A prolific Saudi pharmacy professor published over 200 papers in the last four years, but in recent months the quality of these papers has come into question.
The journal analyzed the images and figures in the article and found three had been published previously and that an outside lab used to collect some of the data had “made a mistake by sending images of other work in the service lab,” according to the retraction notice.
In October, a South African political scientist published a book on how scholars in Africa can improve their standing in the larger academic world. Three months later, after heated emails from several sources alleging ethics breaches, the publisher retracted the book.
The retraction notice, posted Jan. 12, 2024, states that UJ Press retracted and removed the book from its catalog “due to concerns arising from the publication.” Publisher Wilkus van Zyl told us the press had asked the peer reviewers of the manuscript to re-examine the volume with an additional set of questions after they received emails questioning the work’s legitimacy. The reviewers determined the book lacked scholarly rigor and contained “inappropriate criticisms that appear to be based on personal grievances rather than legitimate scholarly discourse.”
The retraction is the latest bout in a years-long quarrel between two feuding academics. Kgothatso Shai is a professor at the University of Limpopo, who writes about African politics and international relations. Several chapters of his book, “An Afrocentric Idea on Contested Knowledge: Selected Cases,” critiqued Facebook posts from Shepherd Mpofu, a media studies professor at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Over the last few years, Mpofu has routinely criticized Shai’s works as “pathetic scholarship” in Facebook posts seen by Retraction Watch.
A year after writing an article about a movement in South Korea to hold clergymembers accountable for sexual abuse, a theology professor has asked for the paper to be retracted after acknowledging “citation irregularities” in the work. The specific problems remain unclear.
The paper’s retraction notice, dated December 21, 2023, states that the editors of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics supported the request to pull the article. Asked for more details about which “irregularities” or other factors might have contributed to the retraction, Maria Teresa Dávila, one of the journal’s editors and an associate professor of religious studies at Merrimack College, in North Andover, Massachusetts, confirmed the retraction and referenced the society’s publishing guidelines and ethics statement, but did not highlight specific passages that would pertain to this specific case. She also refused to answer further questions about the retraction.
Last spring, the Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science published a provocative paper stating that left-handed mothers in Singapore treat their LGBTQ+ children better than do right-handed moms.
The data were fabricated, and so were the authors, Jin Rabak and Hen Guai Lan. Their purported employer, Simisai University? A bogus institution with a name concocted for laughs: in Singaporean English, “simisai” means “what the shit.”
After bankrolling archeological work on a prehistoric site discovered during construction, a state department of transportation has successfully lobbied to retract an article about the researchers’ findings officials said were “published prematurely.”
The whole process was “a bit of a surprise” for the paper’s co-authors, said Logan Miller, one of the authors and an archeology professor at Illinois State University. He and lead author David Leslie both told Retraction Watch they stand by the article’s findings, but declined to comment further about the retraction.
Their research began in 2019, when the Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) wanted to replace a bridge in the town of Avon. When construction workers started digging into the old bridge’s foundations, however, they discovered thousands of ancient objects from the Paleoindians, the earliest known people to live in New England. CTDOT temporarily halted the work and contracted an archaeology firm to excavate the site.
