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.)
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.)
A researcher who guest edited an issue has lost two papers after a journal’s publisher discovered that he had changed his name on the manuscripts following submission.
There’s a new entry on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. And this one is also the fourth member of the Retraction Watch Century Club.
An anesthesiology researcher in Japan is now up to 117 retractions – putting him third on our list of most-retracted authors.
Hironobu Ueshima, formerly of Showa University Hospital in Tokyo, was found to have committed misconduct in 142 papers, according to a pair of investigations, one by his erstwhile institution and another by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists (JSA). We first reported on the existence of the investigation in June 2020, some three months after Australian anesthesiologist and journal editor John Loadsman raised concerns with journals involved in the case.
In September 2015, after a lengthy investigation, the Committee on Scientific Integrity (CSI) of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) advised the LUMC Board of Directors to ask for retraction of two publications because of major data manipulation in images. The case involved Maria Fousteri, who by then had left LUMC.
In the Netherlands it is possible to ask a second opinion, as a non-binding but influential appeal procedure, from the national LOWI (Landelijk Orgaan Wetenschappelijke Integriteit). Fousteri did so. In May 2016, after careful deliberations and a hearing of individuals directly involved, the LOWI fully supported the conclusion of the CSI.
This led the Board to inform several parties, including the defendant’s current employer, and agencies that had provided grants based on the fraudulent work, and to formally ask the journal Molecular Cell to retract two publications. They would not do so for more than five years, with retractionnotices published only this month that list data manipulations in several figures.
