Category: elsevier

As readers of this blog know, we’re fond of highlighting euphemisms, particularly for plagiarism: “inadvertently copied text,” “a significant originality issue” and and “inclusion of significant passages of unattributed material from other authors” come to mind.

But here’s a euphemism for “bullshit” that’s new to us.

Sometimes, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.

Ask Farukh Iqbal. Earlier this year, Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, was alerted to a recent paper in the journal Fuel that cited a 2020 article he’d written with some colleagues. 

Iqbal read the paper and realized with dismay that not only was his work — which included parts of his thesis — cited, it was plagiarized:

What do subterranean insect provinces and motion to clamor have to do with microprocessors and microsystems?

That’s an excellent question. Read on, dear reader.

It keeps happening. 

There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the world’s leading databases for scholarly literature. The Transylvanian Review did the same thing, and so did Test Engineering and Management.

These journals — which can make millions of dollars for their illegitimate publishers — exploit vulnerabilities in Scopus, owned by Elsevier, by making themselves look close enough to real journals, often exploiting the real ISSN and other metadata of those titles. That, in turn, entices potentially unknowing authors whose careers may depend on publishing in journals in major indexes.

Now into the mix comes Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology. This time, the tip-off, discovered by Russian scholar Dmitry Dubrovsky, was almost unbelievable: an article about the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet resistance to Germany’s 1941 invasion — in a journal specializing in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology.  

The now-infamous “TikTok Doc” who was embroiled in a recently settled sexual harassment suit has lost a 2020 paper on, wait for it, faculty development after his co-authors decided that the collaboration risked “reputational damage” to themselves and dismissal of the work. 

Jason Campbell was an anesthesiology resident at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland, when he became a social media darling. Clips of him dancing in the hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic went viral on TikTok — before Campell was accused of sexually harassing a social worker at the Portland VA hospital, where the anesthesiologist sometimes worked. (Campbell left the institution and reportedly now lives and works in Florida.)

According to The Oregonian, the suit against Cambell and OHSU alleges that: 

Three days after we reported that Elsevier would be retracting a paper about COVID-19 and masks whose author claimed a false affiliation with Stanford, the publisher tells us that the “paper is misleading,” “misquotes and selectively cites published papers,” and that the data in one table is “unverified.”

As we noted earlier this week:

The 2020 paper, “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis,” was written by Baruch Vainshelboim, who listed his affiliation as Stanford University and the VA Palo Alto Health System. But the study gained wide circulation earlier this month, thanks in part to some conservative politicians, and became the subject of fact-checks by the Associated Press and Snopes…

Here is Elsevier’s statement in full:

The author of a 2014 review article about the role of vitamin D in Parkinson’s disease has alerted readers to the fact that roughly one-sixth of her references have since been retracted. But she and the journal are not retracting the review itself. 

The paper, “A review of vitamin D and Parkinson’s disease,” appeared in Elsevier’s Maturitas, which is the official journal of the European Menopause and Andropause Society. The author is Amie Hiller, a neurologist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, and the work has been cited 26 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

According to Hiller, she recently became aware that 10 of the 63 references in her article were to papers by Yoshihiro Sato, a bone researcher in Japan whose 103 retractions put him in the third position on the Retraction Watch leaderboard. Sato’s misdeeds run from lack of IRB approval to fabrication of data, in articles dating back to the mid-1990s. 

Hiller’s letter on the subject, recently published in Maturitas but not linked from the original review, states that: 

An Elsevier journal has retracted more than two dozen Covid-19 papers by a researcher in Malta with a fondness for Star Trek after determining that the articles did not meet its standards for publication.  

The move comes several months after we reported that Hampton Gaddy, a student at the University of Oxford, had raised questions about more than 100 articles written by a pediatric cardiologist named Victor Grech. The papers appeared in Early Human Development (EHD), which Grech managed to turn into something of a vanity press — including for papers about how the lessons of Star Trek shed light on everything from the evolving role of nurses to the horrors of Nazi doctors. 

As Gaddy pointed out to Elsevier last December, Grech has written at least 113 papers in EHD, 57 as sole author: