Category: cureus

The Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences in India has been on our radar for a while. So when we got word the university’s channel on an open access journal platform disappeared, we were curious what might be going on. 

Just this year, we reported Saveetha was among 14 universities with “questionable publication practices,” defined as unusually fast growth in research output, as measured by published journal articles.

Our 2023 investigation into Saveetha’s dental school uncovered an elaborate self-citation scheme: Undergraduates write manuscripts as part of their exams; student and faculty reviewers then insert scores of citations to papers by Saveetha faculty to inflate the university’s citation rankings. 

Continue reading Indian university’s channel on publisher’s platform disappears

Karen Rech, a hematopathologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., was reading a case report about a rare disease when she recognized the patient. 

Although the authors of the paper were affiliated with the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Fargo, the patient in the report had gone to Mayo for care, and Rech had made the pathology diagnosis. But the article, “A Diagnostic Dilemma and Classification Conundrum: Atypical Histiocytic Neoplasm Presenting as a Calvarial Mass,” published in Cureus in February, didn’t mention or credit Rech or her colleagues. 

“The ability to make such a unique diagnosis is a direct result of my translational research in histiocytic neoplasms,” Rech wrote in an email to the journal in April. After she made the pathology diagnosis, a hematologist colleague saw the patient, and a group of specialists discussed the case and came to a consensus diagnosis. 

Continue reading After saying it would retract an article, Cureus changed its mind

Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles.

Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications worldwide and can make or break a journal.

WoS is “making a big call here, taking aim at two of the mega-journals that have grown massively in recent years,” said Nick Wise, a scientific sleuth and a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “WoS appears to be one of the only organisations with the power to compel big publishers to act. I don’t think that’s a sign of a healthy academic publishing system, but it’s how things are currently.”

Continue reading Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold

The journal Cureus retracted an article for plagiarized images after questioning the motives of the researcher who said her images were taken.

The researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, first emailed Cureus, an open-access journal Springer Nature acquired in 2022, on August 1. She said she noticed images in the October 2023 paper, “Pediatric Acute Dacryocystitis and Orbital Cellulitis With Concurrent COVID-19 Infection: A Case Report,” came from a lecture she posted online and later removed. 

“The images used in this article were edited and presented under a fabricated clinical scenario” and had been used without her permission, the researcher wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch. She requested the journal retract the article. She also provided what she said were her original images, which were replicated in Figure 1 of the paper, and copied the corresponding author of the article. 

Continue reading Journal retracts article for plagiarized images after trying to gag researcher who complained

Cureus has retracted a 2024 case study after learning it had published a piece about the identical patient, by authors from the same institution, just months earlier.  

The paper, “Lipoma Growing on the Back for 26 Years: A Bizarre Case Report,” was published March 26 and retracted June 17. Three of the four authors are affiliated with Datta Meghe Institute of Higher Education and Research, in Wardha, India. The corresponding author, Samiksha V. Gupta, was a medical student at the institution but has since received his degree. 

The notice states: 

Continue reading Journal retracts redundant case study of same patient from different authors

A 2022 paper in Cureus on causes of cancer around the world is under investigation by the journal following inquiries by Retraction Watch prompted by a reader’s email.

The paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors,” shares a title and figures with a 2005 paper in The Lancet. It also “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” an anonymous tipster told us.

As we’ve noted elsewhere in a report on the team that developed the phrase, “Tortured phrases are what happens to words that get translated from English into a foreign language, then back to English — perhaps by a computer trying to generate a scholarly publication for a group of unscrupulous authors.”

Continue reading Cureus reviewing paper alleged to plagiarize Lancet article

Following an investigation into possible paper mill activities, the journal Cureus has barred a doctor in Pakistan from publishing more papers “out of an abundance of caution,” Retraction Watch has learned.

The journal investigated Satish Kumar, an internist at Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Medical College in Karachi, after a tipster accused him of selling authorship of scientific papers to scientists who did not participate in the research. 

The tipster, who wishes to remain anonymous to avoid backlash from the authors of these papers, sent Cureus WhatsApp messages from a group called “research Match Residency.” There, a user named ”SSS” sent paper titles and offered author slots on manuscripts. Many of the articles were slated for publication in Cureus. 

Continue reading Journal blacklists doctor in Pakistan ‘out of an abundance of caution’