Ivan Oransky

Weekend reads: More allegations at Harvard; plagiarism euphemisms; citation cartels in math

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal takes 3 years to pull papers by researcher who committed misconduct
Journal retracts 80 papers ID’d as paper mill products following sleuth’s report, Undark-Retraction Watch investigation
Paper about clergy sexual abuses in South Korean churches retracted over ‘citation irregularities’
Book retraction surfaces long-standing feud between South African academics

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to nearly 400. There are more than 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or 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):

Journal retracts 80 papers ID’d as paper mill products following sleuth’s report, Undark-Retraction Watch investigation

Nearly two years after being warned one of its journals appeared to be the target of a paper mill operation, Taylor & Francis has retracted 80 articles that appeared in that journal.

Last June, Undark and Retraction Watch reported on the efforts of a sleuth using the name Aishwarya Swaminathan to alert Taylor & Francis and other publishers starting in April 2022 that a data scientist named Gunasekaran Manogaran allegedly runs “a research paper publishing scam” that targets special issues. Such issues appear to be particularly vulnerable to paper mills.

Another sleuth, Nick Wise, also worked to suss out the problems, and El Pais reported on the links between Manogaran and a professor in Spain in October.

Now, Acta Agriculturae Scandinavica, Section B — Soil & Plant Science has retracted 80 papers, all with a notice that specifies the name of the relevant special issue:

Weekend reads: ‘Unethical studies on China minority groups;’ an editorial board signs off; the sleuth who uncovered Dana Farber paper problems

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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

Journal retracts more than 50 studies from Saudi Arabia for faked authorship

The journal Cureus has retracted 56 papers nearly two years after it first began to suspect the works were of dubious lineage.

Cureus – an open access journal founded in 2009 and acquired by Springer Nature in 2022 – slapped 55 of the papers with expressions of concern in April 2022. At that time, at least one author said they didn’t know anything about the work and Cureus noted the “articles were submitted and subsequently published purportedly as an effort coordinated by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University to ensure all medical interns publish at least one peer-reviewed article in order to qualify for enrollment in a postgraduate residency program as stipulated by The Saudi Commission for Health Specialties (SCFHS).”

At the time, Cureus’ founding editor in chief John Adler told us “The investigation has been frustratingly slow due to the relative unresponsiveness of Saudi gov officials.” Apparently, that remained the case. This week, the journal retracted 56 studies. All of the retraction notices read the same way:

Weekend reads: Paper mills bribe editors; Dana-Farber researchers to retract paper; ‘The Next Battle in Higher Ed’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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

Publisher parts ways with editor of five journals who published his own studies on Islamic practices

Ten days after retracting nine papers from several journals because they were “lacking scientific base,” a publisher says it has “parted company” with the editor of five of the titles – who had authored or co-authored the papers in question.

As Retraction Watch reported last week, Thieme International retracted the papers, by Hüseyin Çaksen of Necmettin Erbakan University in Turkey, following criticism on social media and at least one story in the Turkish press. Yesterday, a Thieme account on X (formerly Twitter) posted:

Weekend reads: The future of a federal US watchdog; a publisher plans massive layoffs; the plagiarism arms race

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 to over 375. There are more than 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or 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):

Neri Oxman accused of lifting from article whose plagiarism led to downfall of concussion expert

Neri Oxman’s problems may be getting worse.

The researcher, who has become embroiled in plagiarism accusations following her billionaire husband’s push to depose the president of Harvard for plagiarizing in her thesis, appears to have lifted about 100 words in her thesis from an article that has been plagiarized before.

Last week, Business Insider reported that Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation…including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” Oxman, who earned her PhD at MIT and was later a professor there until 2020, has since acknowledged some citation errors.

The new allegation is that Oxman’s thesis also lifted about 100 words from a 2000 article in Physics World without quoting or citing the piece. (See a comparison here using the Vroniplag similarity detector set at a minimum of six consecutive words of overlap. The 2000 article text is on the left, and part of the thesis is on the right.) That article was plagiarized in 2005 by a then-leading sports medicine expert, Paul McCrory, who resigned from a key post in 2022 following revelations of that and other pilfering. McCrory has now had more than ten papers retracted.

Studies claiming Islamic practices protect against disease and sexual harassment retracted

A researcher in Turkey has lost seven papers about Islamic practices that he managed to publish in journals typically dedicated to childhood diseases.

Hüseyin Çaksen, of Necmettin Erbakan University, published the articles in the Journal of Pediatric Neurology, the Journal of Child Science, and the Journal of Pediatric Epilepsy, all Thieme titles. Feyza Çaksen is co-author of two.

The seven papers are:

Weekend reads: Claudine Gay and what comes after; China cracking down again; ‘retracted papers and collateral damage’

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 to over 375. There are nearly 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or 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):

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