In 2015, the journal Cureus published two neurosurgery papers from the same corresponding author, one month apart.
Soon after, the journal uncovered “potential irregularities” with two reviews during a routine editorial audit, editor John R. Adler Jr. told Retraction Watch: Continue reading An author was accused of faking peer reviews. Turns out he also falsified two images.
An open-access journal with a speedy peer review process has been having some issues with a retracted article on the biology of sex addiction.
Here’s the simple timeline of events: “Hypersexuality Addiction and Withdrawal: Phenomenology, Neurogenetics and Epigenetics,” a review article, was published by Cureus in July, following a two-day peer review. In the weeks that followed, the paper received a number of criticisms. So the journal quietly corrected it, then issued a formal correction, then retracted the paper — and now, finally, has republished it. The editor of the journal, Stanford professor emeritus John Adler, admitted the “decision was dumb” to initially fix the article without an alert, but it was ultimately doomed by “political” issues — namely, a larger debate over whether or not “sex addiction” exists at all.
We’ll start with the retraction. According to the note, it stems from the mistaken characterization of how sex addition — “hypersexuality” — is described in the current “bible” of psychiatry:
Continue reading Sex addiction article retracted, republished
Last week, we reported on the retraction of a paper by Benjamin Jacob Hayempour, a researcher who had threatened to sue us last month for even reporting on another of his retractions.
The journal, Cureus, told us at the time that the retraction — in which the article disappeared, without a notice — didn’t have anything to do with fraud or plagiarism. Hayempour said that “In the pursuit of excellent science, I personally withdrew the article temporarily in order to add an extra section which will make the paper more clinically relevant.”
But we now have the whole story, which reads a bit differently. According to a comment left on our post by journal editor-in-chief John Adler, it was intellectual property issues that forced the retraction: Continue reading Journal reveals real reason for retraction of paper by author who threatened to sue Retraction Watch
Benjamin Jacob Hayempour, the researcher who threatened to sue us for asking questions about a retraction for plagiarism, has had another paper withdrawn.
The paper, published online in the journal Cureus, was titled “Novel Determinants of Tumour Radiosensitivity Post-Large-Scale Compound Library Screening” and had been available at http://www.cureus.com/articles/2394-novel-determinants-of-tumour-radiosensitivity-post-large-scale-compound-library-screening since January 13, but that URL now redirects to Cureus’s homepage.
We asked Cureus editor-in-chief John Adler for details, and he responded: Continue reading Author who threatened to sue Retraction Watch has another paper withdrawn