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.
Provide defense-focused graduate education, including classified studies and interdisciplinary research, to advance the operational effectiveness, technological leadership and warfighting advantage of the Naval service.
Chu’s paper, which appeared in Scientific Reports in January 2020, argued that:
The first author of a highly controversial — and now retracted — paper linking body weight to integrity calls the journal’s decision to pull the article “a bitter surprise” and its handling of the article after publication “deeply unfair.”
More than five months after outraged readers demanded that a Springer Nature journal retract a paper linking body mass index to honesty, the publication has been pulled.
The journal now says that a post-publication review of the article found that the data don’t support the authors’ conclusions — which is another way of saying that the pre-publication peer review missed that fact.
A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move
a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.
A highly controversial 2018 paper suggesting that too much bent-neck staring at your cell phone could sprout, in the words of one of the authors, a “horn” on the back of your head is — perhaps unsurprisingly — getting corrected.
The article, “Prominent exostosis projecting from the occipital squama more substantial and prevalent in young adult than older age groups,” which appeared in Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports in February 2018, received scads of media coverage earlier this year. The stories initially were alarmist but grew increasingly skeptical as journalists and experts began poking holes in the authors’ claims.
The corrected paper doesn’t completely walk back the association, but it definitely mutes the assertions significantly. For example, the original discussion section included this passage:
