by country – Retraction Watch

Author blames retraction on ‘Chinese censorship’

A former assistant professor of international relations at Yibin University in Sichuan, China, said he was fired from his job and “forced” to retract a paper on COVID-19 because the article did not “paint a good picture of the Chinese government.”

In the 2021 paper, Thomas Ameyaw-Brobbey, now an adjunct lecturer at Accra Business School in Ghana and an adjunct research fellow at the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, discussed the negative effects of the pandemic on the global public opinion of Chinese leadership and how the outbreak fostered an “unfavorable image” of China.

After the article appeared in the Journal of International Studies, authorities at Yibin University held several meetings with Ameyaw-Brobbey asking him to explain the paper and why he used a dataset of public opinion in the United States that was “likely to be biased towards China,” he said.

Finland group downgrades 60 journals

A panel of scholars in Finland has downgraded 60 journals in their quality rating system, following months of review and feedback from researchers.

The Finnish Publication Forum (JUFO) classifies and rates journals and other scholarly publications to “support the quality assessment of academic research,” according to its website. JUFO considers the level of transparency, the number of experts on a publication’s editorial board, and the standard of peer review to make its assessment, which academics can use to determine the credibility of a given title or its publisher.

JUFO’s classification ranges from 3, for “supreme-level” publications, to 1, which still counts as legitimate publication. Level 0 means the journal is excluded from the ranking, which may dissuade researchers from publishing with them, James Heathers, a scientific sleuth said. Finland’s university funding model relies on JUFO as a publication quality metric.

Brain tumor researchers lose second paper as UCSF investigates

A research group at the University of California, San Francisco, under investigation for potential misconduct has had a second paper retracted.

The group, led by Russell O. Pieper, director of basic science at the UCSF Brain Tumor Center and vice-chairman of the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery, previously lost a 2021 paper in Science Translational Medicine after Elisabeth Bik and other commenters on PubPeer posted concerns about some of the images in the article.

The newly retracted paper, “Phosphoglycerate Mutase 1 Activates DNA Damage Repair via Regulation of WIP1 Activity,” appeared in Cell Reports in 2020. It has been cited 25 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Two papers retracted for plagiarizing a 50-year-old thesis

A math professor in Poland has lost two papers because she plagiarized a doctoral thesis written before the United States had put a man on the moon.

The articles by Daria Michalik, “The decomposition uniqueness for infinite Cartesian products” and “Some remarks on the uniqueness of decomposition into Cartesian product,” published in 2017 and 2016, respectively, were retracted this year from Topology and its Applications over concerns they closely resembled an unpublished 1968 dissertation from Polish topologist Zbigniew Furdzik: “On the properties of certain decompositions of topological spaces into Cartesian products.”

Michalik has associations with the Institute of Mathematics, the same institution with which Furdzik, now deceased, earned his PhD. As of August of 2023, she was a researcher at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland.

The retraction statements for both papers read:

Indonesian university dean dismissed, barred from teaching, asked to apologize

Kumba Digdowiseiso has been dismissed from his position as dean of the economics and business faculty at the Universitas Nasional (UNAS) in Jakarta, Indonesia, following an investigation into claims he used the names of other academics without consent on papers with which they were not involved.

Digdowiseiso had already announced his resignation from the university on April 19, a week after Retraction Watch reported several researchers from the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) were accusing Digdowiseiso of using their names on papers without permission.

At the time, the university’s official account on X had reposted Digdowiseiso’s response to our report in a now-deleted tweet from April 11. In the tweet, Digdowiseiso wrote that after an internal meeting with UMT, the institution decided the authorship allegations were “a personal issue” and therefore didn’t need “further intervention/action from both universities or even faculties.” Another UNAS tweet from April 14 that is still online does not include this paragraph.

Norway university committee recommends probe into the country’s most productive researcher

Filippo Berto, by ONOLO – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2019, Filippo Berto was hailed as Norway’s most productive researcher, publishing a new study on average every two to three days.

Five years on, a committee appointed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where Berto, a mechanical engineer, was based until last year, is recommending that the institution carries out an in-depth investigation into his work following a complaint by Per Steineide Refseth, a librarian at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences in Rena.

Rune Nydal, a philosopher at NTNU who leads the independent research integrity committee that met May 14 partly to discuss the complaint about Berto’s work, told Retraction Watch it is recommending NTNU’s rector conduct an in-depth probe into Berto’s papers and release a public statement on the outcome.

Controversial rocket scientist in India threatens legal action after journals pull papers

A professor of aerospace engineering in India who developed a scientific theory critics call “absolute nonsense” said he is suing journal editors and publishers for pulling three papers he claims could help protect “millions of lives.”

The articles, one in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports and two in Wiley’s Global Challenges, described a highly technical concept eponymously dubbed “Sanal flow choking.” The first was retracted last summer, the other two in March.

“The retractions of our papers are unjustified,” V. R. Sanal Kumar of Amity University in New Delhi told Retraction Watch. “Our legal representatives are actively pursuing a defamation lawsuit against these editors and their illicit agents who were responsible for retracting articles crucial for safeguarding countless lives.”

Dean in Indonesia resigns following Retraction Watch report

Kumba Digdowiseiso, the dean of the economics and business faculty at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia, resigned on Thursday after a firestorm of criticism over the past week.

The move, reported widely in the Indonesian media, came eight days after Retraction Watch reported that researchers at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu alleged that Digdowiseiso had added dozens of their colleagues’ names to papers without their permission.

“This resignation is a form of my academic responsibility to the Chancellor of Unas and the academic community so as not to burden the campus in carrying out investigations into the problems I am facing,” Digdowiseiso told Kompas yesterday.

The dean who came to visit – and added dozens of authors without their knowledge

Earlier this year, a group of lecturers in Malaysia received a WhatsApp message from a colleague who had made a disturbing discovery.

The colleague, who wished to remain anonymous for this story, was looking through Google Scholar and noticed their name, and many others from their department, repeatedly appeared alongside that of an unfamiliar author: Kumba Digdowiseiso, dean of the economics and business faculty at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“We didn’t even know who this person was,” said Safwan Mohd Nor, an associate professor of finance at the university, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, adding that he was “extremely angry” when he first found out his name had been used.

Chief researcher at national Japanese institute has paper retracted for faking data

An official journal of the Japanese government has retracted a 2021 paper over concerns about misconduct in the work, which was performed in a national research center.

Here’s the retraction notice for the paper, titled “Development and Evaluation of Fluorescence Immunochomatography for Rapid and Sensitive Detection of Thermophilic Campylobacter”:

Food Safety decided to retract this article in which the primary author misconducted as reported from the primary author’s affiliation.

Far more details are available in materials published last December by Japan’s National Institute of Health Sciences, where the first author of the article, Hiroshi Asakura, is chief researcher. According to a press release dated Dec. 26, 2023:

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