Scopus has struck all links to the homepages of journals it indexes, Elsevier announced earlier this month. The move follows revelations that content from dozens of hijacked journals had been included in the database.
In a December 18 blog post, Scopus – which many universities and government agencies around the world use to create journal “whitelists” where authors are encouraged or even paid to publish – explains its rationale:
The publisher Elsevier is investigating an unspecified number of articles by authors affiliated with a French research institute for concerns about “the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants.”
According to a “Publisher’s Note” that appeared November 9 in Elsevier’s New Microbes and New Infections, “concerns have been raised about a number of articles” published in the journal by researchers affiliated with the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection (IHU-MI) in Marseille.
The journal and Elsevier’s “Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics Centre of Expertise” are investigating the allegations “by confidentially consulting with the authors and, where necessary, liaising with the institution where the studies took place,” the note said. It continued:
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.
In 2021, I created an alert on Scopus to keep me updated about new publications in the Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences, which had beenhijacked by fraudulent publishers. I wanted to know if unauthorized content from this hijacked journal ended up in the index.
However, I forgot about the alert until last month, when I received three notifications from Scopus regarding new publications in the journal.
These notifications included lists of a dozen papers indexed in Scopus, all of them originating from the hijacked version of the journal. Inspecting the profile of the journal showed that probably more than 55 papers from the hijackers are currently indexed in Scopus:
In October, the Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation tried – and failed – to publish its own ranking of important papers in the field. The article, “The Top 50 Articles on Knee Posterolateral Corner Injuries,” by a group at Tulane University in New Orleans, purported to give readers a run-down of the 50 most-cited papers on posterolateral corner injuries between 1976 and 2021.
If you’re afraid of numbers, you might want to skip ahead. If not: Within the top 50 was a Top 10 list, capped by this 2009 review article, which, according to the authors, had garnered 205 citations – and amassed a citation density of 15.77 (citations divided by years in print) – since publication.
Citation density, meet the dust. According to the retraction notice:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 V1B 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.)
