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.
An Indian paper mill featuring prominently in our recent investigation in Science and a companion piece on our website shut down its WhatsApp community six days after the stories ran, Retraction Watch has learned.
The company, called iTrilon, used the messaging platform to hawk authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals.” It claimed to have connections at journals that allowed the mill to guarantee acceptance of most of its papers.
But on January 24, Sarath Ranganathan, iTrilon’s scientific director, deactivated the WhatsApp community he had been curating.
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.
Nearly three years after a university investigation committee recommended retracting several papers by a cancer researcher found guilty of research misconduct, the journal Cancer Research has pulled three of the offending articles.
The journal also retracted a fourth paper by the researcher, Samson Jacob, a former emeritus professor at The Ohio State University, which had been flagged on PubPeer.
In 2021, the OSU committee reviewed dozens of allegations against Jacob’s work, and found 14 of them met at least one of two evidence standards for research misconduct, as we reported in 2022. The allegations mainly centered on figures that appeared to be spliced together from different experimental runs, which was not acknowledged in the studies – a concern the new retraction notices also mention.
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:
The entire editorial board of a sociology journal has resigned after they say that the publisher, Springer Nature, installed new editors-in-chief without consulting the board — but Springer Nature says they tried unsuccessfully to engage the board on planning going back at least five years.
In December 2023, senior editors of the journal, Theory and Society, learned Springer Nature “had opted for a ‘completely different view’ of the journal going forward,” according to a message shared on a listserv for the American Sociological Association and published on the blog Scatterplot. The 10 senior editors subsequently resigned, they told their colleagues, but didn’t offer additional details.
On January 4, the journal’s corresponding editors also resigned, according to a resignation letter shared with the sociology listserv. The corresponding editors cited Springer Nature’s decision to replace Janet Gouldner, the former executive editor (and widow of the journal’s founding editor, Alvin Gouldner), without consulting the rest of the editorial board. They wrote:
Last year, a professor and dean at a university in Spain suddenly began publishing papers with a multitude of far-flung researchers. His coauthors, until then exclusively national, now came from places like India, China, Nepal, South Korea, Georgia, Austria, and the United States.
How these unlikely collaborations began is not entirely clear. But a six-month Retraction Watch investigation, part of which is published here as a companion piece to a longer article appearing today in Science, suggests an unsavory possibility: The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of the faculty of health sciences at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, bought his way onto the papers – something he partly admits.
At least six of the seven journal articles Lorenzo published last year had been previously advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon. Based in Chennai, this underhand operation sells authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals,” according to a WhatsApp message its scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, sent to prospective clients last summer. Ranganathan also claimed to have connections at journals that allowed him, in many cases, to guarantee acceptance of the manuscripts he would send their way.
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.
Pleading emails requesting papers are regular visitors to one’s inbox. These unsolicited and flattering requests promise rapid publication and tempt authors to part with their work. Even master’s and doctoral students, after graduation, receive sweet-talking requests to publish their dissertations as a book, a book chapter, or as a paper. Predatory journals and publishers are easy to spot and ignore at these low ends.
The danger lies with well-established and efficient predatory publishers. These ‘efficient’ publishers hide in the open on allowlists, such as South Africa’s Department of Higher Education and Training (DHETs) list of approved journals, and reputable indices such as Scopus and the WoS. They embellish their websites with claims of peer review and even state that they comply with requirements set by the Committee on Publication Ethics. Their websites tick all the boxes, providing a strong veneer of an authentic scholarly journal.
One of my colleagues alerted me to a suspected predatory publisher. I looked into the case and thought it sensible to share my results, with the hope of sensitising postgraduate students and fellow authors.
