Ivan Oransky

Weekend reads: A paper mill; ‘science needs to clean its own house;’ is the COVID-19 retraction rate ‘exceptionally high?’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The retraction of a controversial paper on race and police killings
The case of the stolen journal
An expression of concern for a 77-year-old paper
A judge ordering a Stanford researcher to pay the legal fees of a scientist he sued for defamation

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 22.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

A month after Surgisphere paper retraction, Lancet retracts, replaces hydroxychloroquine editorial

In early June, as controversy swirled over a high-profile study of hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19, Christian Funck-Brentano started receiving aggressive emails, texts and tweets.

Funck-Brentano, professor of medicine and clinical pharmacology at Sorbonne Université and Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris, and a colleague had published an editorial in The Lancet alongside the study — purportedly based on data from a company called Surgisphere — citing the results and sounding an alarm about the cardiac risks of hydroxychloroquine. Within days, that paper was retracted, along with a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine about different medications also allegedly based on Surgisphere data.

“I’m 65 and I have no real concerns,” Funck-Brentano told Retraction Watch, but his co-author was in an earlier stage of his career, and Funck-Brentano wanted to handle the situation in a way that would cause the least collateral damage.

Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist

A Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million — then dropped the suit — has been ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees based on a statute “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Mark Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.

At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:

Indexer “obviously made a mistake” in sanctioning taxonomy journal, says editor

The Clarivate logo

Zoologists are up in arms that a leading taxonomy journal is being called out for excessive self-citation and being denied an Impact Factor.

Last week, Clarivate announced that it was suppressing 33 journals from its Journal Citation Report, which would mean no Impact Factor for those journals, because of high levels of self-citation that distorted journal rankings. One of those journals was Zootaxa, which since 2015 has published more than a quarter of all newly described taxa in the literature.

Denying Zootaxa an Impact Factor — which is used, for better or for worse, by universities and other institutions to determine whether a journal is worthy of publishing in — is unfair and damages the field, taxonomists said this past week.

For example, Wayne Maddison, a professor of botany and zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, tweeted:

Weekend reads: Sexism in a medical textbook; proof Reviewer 2 is a jerk; COVID-19 and research misconduct

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

the retraction of a paper that editors called “deeply offensive to particular minorities“
alarm over self-citation at nearly 50 journals
the story of why a retraction took nearly two years
a retraction because editors realized a penis enlargement drug was just homeopathy

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 22.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Major indexing service sounds alarm on self-citations by nearly 50 journals

Clarivate’s logo

More than 70% of the citations in one journal were to other papers in that journal. Another published a single paper that cited nearly 200 other articles in the journal.

Now, Clarivate, the company behind the Impact Factor, is taking steps to fight such behavior, suppressing 33 journals from their indexing service and subjecting 15 more to expressions of concern — all for apparent self-citation that boosted the journals’ rankings.

The list includes some of publishing’s biggest players: Nine journals published by Elsevier, seven by Springer Nature, six by Taylor & Francis, and five by Wiley.

Editors in chief past and present apologize for publishing article that “feed[s] into racist narratives”

The previous and current editors in chief of a psychology journal have apologized for publishing an article about which one of them writes, “in retrospect I can certainly see that their article does feed into racist narratives.”

Earlier this month, we reported that the authors of “Declines in Religiosity Predict Increases in Violent Crime—but Not Among Countries With Relatively High Average IQ,” first published in January in Psychological Science, had requested its retraction because they realized they had not vetted the research behind the paper well enough before submitting.

In a retraction notice dated yesterday, the journal’s current editor in chief, Patricia Bauer, writes that the article “has been retracted at the request of the authors:”

Weekend reads: A deluge of papers, reviewed in haste; a dog food study faces scrutiny; the trouble with research evaluations

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The tale of why it’s so difficult to publish a critical letter
A disappearing act
An apology by an anesthesiology researcher for misconduct
The temporary withdrawal of a COVID-19 “baby cage” study
A cancer researcher being sued for $900,000 in unpaid legal fees

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 22.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Law firm sues OSU cancer researcher for $900,000 in unpaid fees following failed libel suit

Carlo Croce may be back in court again — but this time, as a defendant.

Last month, Croce lost a defamation suit he filed against David Sanders, a Purdue researcher who was quoted in a 2017 New York Times story about allegations regarding Croce’s work. Croce had already lost an appeal of a related suit against the Times.

It turns out that Croce had not paid his attorneys — Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, Ohio — in a number of those cases, to the tune of $923,445.51, according to a lawsuit filed against Croce last week in Franklin County Court.

A Wiley journal makes another article disappear

In journalism, we have a running joke: Once something happens three times, it is a trend.

Well, one publisher’s propensity for making articles disappear from journal websites seems to be a trend. Twice this month, we have reported on Wiley’s disappearing act. Angewandte Chemie, a top chemistry journal, made an editorial decrying diversity efforts disappear. And Nursing Forum did the same thing with two letters that they said would only appear in print — but were briefly online.

Angewandte Chemie has done it again. This time the journal waved their magic wand on “What’s Hot, What’s Not: The Trends of the Past 20 Years in the Chemistry of Odorants,” published online last month. Its abstract:

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