by journal – Page 5 – Retraction Watch

Exclusive: PLOS ONE to retract more than 100 papers for manipulated peer review

In March, an editor at PLOS ONE noticed something odd among a stack of agriculture manuscripts he was handling. One author had submitted at least 40 manuscripts over a 10-month period, much more than expected from any one person.

The editor told the ethics team at the journal about the anomaly, and they started an investigation. Looking at the author lists and academic editors who managed peer review for the papers, the team found that some names kept popping up repeatedly.

Within a month, the initial list of 50 papers under investigation expanded to more than 300 submissions received since 2020 – about 100 of them already published – with concerns about improper authorship and conflicts of interest that compromised peer review.

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions

Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.

The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.

One 2021 article, “Numerical investigation of nanofluid flow using CFD and fuzzy-based particle swarm optimization,” drew a significant amount of attention on PubPeer. In January, a commenter pointed out a variety of apparent problems with the paper and noted that questions have been raised about other work by members of the group – including this now-retracted article in … Scientific Reports.

The Lancet more than doubles its impact factor, eclipsing NEJM for the first time ever

The Lancet has overtaken the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, according to Clarivate’s 2022 update to its Journal Citation Reports. And the jump wasn’t subtle: The Lancet’s impact factor – a controversial measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited on average – more than doubled from last year.

Lancet can thank the COVID-19 pandemic for its surge.

In separate news, Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation, and warned a half dozen others.

As we’ve written in posts on previous years’ reports:

Cornell food marketing researcher who retired after misconduct finding is publishing again

Brian Wansink, the food marketing researcher who retired from Cornell in 2019 after the university found that he had committed academic misconduct, has published two new papers.

The articles, in Cureus and the International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health, appear to use data that are at least a decade old. Wansink’s only coauthor on the papers is Audrey Wansink, a high school student and, evidently, his daughter. Brian Wansink did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.

Wansink’s work came under scrutiny beginning in 2016, after he published a blog post that described research practices that sounded like p-hacking to some readers. Other researchers started reviewing his published papers and found many issues.

Journal issues 55 expressions of concern at once

The journal Cureus has issued expressions of concern for a whopping 55 papers whose authorship has come into question.

The articles, including a couple like this one on COVID-19, were apparently submitted as part of an effort by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, in Saudi Arabia, to pad the publishing resumes of its medical students – and perhaps the school’s own metrics – who targeted Cureus for reasons that aren’t now clear.

Here’s the notice for “Sylvian Fissure Lipoma: An Unusual Etiology of Seizures in Adults,” which the journal published in January 2022:

Chemistry paper retracted from Science

Science has retracted a 2020 paper which hinted at the future of eco-friendly pharmaceuticals after concluding that the data had been manipulated.

The article, “Asymmetric remote C–H borylation of aliphatic amides and esters with a modular iridium catalyst,” came from a team anchored by Masaya Sawamura, of Hokkaido University, in Sapporo.

Funding for the study – which has been cited 57 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science – came from the Japanese government and the Uehara Memorial Foundation. Hokkaido is now investigating, Science said.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The paper received some attention, including this article in Chemistry & Engineering News which described the results this way:

Authors retract second Majorana paper from Nature

A year after retracting a Nature paper claiming to find evidence for the elusive Majorana particle that many hope would have paved the way for a quantum computer, a group of researchers have retracted a second paper on the subject from the same journal.

In the August 2017 paper “Epitaxy of advanced nanowire quantum devices,” Erik Bakkers of QuTech and Kavli Institute of NanoScience, Delft University of Technology, in The Netherlands, and colleagues claim that the work is a “substantial materials advancement that paves the road for the first Majorana braiding experiments.” The paper has been cited 189 times, earning it a “highly cited paper” designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But the Majorana story has been unraveling after other physicists began raising questions. In March 2021, the group retracted a Nature paper. That was followed by an expression of concern for related work in Science in July, and another expression of concern in Science in December.

8 years after three papers are flagged — and after losing original correspondence — PLOS ONE retracts

A group of nutrition researchers in Canada led by the prominent diabetes scientist Emile Levy has lost three papers in PLOS ONE over concerns about the integrity of the data.

The concerns were raised nearly eight years ago by Elisabeth Bik, early in her career as a data sleuth.

In May 2014, Bik told us, she contacted the journal to point out problems with images in the articles, as well as a fourth paper that has received an expression of concern:

Triple sunrise, triple sunset: Science paper retracted when it turns out a planet is a star

Artist’s impression of HD 131399 from 2016 (via European Southern Observatory)

When Kevin Wagner at the University of Arizona and colleagues published a paper in Science about their discovery of a new planet in 2016, it captured the attention of a lot of science writers.

Finding the object – HD 131399 – meant that “astronomers have discovered a planet with an even more exotic sight on its horizon: a triple sunset,” in the words of The New York Times.

Or, as the AP put it, “a planet with triple sunrises and sunsets every day for part of the year.”

Is a “Wall of Shame” a good idea for journals?

Today, the journal Cureus — which is no stranger to Retraction Watch — unveiled what they are calling a “Wall of Shame,” which “highlights authors and reviewers who have committed egregious ethical violations as well as the institutions that enabled them.”

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