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Cureus reviewing paper alleged to plagiarize Lancet article

A 2022 paper in Cureus on causes of cancer around the world is under investigation by the journal following inquiries by Retraction Watch prompted by a reader’s email.

The paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors,” shares a title and figures with a 2005 paper in The Lancet. It also “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” an anonymous tipster told us.

As we’ve noted elsewhere in a report on the team that developed the phrase, “Tortured phrases are what happens to words that get translated from English into a foreign language, then back to English — perhaps by a computer trying to generate a scholarly publication for a group of unscrupulous authors.”

Exclusive: PLOS ONE to correct 1,000 papers, add author proof step

The megajournal PLOS ONE will be correcting about 1,000 papers over the next few months, Retraction Watch has learned, and will add an author proof step – a first for the journal.

The corrections are for “errors in author names, affiliations, titles and references; to make minor updates to the acknowledgements, funding statements, and data availability statements, among other minor issues,” PLOS ONE head of communications David Knutson told us. He continued:

This batch of corrections does not reflect a recent change in the journal’s quality control standards or processes. Rather, we are clearing a backlog that accumulated during a 2-year period when minor corrections were deprioritized and resources were diverted to other areas. PLOS ONE is in the process of implementing an author proof step so that in the future such errors can be identified and addressed prior to publication.

Journal blacklists doctor in Pakistan ‘out of an abundance of caution’

Following an investigation into possible paper mill activities, the journal Cureus has barred a doctor in Pakistan from publishing more papers “out of an abundance of caution,” Retraction Watch has learned.

The journal investigated Satish Kumar, an internist at Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Medical College in Karachi, after a tipster accused him of selling authorship of scientific papers to scientists who did not participate in the research.

The tipster, who wishes to remain anonymous to avoid backlash from the authors of these papers, sent Cureus WhatsApp messages from a group called “research Match Residency.” There, a user named ”SSS” sent paper titles and offered author slots on manuscripts. Many of the articles were slated for publication in Cureus.

Paper claiming ‘extensive’ harms of COVID-19 vaccines to be retracted

A journal is retracting a paper on the purported harms of vaccines against COVID-19 written in part by authors who have had similar work retracted before.

The article, “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign,” appeared late last month in Cureus, which used to be a stand-alone journal but is now owned by Springer Nature. (It has appeared frequently in these pages.)

Graham Parker, Director of Publishing and Customer Success at Cureus, told Retraction Watch:

I can confirm we will be retracting it by the end of the week, as we have provided the authors with a deadline to reply and indicate whether they agree or disagree with the retraction.

The senior author on the work was Peter McCullough, a cardiologist at the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge who lost his board certification after the American Board of Internal Medicine found he had “provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public.”

Journal retracts more than 50 studies from Saudi Arabia for faked authorship

The journal Cureus has retracted 56 papers nearly two years after it first began to suspect the works were of dubious lineage.

Cureus – an open access journal founded in 2009 and acquired by Springer Nature in 2022 – slapped 55 of the papers with expressions of concern in April 2022. At that time, at least one author said they didn’t know anything about the work and Cureus noted the “articles were submitted and subsequently published purportedly as an effort coordinated by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University to ensure all medical interns publish at least one peer-reviewed article in order to qualify for enrollment in a postgraduate residency program as stipulated by The Saudi Commission for Health Specialties (SCFHS).”

At the time, Cureus’ founding editor in chief John Adler told us “The investigation has been frustratingly slow due to the relative unresponsiveness of Saudi gov officials.” Apparently, that remained the case. This week, the journal retracted 56 studies. All of the retraction notices read the same way:

‘Nonsensical content’: Springer Nature journal breaks up with a paper on a love story

You can love math, but can you math love?

Scientific Reports has retracted a 2023 paper that tried to do just that by imposing a numerical model onto an ancient Persian love story that may have influenced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The paper, “A fractional order nonlinear model of the love story of Layla and Majnun,” was written by Zulqurnain Sabir and Salem Ben Said, both mathematicians at United Arab Emirates University. The article has been cited three times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the abstract:

Former Stanford president retracts Nature paper as another gets expression of concern

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned earlier this year after an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a paper from Nature. The journal’s editorial office marked another of Tessier-Lavigne’s articles with an expression of concern.

The two Nature papers – which have together been cited more than 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – were among five the university investigation examined on which Tessier-Lavigne was the principal author. The other three have been retracted – two from Science and one from Cell. In a statement posted to his lab website July 19, Tessier-Lavigne wrote that he planned to correct the two papers in Nature.

The retracted article, “APP binds DR6 to trigger axon pruning and neuron death via distinct caspases,” appeared in 2009. It has been cited 816 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The retraction notice stated:

PLOS backs down from expression of concern after author’s lawsuit

A researcher who sued the publisher PLOS to prevent it from posting an expression of concern for one of her papers has dropped her suit, and the publisher tells us it will add a correction to the article instead – but may “revisit this case” to deal with “unresolved issues.”

We’ve previously reported on the lawsuit Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., filed against PLOS in April, as well as signs of a pending settlement.

According to an order filed November 2, Singh informed the court that she “voluntarily dismisses” the claims in her complaint, without the possibility of re-filing them, and the judge dismissed the case.

In her complaint, Singh alleged that PLOS planned to place an expression of concern on one of her papers, “Cyclooxygenase pathway mediates the inhibition of Na-glutamine co-transporter B0AT1 in rabbit villus cells during chronic intestinal inflammation,” published in PLOS ONE in September 2018, after she and her co-authors had requested a correction of a duplicated image. The paper has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, but not since April 2021.

Nature pulls study that found climate fears were overblown

It was that rarest of things: a sliver of good news about climate change.

According to calculations published last year in Nature, our planet was keeping pace, and then some, with rising emissions from tropical forest clearance by gobbling up more and more atmospheric carbon.

“What we can mainly prove is that the worst nightmare scenarios of an impaired carbon sink have not yet materialised and that the news is not quite as bad,” Guido van der Werf, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a press release at the time.

His coauthor Dave van Wees added:

Frontiers retracts nearly 40 papers linked to ‘authorship-for-sale’

The publisher Frontiers has retracted nearly 40 papers across multiple journals linked to “the unethical practice of buying or selling authorship on research papers,” according to a press release posted to a company website Monday.

The release also states Frontiers is adopting new policies to prevent the sale of authorships on papers it publishes.

The publisher’s old policy simply stated that “Requests to modify the author list after submission should be made to the editorial office using the authorship change form.”

Now, such requests “will only be granted under exceptional circumstances and after in-depth assessment by the Frontiers’ research integrity unit,” according to the release. The publisher will also keep track of the requests “to identify suspicious patterns and trends.”

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