Category: turkey retractions

Studies claiming Islamic practices protect against disease and sexual harassment retracted

Hüseyin Çaksen

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.

The seven papers are:

Continue reading Studies claiming Islamic practices protect against disease and sexual harassment retracted

Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

Continue reading Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

There are retractors in plastic surgery — and not just of the instrument kind

Ilteris Murat Emsen

A plastic surgeon in Turkey has notched his fifth retraction for plagiarism and other issues. 

That makes him a retractor — even if most plastic surgeons would have something else in mind if they used that term.

Ilteris Murat Emsen, then of the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery at the Numune State Hospital in Erzurum, has lost five papers dating back to 2006. Four were pulled in 2009. The most recent retraction appeared last month in the European Journal of Plastic Surgery, for a 2007 article titled “Management of the large septal perforations with the support of porous high-density polyethylene (MEDPOR).” 

According to the notice: 

Continue reading There are retractors in plastic surgery — and not just of the instrument kind

Too much skin in the game: Derm journal calls out author for duplication

We often praise authors for doing the right thing by retracting with transparency. Here’s a journal that deserves recognition for its handling of a case of duplicate publication.

Acta Dermatovenerologica Alpina, Pannonica et Adriatica (ADAPA), a European derm publication, has retracted a 2018 article in smack-down fashion, calling out a co-author for deceit. The paper was a case study titled “Inflamed bilateral linear atrophoderma of Moulin in an adult woman: a case report.” According to ADAPA, a reader noticed that a virtually identical article — with the same title — had appeared in a Turkish dermatology publication in late 2017.

In an lengthy editorial, Jovan Miljković, the editor-in-chief of the journal, explained what happened after a review of the two papers found them to be “virtually identical”: Continue reading Too much skin in the game: Derm journal calls out author for duplication

Caught stealing a manuscript, author blames a dead colleague

William Faulkner

As William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Farzad Kiani learned that lesson the hard way.

Kiani, of Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University, was the “author” of a 2018 review article in Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing titled “A survey on management frameworks and open challenges in IoT.” According to the abstract: Continue reading Caught stealing a manuscript, author blames a dead colleague

A “clandestine retraction” as a paper disappears from a management journal without a trace

Daniel Jung

First it was there. Now it’s gone.

In March 2018, three researchers at Atatürk University in Turkey published“Investigation Of The Critical Factors Affecting E-Government Acceptance: A Systematic Review And A Conceptual Model” at the Innovative Journal of Business and Management, where it was freely available during 2018. It has no DOI, and no citations (that I know of).

Now it is gone; the link is redirected to the journal’s general search engine. A search for the title or authors there yields no hits; neither do the Google references to the article nor resources around it. The March 2018 issue has now an unexplained hole from pages 77–84. The Google Scholar index for this article disappeared in March 2019.

What happened? Continue reading A “clandestine retraction” as a paper disappears from a management journal without a trace

Plagiarism costs author five papers in five different journals

An engineering researcher has written about models tackling a range of complex issues — security problems in Iraq, poverty in Europe, and emergency responses to humanitarian crises. But there may be some limits to his expertise: Between 2016 and 2017, five journals have retracted five of his papers, citing plagiarism.

Some of the notices describe the plagiarism as “extensive,” “significant,” and “substantial.” One journal editor, who retracted one of Kubilay Kaptan’s papers last year, told us the paper “was simply a direct copy from an existing one.”

The editor noted that Kaptan — who lists his affiliation as the Civil Engineering Department at Beykent University in Istanbul — claimed to be “the victim of a personal smear campaign, which involved submitting plagiarised manuscripts in his name.” We reached out to Kaptan several times by phone and email to verify this claim, but did not hear back.

Here’s the most recent retraction, for a 2016 paper published in Journal of Refugee Studies:   Continue reading Plagiarism costs author five papers in five different journals

Group whose findings support video game-violence link loses another paper

Last July, Joseph Hilgard, a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, saw an article in Gifted Child Quarterly that made him do a double take. Hilgard, who is studying the effects of violent media on aggressive behavior, said the results of the 2016 paper “caused me some alarm.”

The research—led by corresponding author Brad J. Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at The Ohio State University (OSU)—showed that gifted and non-gifted children’s verbal skills dropped substantially after watching 12 minutes of a violent cartoon. The violent program had a greater impact on the gifted children, temporarily eliminating the pre-video verbal edge they displayed over their non-gifted peers.

To Hilgard, the results suggested that violent media can actually impair learning and performance. But the effect size was huge — so big, Hilgard thought it had to be a mistake. This, plus other questions, prompted Hilgard to contact the authors and the journal. Unfortunately, once he got a look at the data — collected by a co-author in Turkey who became unreachable after the recent coup attempt — the questions didn’t go away. So the journal decided to retract the paper.

Bushman’s body of work has continually supported the idea that violent media increases aggressive behavior, including a controversial 2012 study “Boom, Headshot!” that was retracted earlier this year.

What first struck Hilgard as odd about the 2016 paper was how large the effect of the violent cartoon was: Continue reading Group whose findings support video game-violence link loses another paper

Author objects to retraction of paper suggesting fingerprints can predict facial features

A journal has pulled a paper about predicting people’s faces from their fingerprints due to “significant overlap” with a previous paper by the same authors.   

According to the retraction notice in Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing, the authors didn’t cite or acknowledge the other study in the Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science.

First author of both papers, Şeref Sağıroğlu, who is based at Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey told Retraction Watch that he doesn’t believe the two papers have significant overlap. Still, the research is related, so when he learned the retracted paper didn’t reference the previous one:

Continue reading Author objects to retraction of paper suggesting fingerprints can predict facial features

Peer review manipulation fells another study

Spectrochimica ActaA spectroscopy journal has retracted a 2016 study after concluding that its editors had been misled by a fake review.

According to the retraction notice, the journal — Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy — accepted the paper due to positive feedback from someone assuming the identity of an expert reviewer, using an email address provided by the author of the study.

An official from the author’s institution in Turkey informed us that it will conduct an investigation. 

Here’s the retraction notice for “Diagnosis of cervical cancer cell taken from scanning electron and atomic force microscope images of the same patients using discrete wavelet entropy energy and Jensen Shannon, Hellinger, Triangle Measure classifier:” Continue reading Peer review manipulation fells another study