A 2014 paper in Science by a lab in Toronto has been retracted after a December expression of concern raised “potential data integrity issues.”
The paper, “Mitosis Inhibits DNA Double-Strand Break Repair to Guard Against Telomere Fusions,” is from the lab of Daniel Durocher, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.
The retraction notice, published today and signed by all of the original authors, reads, in part:
Continue reading Science paper by Toronto lab retracted
The publisher of the Journal of Human Evolution says it does not use artificial intelligence in its production process, contrary to a statement issued last month by the journal’s editorial board when all but one member of the group resigned.
The statement, shared on X on December 26, noted the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” were resigning because Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, “has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years.” Among the examples cited:
Continue reading Elsevier denies AI use in response to evolution journal board resignationsAll but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”
“Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years,” the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” said in their resignation statement posted to X/Twitter yesterday.
Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”
Continue reading Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier changes
A committee of scholars in Finland has decided to downgrade 271 journals from Frontiers and MDPI in their quality rating system, in a move that may discourage researchers from submitting manuscripts to the outlets.
Both publishers criticized the move, first reported in Times Higher Education, as lacking transparency and seeming to target fully open-access publishers.
Finland’s Publication Forum (JUFO) “is a rating and classification system to support the quality assessment of research output,” which factors into government funding for universities, according to its website. “The objective is to encourage Finnish scholars and researchers to publish their research outcomes in high-level domestic and foreign forums.”
Continue reading Finland Publication Forum will downgrade hundreds of Frontiers and MDPI journals
Chemosphere, the Elsevier title which in September published an article on “unexpected exposure to toxic flame retardants in household items” such as black plastic cooking utensils, has been removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science index in its December update.
The article, “From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling,” received heavy international media coverage questioning whether we should all throw out our black plastic spatulas.
The authors corrected their calculations in a December 15 corrigendum, as reported by Ars Technica. The exposure was an order of magnitude lower than the safe daily reference dose, not approaching it, as they had initially reported, but “this calculation error does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper,” the authors wrote in the notice.
Continue reading Journal that published viral study on black plastic removed from major index
An engineer accused of being involved in paper mill activities mysteriously reappeared on a list of editorial board members at Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports earlier this year, Retraction Watch has learned.
The journal had “parted ways” with the engineer, Masoud Afrand of the Islamic Azad University in Iran, in March 2022 after an internal audit found “irregularities” in how he handled papers, editor-in-chief Rafal Marszalek told us last year.
Because of “an oversight,” however, Afrand remained on the publication’s website until a story by Retraction Watch and Undark raised concerns about his work last year.
Continue reading Researcher linked to paper mill activity mysteriously reappeared on list of journal’s editorial board
The British Medical Journal has retracted an article examining when unexpected weight loss could be a warning sign of cancer after the authors found an error in their work. The journal published an updated version of the analysis with different conclusions, which the authors think could influence patient care.
The retracted paper, “Prioritising primary care patients with unexpected weight loss for cancer investigation: diagnostic accuracy study,” appeared Aug. 13, 2020. The researchers, led by Brian D. Nicholson, a general practitioner and associate professor in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, England, used electronic health records data to look for people diagnosed with cancer within six months after a recording of unexpected weight loss.
The authors were attempting to replicate their results in another dataset when they found “some differences in the study findings and study population that we could not easily explain,” Nicholson told Retraction Watch. He continued:
Continue reading ‘Relieved’: BMJ retracts and replaces article on unexpected weight loss as a sign of cancer
Clarivate, the data company for scholarly publications, has decided to continue indexing some content from eLife in Web of Science, after reevaluating the open-access biology journal’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them. The journal will not receive an Impact Factor.
Last month, Clarivate paused indexing new content from eLife, citing a policy on “Coverage of journals/platforms in which publication is decoupled from validation by peer review.”
eLife last year adopted a new model in which it publishes every manuscript its editors send out for review, along with the text of the reviews and an editor’s assessment of the significance of the findings in the paper and the strength of the evidence presented. The editorial assessments of the paper can be “exceptional,” “compelling,” “convincing,” “solid,” “incomplete,” or “inadequate.”
Continue reading eLife won’t get an impact factor, says Clarivate
Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, has retracted an article a group of sleuths described as “a kind of case study of all the red flags for fraud that we look for” in an open letter to the publisher’s head of research integrity.
The article, “Hybrid CNN-LSTM model with efficient hyperparameter tuning for prediction of Parkinson’s disease,” appeared in September 2023. It has been cited 11 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.
Continue reading ‘All the red flags’: Scientific Reports retracts paper sleuths called out in open letterCiting eLife’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them, Clarivate says it is re-evaluating the inclusion of the open-access biology journal in Web of Science, its influential database of abstracts and citations.
In contrast to the other journals recently placed on hold from indexing, including Elsevier’s Science of the Total Environment, Clarivate has cited a specific policy as the reason for re-evaluating eLife: “Coverage of journals/platforms in which publication is decoupled from validation by peer review.”
A Clarivate spokesperson described the policy as applying to “journals that do not make an editorial decision to accept or reject based on peer reviewers’ comments.”
Continue reading eLife latest in string of major journals put on hold from Web of Science