads:
Continue reading Publisher retracts nearly 80 articles over three days
Welcome to another edition of Weekend Reads. Because our site was down for several days starting last Saturday morning, there was no Weekend Reads last week, and this is a double edition.
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The last two weeks at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 190. There are now more than 31,000 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?
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, double edition: Scamming journals to publish gibberish; a whole issue with nothing but retractions; ‘the unbearable lightness of scientometric indices’
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year.
We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American Control Conference, the other in the Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA) — from a reader in early October.
We alerted IEEE to the identical papers on October 7. The next day, a spokesperson said she was initiating an inquiry. And on November 10, the spokesperson sent us this statement:
Continue reading IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries
The University of Glasgow is requesting the retraction of multiple papers by a pharmacology researcher who held various positions there for more than a quarter century.
The story begins in December 2016, when biostatistician Steven McKinney posted on PubPeer about a paper by the researcher, Miles Houslay, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. That paper was eventually retracted in August 2020, but not before McKinney posted a comment on Retraction Watch that caught the eye of the pseudonymous Clare Francis.
Francis pointed us to comments about a total of eight of Houslay’s papers at that time. And in August 2020, when the JBC retraction appeared, Francis forwarded those to the King’s College, London, where Houslay is listed as having a faculty position, and the University of Glasgow, which he left in 2011.
Continue reading Exclusive: University of Glasgow seeking retraction of multiple papers after findings of image manipulation
Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist and Canada 150 Research Chair who has had a dozen papers retracted following allegations of data fraud, now appears to have had his doctoral dissertation withdrawn.
The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.
Continue reading Behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt’s PhD dissertation withdrawn
If you file public records requests regularly, you have likely become used to how long they can take, and how few documents you may end up with. We certainly have. But we’re prompted to share a particularly frustrating experience with the NIH.
Settle in. This is a three-and-a-half year tale — and counting.
On May 8, 2018, we made a public records request to the NIH under the Freedom of Information Act for “Any Correspondence between the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA) and officials at Duke University during the month of March 2018.” We did so because, as we reported on March 23, 2018 in Science, the NIH had:
Continue reading HHS takes three and a half years to tell us “there are no records responsive to your request”…for a letter we know existsBefore we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible 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 188. There are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately?
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: “Passing the professor,” documented; “tortured phrases;” a “catastrophic failure of peer review”
In June of this year, Enamul Haque, a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, came across an article in the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA).
It looked familiar.
That’s because it was copied, in large part, from Haque’s master’s thesis, which he had completed at Canada’s McMaster University and submitted the previous year. Haque wrote to Kohei Arai, the journal’s editor in chief, on June 30, providing detailed evidence of plagiarism:
Continue reading Plagiarism of a thesis earns authors a retraction — and a two-year-publishing ban
A paper claiming that cases of myocarditis spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines that earned a “temporary removal” earlier this month will be permanently removed, according to a publisher at Elsevier.
As we reported last week, the article, “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products,” was published in Current Problems in Cardiology on October 1.
Sometime between then and October 17, the article was stamped “TEMPORARY REMOVAL” without explanation other than Elsevier’s boilerplate notice in such cases:
Continue reading COVID-19 vaccine-myocarditis paper to be permanently removed: ElsevierBefore we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible 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 183. There are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately?
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: Peer review during the pandemic; CEO out after doctored research; more on COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis