elsevier – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

The Whack-a-Mole problem: Hijacked journal still being indexed in Scopus even after discovery

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

Hijacked journal: Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies

What happened: The journal became a perfect target for hijackers when it expanded its title from “Linguistica Antverpiensia” and changed its web domain.

Fraudulent publishers hijacked the journal in 2021, re-registering the old, expired domain under the original, shorter name Linguistica Antverpiensia.

Contempt judgment in penile implant spat leads to retraction

The authors of a 2021 paper on a method of male enhancement have been forced to retract the paper after losing a legal battle over the technology.

At the heart (er, groin?) of the matter is a dispute over the ownership of a penile implant. According to court documents, James Elist, a urologist in Beverly Hills, Calif., developed the device, which he commercialized as Penuma for men who want a bit more than nature provided.

Penuma received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2004, becoming the first such product to reach the market. (As Elist told GQ in 2016, the surgically-implanted devices come only in large sizes because “nobody wants a small.”)

Elist alleges in a lawsuit that in 2018, a urologist in Texas named Robert Cornell contacted him with questions about how to use the Penuma in practice – questions the California physician claims were really efforts at corporate espionage:

Article on sexual orientation and psych disorders retracted – without the author’s knowledge, he says

A paper about the potential influence of neurotransmitters on the development of sexual orientation and psychiatric disorders that caught flack on social media a year ago has now been retracted – so recently that the corresponding author said he didn’t know about the retraction until we asked him about it.

Late last year, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, an Elsevier journal, published an expression of concern for the article “Sexual orientation, neuropsychiatric disorders and the neurotransmitters involved.” It was published online in September 2021 and has not been cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notice said only that “some readers have raised concerns” about the article, which the journal was discussing the the authors, a group led by Dick Swaab of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam.

Psychologists want to retract old papers about conversion therapy. Elsevier says no.

Over the past year, a professional society for cognitive therapists has been pondering what to do with dozens of decades-old articles about conversion therapy – the practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – in the archives of the journals it publishes.

The society, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), was considering a variety of options, including retraction.

But in a statement the group published earlier this month, ABCT said Elsevier, the journals’ publisher, would not allow retraction of the articles.

Exclusive: Elsevier retracting 500 papers for shoddy peer review

Elsevier is retracting 500 papers from a journal dedicated to conference proceedings because “the peer-review process was confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected,” Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported a month ago, “data thug” James Heathers “found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing ‘tortured phrases’ that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.”

Shortly thereafter, Elsevier told us they were beginning an investigation of the title, Materials Today: Proceedings. Yesterday, they said the retractions were beginning.

When failure to correct a flawed paper could put patients’ lives at risk

On April 15, 2021, as COVID-19 was waning several months prior to the surge in deaths associated with arrival of the Delta variant, the journal Cell published an eye-catching paper.

Titled “Soluble ACE2-mediated cell entry of SARS-CoV-2 via interaction with proteins related to the renin-angiotensin system,” the article stood in stark contrast to the contemporary understanding of the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which until then held that ACE2 on the membranes of susceptible cells served as the “receptor” for the virus.

The paper was notable because it claimed that vasopressin, also known as antidiuretic hormone, worsened COVID-19 infections. Vasopressin is known for its ability to promote water retention in the kidneys as well as to constrict blood vessels, but had not previously been associated with COVID-19 infections.

Upon reading the paper, one of us (MB) noted a large number of inaccuracies. The authors had used the wrong reagent: a high molecular weight precursor of vasopressin rather than vasopressin itself. They also incorrectly portrayed ACE2, the V_1B vasopressin receptor, and the AT₁ angiotensin II receptor – the primary mediators of their hypothetical mechanism of COVID-19 infection. (PubPeer commenters also pointed out problems in the paper, including a failure of the authors to post their original data.)

An Elsevier journal said it would retract 10 papers two years ago. It still hasn’t.

An Elsevier journal has sat for two years on its decision to retract 10 papers by researchers with known misconduct issues, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

The Journal of the Neurological Sciences had decided by June 2020 to retract the articles by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who are currently in positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions, according to the emails. But the papers still haven’t been retracted, to the disappointment of one of the data sleuths who raised concerns about the work – and in the meantime have been cited more than a dozen times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

As Andrew Grey, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, wrote to a staffer at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) who became involved in the case:

An Elsevier book plagiarizes an abstract published by…Elsevier

Elsevier plans to remove the introduction from a book on mineralogy after investigating allegations of plagiarism, including from another Elsevier publication, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.

Photo Atlas of Mineral Pseudomorphism by J. Theo Kloprogge and Robert Lavinsky, was published in 2017 and still appears to be for sale for $100 for a hardcover and ebook bundle. (The usual price is $200, but there is a sale on at the time of this writing.) Its listing on ScienceDirect includes the introduction with no note about removal.

As we’ve previously reported, Elsevier last year retracted an entire book by Kloprogge, an adjunct professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas and honorary senior fellow at the University of Queensland, that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia.

According to the emails we obtained, Gloria Staebler, of mineralogical publisher Lithographie, Ltd., noticed the plagiarism in the book in May while preparing to formally publish a manuscript by Si and Ann Frazier that had been circulated in a mineral club newsletter in 2005. In a May 31st email to an editor at Elsevier, Staebler laid out her evidence:

Widely touted abstract on ivermectin and COVID-19 retracted

The authors of a controversial meeting abstract linking ivermectin to lower mortality from Covid-19 have retracted the study, saying that the work has been widely “misinterpreted” and might be leading to patient harm.

The abstract, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database,” was presented at the 2021 International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance.

According to the researchers, from the University of Miami, Covid-19 patients who took ivermectin were about 70% less likely to die of the disease than those who took remdesivir.

A college that doesn’t exist. An email address that goes dark. Who wrote this paper?

Alexander Templeton works at the math library of Glen Liberty Community College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

At least that’s what a paper, “A bibliometric analysis of Atangana-Baleanu operators in fractional calculus,” Templeton appears to have published in the Alexandria Engineering Journal claims. But no Glen Liberty Community College appears to exist in Scottsbluff – or anywhere – and the Gmail address Templeton used as contact information no longer works. (There is a Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, but no Glen Liberty.)

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