Toxicologic Pathology – a Sage title – has issued expressions of concern for six papers that were among the subjects of an investigation by Azabu University that concluded in November 2022.
The expression of concern, dated March 7, 2024, includes a list of the six articles and reads:
Continue reading Publisher flags papers found by university to involve misconduct more than a year ago
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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 48,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?
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: ‘Objectionable conditions’ at psychiatry institute; impact factor obsession; Nobel winner acknowledges more errors
A 2022 paper in Cureus on causes of cancer around the world is under investigation by the journal following inquiries by Retraction Watch prompted by a reader’s email.
The paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors,” shares a title and figures with a 2005 paper in The Lancet. It also “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” an anonymous tipster told us.
As we’ve noted elsewhere in a report on the team that developed the phrase, “Tortured phrases are what happens to words that get translated from English into a foreign language, then back to English — perhaps by a computer trying to generate a scholarly publication for a group of unscrupulous authors.”
Continue reading Cureus reviewing paper alleged to plagiarize Lancet articleWould you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 48,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our new list of papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?
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: Clinical trial fraud leads to prison; journal editors resigning en masse; who should police scientific fraud?
Two BMC journals – part of the Springer Nature stable – have flagged studies a month after 10 editors at one of the journals resigned to protest the publications’ failure to respond quickly to allegations of data fabrication.
As we reported earlier this month, obstetrician-gynecologist and sleuth Ben Mol sent allegations about papers published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health on Jan. 29, 2024. When BMC had not responded to Mol by February 28, 10 editors quit.
Mohamed Abdelmonem Kamel of Fayoum University in Egypt, the corresponding author of both articles, did not initially respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch. However, he left a comment defending the work on our post and said his team could not share the data behind one of the papers “before publishing it first as a paper to prevent stealing the data in another paper by different authors.” The study said that the data “are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.”
Continue reading Following mass resignation, obstetrics journals place editor’s notes on studiesWould you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 47,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our new list of papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?
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: More retractions at Columbia; ‘an epidemic of scientific fraud’; when articles cite retracted papers
The megajournal PLOS ONE will be correcting about 1,000 papers over the next few months, Retraction Watch has learned, and will add an author proof step – a first for the journal.
The corrections are for “errors in author names, affiliations, titles and references; to make minor updates to the acknowledgements, funding statements, and data availability statements, among other minor issues,” PLOS ONE head of communications David Knutson told us. He continued:
Continue reading Exclusive: PLOS ONE to correct 1,000 papers, add author proof stepThis batch of corrections does not reflect a recent change in the journal’s quality control standards or processes. Rather, we are clearing a backlog that accumulated during a 2-year period when minor corrections were deprioritized and resources were diverted to other areas. PLOS ONE is in the process of implementing an author proof step so that in the future such errors can be identified and addressed prior to publication.
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 47,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?
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 paper written by ChatGPT goes viral; the Gino misconduct investigation report; superconductivity scandal
Wiley, whose Hindawi subsidiary has attracted thousands of paper mill papers that later needed to be retracted, has seen widespread paper mill activity among hundreds of its journals, it announced yesterday.
More than 270 of its titles rejected anywhere from 600 to 1,000 papers per month before peer review once they implemented a pilot of what the publisher calls its Papermill Detection service. That service flagged 10-13% of all of the 10,000 manuscripts submitted to those journals per month, Wiley told Retraction Watch.
Wiley said the service includes “six distinct tools,” including looking for similarities with known paper mill papers, searching for “tortured phrases” and other problematic passages, flagging “irregular publishing patterns by paper authors,” verifying researcher identity, detecting hallmarks of generative AI, and analyzing the relevance of a given manuscript to the journal.
Continue reading Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill toolWould you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?
The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 47,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?
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: Citation cartels; a history of scientific integrity; another Nobelist retracts a paper