Category: elsevier

This retraction reminds us of an old joke about food in the Borscht Belt resorts: It’s terrible, and such small portions!

A group of researchers in Japan and Singapore objected to being included on a 2019 paper without their consent — and someone’s feelings appear to have been hurt for having been left off the bogus list of authors. 

The paper, “Effect of copper substitution on the local chemical structure and dissolution property of copper-doped β-tricalcium phosphate,” appeared in Acta Biomaterialia, an Elsevier title. 

Scopus is the world’s largest database of abstracts and citations, and calls itself “comprehensive,” “curated,” and “enriched.” But my recent experience with it suggests its curation could use some work.

In October 2019, I discovered that the Scopus profile of the journal Transylvanian Review contained numerous faked articles. How did I know? A few years ago, a legitimate Scopus indexed journal, Transylvanian Review, was hijacked and listed on the well-known — but controversial — Beall’s List of predatory and unscrupulous publishers.

Many of these articles appeared on the cloned website and were authored by Iraqi researchers.

The cats are back. 

As promised, Biological Conservation has replaced a controversial paper on feral cats in China whose cringeworthy title — “Where there are girls, there are cats” — prompted an outcry on social media that resulted in a temporary retraction. 

The new article boasts a different, non-gendered title: “Understanding how free-ranging cats interact with humans: A case study in China with management implications.” But it makes more or less the same point: Where there are women, there are more cats: 

Alison Avenell first came across The Yamaguchi Osteoporosis Study (YOPS) when she was working on a 2014 Cochrane Review on bone fractures.

She cited the study but felt something was off about it. “I suppose, together with my collaborators over the years, we developed sort of antennae for rather suspicious looking studies,” Avenell, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told Retraction Watch. “And when you see a relatively large trial with just two authors, you think to yourself, that’s not possible.”

Avenell and her colleagues, whose work we’ve written about before, were critical to the retraction of fraudulent research by the late Yoshihiro Sato and his collaborator Jun Iwamoto, who rank third and fourth, respectively, on our retraction leaderboard.

An article claiming that skin pigmentation is related to aggression and sexuality in humans will be retracted, Elsevier announced today.

The study, “Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?” was published online in Personality and Individual Differences, an Elsevier journal, on March 15, 2012.

The study’s authors, John Rushton and Donald Templer, both deceased, hypothesized that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans. It has been cited just nine times in eight years, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Part of the abstract says:

An Elsevier journal is wearing an omelet on its face after accepting a paper by a group of authors who have completely disavowed the work. 

Oh, and no one seems to know who one of the authors is, which makes the second time inside of a month that we’ve reported on a case like this.

The article’s title also misspelled “neuroprogenitor.” But we digress.

Some words do more work in sentences than others. Take the example of the word  “negligence,” which in the case of the following retraction notice is a veritable beast of burden.

The 2019 article, “Conservative management of subglottic stenosis with home based tracheostomy care: A retrospective review of 28 patients,” appeared in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, an Elsevier title. The authors, led by Andrew Pelser, have affiliations in the United Kingdom and South Africa — a fact that appears to be non-trivial. 

Per the abstract: