Kate Travis

Math is back as Clarivate boosts integrity markers in Highly Cited Researchers list

This year’s Highly Cited Researchers are from 61 countries and regions, but 86 percent of them work in the top 10.

The analysis behind this year’s Highly Cited Researchers list, released today by indexing giant Clarivate, includes several tweaks aimed at reducing attempts to game the metric and excluding researchers who engage in questionable publication practices.

Those changes include removing highly cited papers from the calculations authored by researchers excluded from last year’s list for integrity issues. The company also applied specific removal criteria — including excessive self-citation rates, papers retracted for integrity concerns, and prolific publication rates — more comprehensively this year. In past years, the company had done so manually for particular geographic areas or disciplines.

“We’re trying to make sure that the indicators are valid and reliable, which means we have to include these kinds of filters or screens and quantitative tests that indicate some kind of quality, qualitative character,” David Pendlebury, head of research analysis at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, told Retraction Watch.

Less is more: Academic publishing needs ‘radical change,’ Cambridge press report concludes

Academic publishing needs “renewed focus and collective action” to embrace new approaches and ensure the future of the industry, concludes a report from Cambridge University Press, released last week.

What started as an exploration of barriers to open access models turned into a call for “radical change” in academic publishing. “It has been clear for some time that the publishing ecosystem is under increasing strain,” Mandy Hill, managing director of Cambridge University Press, wrote in the introduction to the report. “This was the case before the growth of open access, but it is also clear that the shift to open has not solved the problems, as some early open access advocates may have hoped.”

The report, which followed workshops and interviews with stakeholders, includes results of a survey of more than 3,000 researchers, librarians, funders, publishers and societies.

$1.5 million program targets changes to academic incentives

The incentive systems that drive academic research underlie nearly every story we write: publication counts for promotion, pressure to produce positive results, hitting certain metrics, and so on. Critics have long called for change in these systems, but support for such change is hard to come by.

Several organizations are now putting more than $1 million toward reimagining hiring, promotion and tenure at U.S. universities. The program, called the Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge, is seeking proposals for “bold, creative strategies to develop academic reward systems that foster a collaborative, responsive, and transparent research environment.”

Organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), the program will offer grants at two funding levels — $50,000 or $250,000 — over two years. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Dana Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have provided the funding, which totals $1.5 million.

Taylor & Francis threatens legal action against anonymous group’s ‘highly defamatory’ claims

Taylor & Francis has threatened legal action against an online group that has made allegations, based largely on vague insinuations rather than evidence, about the publisher and a member of its research integrity team.

The group, ScienceGuardians, is an anonymous organization whose website serves as what they call an online “journal club.” On X, it has been posting so-called “investigations” of several sleuths, publishers and organizations, what it calls “perpetrators of the PubPeer Network Mob.” Its targets have included sleuths Kevin Patrick and Reese Richardson, and others such as Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp, and its posts are often amplified by those whose work has been questioned on PubPeer or retracted.

On September 7, the group published a string of claims on X about Nick Wise, a sleuth who joined Taylor & Francis in January as a research integrity manager. The ScienceGuardians post characterized the move as Wise “infiltrated” the publisher’s research integrity office. The post states he is responsible for 1,300 posts on PubPeer (which we have noted he does under his real name), and, ScienceGuardians claims, more than 100 others under the name “Simnia avena.”

Exclusive: Journal bans drug safety database papers as they flood the literature

Starting around 2023, a curious trend took hold in papers on drug safety monitoring. The number of articles published on an individual drug and its link to specific adverse events went from a steady increase to a huge spike.

The data source in most of those articles was largely the same: The FDA Adverse Events Reporting System, or FAERS. In 2021, around 100 studies mining FAERS for drug safety signals were published. In 2024, that number was 600, with more than that already published this year.

Two journals in particular published the bulk of these papers, Frontiers in Pharmacology and Expert Opinion on Drug Safety. In response to the flood, Frontiers started to require independent validation of studies drawing on public datasets. And Expert Opinion on Drug Safety decided in late July to stop accepting submissions altogether that use the FAERS database for this particular type of study.

Former lab tech earns federal funding ban years after leaving science

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has barred a former lab technician at Washington State University from participating in federally funded research for three years after finding he had committed misconduct.

The case dates back more than five years. Ryan Evanoff was a scientific assistant in the Department of Veterinary Microbiology and Pathology at the university’s Pullman campus. As we reported in 2020, colleagues in the department had discovered he had been fabricating gene sequence data. The falsified data led to the retraction of two papers.

A draft of the university’s investigation obtained through a public records request stated Evanoff engaged in “a repeated and measurable pattern of research material manipulation, changing of data, omission of critical research procedures and findings in lab notebooks, and making up data and results” from at least 2015 through 2019, when he left the university.

Panel upholds results of contested U Toronto mammography study

The University of Toronto has quietly published the results of an inquiry into the Canadian National Breast Screening Study that began in 2022 and, it seems, concluded in March 2024.

The panel, tasked with evaluating new allegations about the trial’s randomization, found the evidence it reviewed did not affect the results of the trials, which called into question the value of mammography in women ages 40-59.

Imaging scientist Martin Yaffe of the University of Toronto has long been a critic of the CNBSS, a pair of randomized clinical trials of mammography conducted in the 1980s. In April, we published a guest post in which Yaffe detailed the history of the trial and his critiques of it, as well as new evidence that clinical staff may have unwittingly influenced randomization. He reported this to the Canadian Cancer Society in 2021, and to the university.

Retraction for ‘unsound’ analysis was ‘disproportionate and discouraging,’ author says

The editors of Scientific Reports have retracted an article on burnout because the statistical analysis of its main finding was “unsound.” But the authors dispute the editors’ take on the statistics and claim a mistake in the paper triggered an unfair review.

For the paper, published in November, the authors measured concentrations of cortisol in hair samples from nearly 500 healthcare workers in Buenos Aires to study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on chronic stress and burnout. The analysis hinged on a statistical method called mediation analysis.

“Mediation analysis is a method to understand how one thing causes another by looking at what happens in between,” said lead author Federico Fortuna, of the Institute of Physiopathology and Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Buenos Aires. “In our study, we examined whether depersonalisation mediates the relationship between hair cortisol — a biological stress marker — and emotional exhaustion, a key psychological symptom of burnout.”

Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction

The authors of a paper that went viral with attention-grabbing headlines urging people to throw out their black plastic kitchen tools have corrected the work for a second time.

But a letter accompanying the correction suggests the latest update still fails “to completely correct the math and methodological errors present in the study,” according to Mark Jones, an industrial chemist and consultant who has been following the case. “The errors are sufficient to warrant a restating of the abstract, sections of the paper and conclusions, if not a retraction.”

The paper, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” originally appeared in Chemosphere in September. The study authors, from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, looked for the presence of flame retardants in certain household plastic items, including toys, food service trays and kitchen utensils.

When PubMed got it right, Elsevier got it wrong, and Retraction Watch helped clear it up

More than 20 years after publishing a letter saying a set of papers should be retracted — and PubMed marking them as such — the journal has finally retracted the articles, following a Retraction Watch inquiry.

Let’s back up.

In 1998, the journal Contraception published a supplement with six articles on Implanon, a subdermal contraceptive implant. The papers examined the implant’s pharmacodynamics and side effects. The next year, the journal published two clinical studies of the implant, one on its effectiveness as a contraceptive and the other on its effect on lipid metabolism.

Those two studies took place at centers in Jakarta, Indonesia. Some of the study data published in the supplement also included patients at those centers.

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