Among the critiques of a new article is a figure (left) duplicated from a retracted paper (right).
A second paper on a contested pain disease is under investigation after sleuths raised questions about the methodology and possible fabrication of data.
Last year, Scientific Reportsretracted a paper comparing the condition, which the authors dubbed Middle East Pain Syndrome, to rheumatoid arthritis for failing to establish a clear distinction between the two ailments.
The new article, published in January in BMC Rheumatology with two overlapping authors, compares MEPS to fibromyalgia, claiming it is distinct for its “hand tufts spur-like excrescences.”
Bothrops jararaca is a pit viper species prevalent in southeastern Brazil. Credit: Butantan Institute
Agitating snakes isn’t something most of us would do on purpose, but for a group of researchers, it was central to their research. The authors of a May 2024 paper in Scientific Reports achieved that by “softly” stepping on the head, tail and mid-body of newborn, juvenile and adult pit vipers to see how often they would bite.
But the technique wasn’t quite what the authors’ ethics committee had in mind when approving the study. The journal retracted the paper last month, noting the ethics approval the authors received “did not include newborn snakes or the use of the ‘soft stepping’ method.”
Lead author João Miguel Alves-Nunes blamed the retraction on a “communication error” by the ethics committee. The researchers believed they had approval both to step on snakes and to include newborn snakes, Alves-Nunes, a former researcher at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, said in an email to Retraction Watch.
An engineer accused of being involved in paper mill activities mysteriously reappeared on a list of editorial board members at Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports earlier this year, Retraction Watch has learned.
The journal had “parted ways” with the engineer, Masoud Afrand of the Islamic Azad University in Iran, in March 2022 after an internal audit found “irregularities” in how he handled papers, editor-in-chief Rafal Marszalek told us last year.
Because of “an oversight,” however, Afrand remained on the publication’s website until a story by Retraction Watch and Undark raised concerns about his work last year.
Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, has retracted an article a group of sleuths described as “a kind of case study of all the red flags for fraud that we look for” in an open letter to the publisher’s head of research integrity.
In December 2023, a PubPeer user commented on 13 tortured phrases the Problematic Paper Screener had flagged in the article, such as the use of “Parkinson’s illness,” “Parkinson’s infection,” and “Parkinson’s sickness” rather than Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers who said they discovered a new disease akin to rheumatoid arthritis, but caused by pollution, are standing by their claim despite the retraction of their paper last month.
According to the retraction notice, “post-publication peer review by an expert has confirmed the validity” of multiple concerns raised about the study. The paper did not present data to support its claims about the presumed cause for the syndrome, didn’t “conclusively” prove that MEPS is a new disease, and the bone erosions the study claimed were a hallmark of the disease weren’t backed by scans, the notice stated. Also, a figure of the paper featured a radiograph of a patient that wasn’t part of the study.
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.
Fig. 53 from the paper: A simulation of an airburst by physicist Mark Boslough, to which he says incorrect labels were added
A paper that caught flak for its claims that an ancient city in the Middle East was destroyed by an exploding celestial body – and the authors’ suggestion that the event could have inspired the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah – now has an editor’s note acknowledging the journal is looking into concerns about its data and conclusions.
The note follows a litany of criticism on Twitter, PubPeer, and in a “Matters Arising” response, as well as an extensive correction published last year. It appeared just days after Retraction Watch asked the publisher for an update on the case.
Soon after the article’s publication, its claims attracted scrutiny on Twitter, as we reported at the time. Mark Boslough, a retired physicist at the University of New Mexico and expert in planetary impacts and airbursts (when celestial bodies explode above the earth’s surface) kicked off the criticism, and other scientists quickly joined in.
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.
Carine06 from UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2021 article with dire news for mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park about the prospects of extinction on the spikes of SARS-CoV-2 after finding a fatal error in their model of the outbreak.
The article, “Exploring the potential effect of COVID-19 on an endangered great ape,” appeared in October in Scientific Reports and was written by a group at the University of Southern Denmark and the the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, in Atlanta. The Fund has been concerned – for good reason – about the potential of respiratory illnesses to decimate populations of great apes, whose social nature can foster transmission of infections.
Scientific Reports is taking heat on social media and from data sleuths for publishing a paper implying that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might have been the retelling of the devastation wrought by an exploding asteroid in or around the year 1,650 BCE.
