elsevier – Retraction Watch

Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases

The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications. One of the titles, which was included in Clarivate’s Web of Science, was dropped from that index as well.

Last month we reported on allegations that one of the delisted journals, the Medical Journal of Babylon, a publication of the University of Babylon in Hilla, was coercing authors to cite its articles. Citation manipulation is widespread in Iraq and elsewhere, but is considered a form of scientific misconduct.

“The Medical Journal of Babylon was flagged for re-evaluation at the end of September when we received concerns, and because we observed outlier publication performance,” said a spokesperson from Elsevier, which owns Scopus. The publisher marked the journal as delisted in its October update of indexed and delisted titles.

Botanists plant a stake in oral cancer research with case report, now under investigation

Elsevier is investigating a case report of a person with aggressive cancer, written by three plant researchers working far afield of their specialty.

The three authors of the study, published June 2024 in Oral Oncology Reports, purport to diagnose a 63-year-old man with a rare, aggressive form of oral cancer. The journal is a companion title to Elsevier’s Oral Oncology according to the homepage, but is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Corresponding author Velmani Sankaravel told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues found the case report from an “online open-access source” and then used it “to support our research on plant-based diagnostics for oral cancer.” However, the paper lists CT scans, biopsies, and other routine diagnostic tests and makes no mention of plant-based diagnostic tools.

Journal retracts ‘bizarre’ placebo effect paper

An Elsevier journal has retracted a study on the placebo effect coauthored by a researcher known for extreme claims that have failed to withstand scrutiny. The move comes after critics said the researchers misunderstood “what a ‘treatment effect’ is.”

The study, published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in December 2024, analyzed 30 clinical trials examining treatments for a total of five conditions. The authors concluded “the placebo-effect is the major driver of treatment effects in clinical trials that alone explains 69% of the variance.” It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The last author of the study is Harald Walach, who may be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch. In one now-retracted paper, Walach and his coauthors claimed the COVID-19 vaccines killed two people for every three deaths they prevented. In a different, also retracted paper, Walach and colleagues claimed children’s masks trap carbon dioxide. (They later republished the article in a different journal.)

Exclusive: A misconduct ruling, a flawed investigation, and an attempted payoff

In April 2019, Daejung Kim, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found a draft manuscript on the desk of a postdoc in the same laboratory. The manuscript included the experimental results on metal alloys he had spent months collecting. Kim hadn’t been told about the paper, nor had anyone asked his permission to use the data. The findings were central to Kim’s Ph.D. thesis and publishing them would mean the data were no longer original.

“I was shaking in the lab,” he recalled recently. “When I saw it, I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know what to do.”

Kim took his concerns to his supervisor, Kenong Xia, a materials scientist and head of the lab, asking for his help to resolve the issue. He wanted to be credited as a coauthor on any papers using his results. He also emailed the postdoc, Ahmad Zafari, asking to see a draft of the paper.

Widespread image reuse, manipulation uncovered in animal studies of brain injury

One of the papers in the analysis contained a figure (bottom) found to have overlap with other work by the same author (top). Both papers have been retracted.
*Annotated images: PubPeer*

More than 200 papers on ways to prevent brain injury after a stroke contain problematic images, according to an analysis published today in PLOS Biology. Researchers found dozens of duplicated Western blots and reused images of tissues and cells purportedly showing different experimental conditions — both within a single paper and across separate publications.

As we reported last year, René Aquarius and Kim Wever, of the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, first noticed these patterns in 2023 when they started working on a systematic review of animal studies in the field. They had wanted to identify promising interventions for preventing early brain injury following hemorrhagic stroke. Instead, their efforts turned into an audit of suspicious papers in their field.

Of the 608 studies they analyzed, more than 240, or 40 percent, contained problematic images. So far, 19 of those articles have been retracted and 55 corrected, mostly from the researchers’ efforts to alert journals and publishers about the issues. Almost 90 percent of the problematic papers had a corresponding author based in China, and many appeared in major journals such as Stroke, Brain Research and Molecular Neurobiology.

Soil scientist previously named in citation scandal appointed to editor role at Elsevier journal

A soil scientist who resigned from several journals in 2017 after being linked to manipulated citations has been appointed to the editorial board of a journal copublished by Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media.

International Soil and Water Conservation Research announced in April that Artemi Cerdà would serve as an editorial board member, describing him as a “renowned researcher” in the field of soil erosion and land management. The appointment comes eight years after Cerdà, of the University of Valencia, in Spain, was found to have manipulated citations in favor of his own work and journals with which he was associated.

While Cerdà has not responded to our questions about his appointment, a spokesperson for Elsevier acknowledged Cerdà’s history but defended the decision, writing that researchers “grow into their roles through participation and learning.” The spokesperson continued:

Sleuth unearths citation, authorship issues at earth sciences journal

Carlos Conforti Ferreira Guedes, a geology professor at the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil, came across a paper in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences earlier this year with irrelevant, and in some cases nonexistent, references.

Made-up citations can indicate the use of generative AI in crafting the paper – but another detail caught his attention as particularly odd: The researchers on the paper, a study on the transformation of the Brazilian coastline, all listed affiliations in India. Guedes reached out to one of the editors-in-chief of the journal at the time, Andres Folguera, on March 10 to notify the journal about the issues.

As Guedes and his colleagues noted in a May 19 blog post on the Brazilian Association for Quaternary Studies (ABEQUA) website, “there were no citations of work conducted in Brazil or by researchers who had previously worked in the region.”

Why has this microRNA review paper been cited more than 2,000 times?

Earlier this year, Marc Halushka, a pathologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, came across a review titled simply “MicroRNA,” an unusually short title in a big field. Looking deeper into the review, published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology in 2018, Halushka found it had been cited more than 2,000 times. He thought this number “shockingly high,” given the article’s brevity and content.

Other, older reviews on microRNA from leaders in the field have been cited far more often, some even tens of thousands of times. But when searching “microRNA” on Google Scholar, the review with that single term as its title is the first result.

Halushka doesn’t think anything in the paper is wrong or out of date. But the citation was among those in a paper he was asked to review that he thought “was clearly a paper mill paper,” he told Retraction Watch. He suspects when people “who know nothing about microRNAs because they are just in the paper mill business” need to cite a review on the topic, they just use the top search result.

When you discover you’re an author on a paper you’ve never seen

Learning a paper with your name on it has been published is typically something to celebrate. But for one climate scientist, a recent notification was the first he learned the manuscript even existed.

So instead of rejoicing, Jan Cermak, a researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, was busy writing to the journal Chemosphere about a paper he’d been credited with but never seen.

The paper, on meteorologic influences on air pollution in India, has been retracted after it became clear that a visiting fellow included Cermak as a coauthor without his permission.

Deputy department chair loses paper for image duplication, more retractions to follow

An Elsevier journal has retracted a paper coauthored by a deputy department chair at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and says it plans to retract at least two more of his articles for image-related concerns.

The 2022 paper, in Matrix Biology, describes the regulatory role of proteoglycans in remodeling of the cervix during pregnancy. According to the August 12 retraction notice, 18 of the image panels were duplicates. The paper has been cited 18 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Renato Iozzo, deputy chair of Pathology, Anatomy & Cell Biology at Jefferson, is a coauthor on the study. Neither Iozzo nor corresponding author Mala Mahendroo, a researcher at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, responded to our requests for comment.

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