Rebecca Sohn

‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review

A retired professor of education has lost three papers – which he said he helped edit for a former student – after the publisher discovered manipulated peer review led to their acceptance.

Roger Shouse, an associate professor emeritus at Penn State College of Education, spent the 2018-2019 academic year at Sichuan University in China as a professor of public administration. While there, he helped several students write research articles in English, and advised one who listed him as a coauthor on three papers even though Shouse didn’t ask for authorship, he told us.

Those papers – on land use, climate vulnerability and disaster response among rural communities in Bangladesh – were retracted from the journal Land Use Policy this past August, after an investigation revealed the peer review process had been manipulated.

Shouse was listed as the last author, and researcher Md Nazirul Islam Sarker of Neijiang Normal University was the first author. A fourth paper retracted at the same time, with an identical retraction notice, listed Sarker as second author but did not include Shouse.

The retracted papers are:

‘Just some eccentric guy in Australia’: The story of a non-retraction for plagiarism

After reading a paper published in The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England last March, Andrew Thomas, an orthopedic surgeon in the UK, noticed that it was very similar to an article published the previous December in another journal.

He wrote a letter to the editor of Annals, notifying the journal of the similarity between its paper, “The possible effect of different types of ventilation on reducing operation theatre infections: a meta-analysis,” and “The effect of type of ventilation used in the operating room and surgical site infection: A meta-analysis,” published in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

In his letter, Thomas pointed out several apparent mistakes in the analyses, and also noted similarities between both papers and a 2017 article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, which has been cited 93 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Despite the similarities Thomas noted, which another surgeon verified with anti-plagiarism software, the journal has not retracted the paper, but flagged it with an expression of concern so readers can “draw their own conclusions.” At the same time, the journal retracted an unrelated article that was also found to be similar to one published elsewhere, then the retraction was changed to an expression of concern, and now neither notice appears online.

Mathematician requests two retractions for “subtle inaccuracies”

A mathematician has requested the retraction of two recently published articles “claiming proofs of big results in number theory,” as one observer put it.

After publication, the author said he “found some subtle inaccuracies” in the work.

The editor-in-chief of the mathematics journal Studia Logica, where the papers were published, posted a notice to the publication’s website weeks ago stating that it had retracted the two articles.

But the online versions of the papers still show no signs of having been retracted, as the editors wait on their publisher, Springer Nature, to process the retractions.

Pain researchers lose three papers after Cochrane group questioned data

A group of pain management researchers have had three of their papers retracted since September, after another group published a critique of their work earlier this year.

The critique, published in the journal Pain in April, found that ten studies led by physiatrist Marco Monticone of the University of Cagliari in Italy may not be reliable. The studies had several inconsistencies, including data that diverged from almost all similar studies, impossible statistical significance values, and duplicated or very similar data from other studies by the group, though the studies were purportedly separate clinical trials.

‘A big pain’: Professor up to six retractions for plagiarism and manipulated peer review

A business professor has now had six papers retracted, resulting from a combination of plagiarism and manipulated peer review.

All six retractions for Bilal Afsar, an associate professor of management sciences at Hazara University in Pakistan, have come since last February. He is the only common author on all the papers, which were published in 2019 and 2020 – and in comments to Retraction Watch, blamed a research assistant whom he declined to name for the problems.

The most recent paper to be retracted, in August of this year, was “Does thriving and trust in the leader explain the link between transformational leadership and innovative work behaviour? A cross-sectional survey.” It was originally published in the Journal of Research in Nursing in December of 2019 and has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to the retraction notice:

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