wiley – Retraction Watch

A journal switches to a new publisher, then corrects a paper. What should happen to the old version?

In January 2022, The Oncologist switched publishers from Wiley to Oxford University Press.

Last month, the journal issued an extensive correction for one of its most popular articles, a 2020 paper that describes results of a clinical trial the authors claimed found a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer.

The article page that remains on Wiley’s website, however, does not reflect the recent correction.

Journal to retract two articles more than six months after VA said they had fake images

The Journal of Cellular Physiology, a Wiley title, will retract two articles by an arthritis researcher the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found to have engaged in research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

Last November, the VA published findings stating Hee-Jeong Im Sampen, formerly a research biologist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago, faked images and inflated sample sizes in three published papers, a grant application, a presentation, and an unpublished manuscript.

Based on the findings, the VA banned Sampen, who publishes under the name Hee-Jeong Im, from conducting research for the department and requested retractions of the three publications.

Two of the papers, “Development of an Experimental Animal Model for Lower Back Pain by Percutaneous Injury-Induced Lumbar Facet Joint Osteoarthritis” and “Environmental Disruption of Circadian Rhythm Predisposes Mice to Osteoarthritis-Like Changes in Knee Joint,” appeared in the Journal of Cellular Physiology in 2015, and don’t currently have any sort of notice about the VA finding they contain faked images.

Wiley journal retracts two papers it said were fine following criticism years ago

Two years after a journal told sleuths it wouldn’t retract flawed papers, it changed course and pulled them.

Mark Bolland, a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who is no stranger to unearthing academic wrongdoing, first sent complaints about one of the papers to The International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (IJGO) in March 2021. He said the data on bone mineral density in “Isosorbide mononitrate versus alendronate for postmenopausal osteoporosis,” which has been cited 26 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, were “impossible.”

Bolland said the data the researchers reported were not consistent with the reference values provided by the maker of the device used to measure bone density in the study. The normal ranges are 0.96 +/- 0.12 g/cm², whereas the experiment reported much lower values of 0.21-0.24 g/cm².

In an email to Retraction Watch, Bolland’s colleague Andrew Grey called the data “laughable, frankly.”

Give or take a year or two: Case reveals publishers’ vastly different retraction times

On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.”

“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.

Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:

A study of C-section scars – in women who hadn’t undergone the surgery

A study purportedly of scars left by caesarean sections included women yet to undergo the surgery, say sleuths. But an investigation into the research by the author’s employer and the journal that published it found no evidence of research misconduct.

The paper, published in Wiley journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, was flagged on PubPeer in February by Ben Mol, an ob-gyn researcher at Monash University in Australia whose efforts have led to scores of retractions and corrections, and Jim Thornton, emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Nottingham, in the UK. The study looks at how the scar left behind on a woman’s uterus after a c-section is affected by the dilation of her cervix at the time of the procedure.

Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool

Wiley, whose Hindawi subsidiary has attracted thousands of paper mill papers that later needed to be retracted, has seen widespread paper mill activity among hundreds of its journals, it announced yesterday.

More than 270 of its titles rejected anywhere from 600 to 1,000 papers per month before peer review once they implemented a pilot of what the publisher calls its Papermill Detection service. That service flagged 10-13% of all of the 10,000 manuscripts submitted to those journals per month, Wiley told Retraction Watch.

Wiley said the service includes “six distinct tools,” including looking for similarities with known paper mill papers, searching for “tortured phrases” and other problematic passages, flagging “irregular publishing patterns by paper authors,” verifying researcher identity, detecting hallmarks of generative AI, and analyzing the relevance of a given manuscript to the journal.

Econ journal board quits en masse because Wiley ‘appeared to emphasize quantity over quality’

In what has become a familiar refrain, more than 30 editors and advisors of an economics journal have resigned because they felt the publisher’s need for growth would increase the “risks of proliferation of poor-quality science.”

In a letter uploaded to Dropbox on February 7, the editors and advisors of the Journal of Economic Surveys said: “We no longer believed that the corporate policies and practices of the Journal’s publisher, Wiley, as we perceived them through several statements made by Wiley and the draft of a new editor agreement submitted to the attention of Editors-in-Chief and Managing Editors by Wiley, were coherent with ours.”

Despite involving a lawyer, the now-former editors said:

Wiley journal editors resign en masse, fired chief editor speaks

Two-thirds of the associate editors of the Journal of Biogeography, a Wiley title, have resigned in a dispute with the publisher, and more resignations are likely, according to those involved.

Most of the resignations, reported first by Times Higher Education, were effective immediately, but a portion of the associate editors set August 28 as their effective date in hopes Wiley may negotiate with them about their concerns.

Most of the associate editors stopped processing new manuscripts at the end of June, as we reported last month, due to the dispute.

In interviews with Retraction Watch, two associate editors who had put in their resignations described concerns with the journal’s high article processing charges (APCs) fueling Wiley’s profitability, as well as the “breakdown in negotiations” between the publisher and the journal’s lead editorial team.

An editor resigned in protest. Now, Wiley is firing him four months earlier than he planned to leave.

The publisher Wiley has fired the chief editor of the Journal of Biogeography after he resigned over conflicts with the company.

Michael Dawson, a professor at the University of California, Merced, submitted his resignation on June 21, tweeting that he made the decision “because journal management declined to explore productive solutions to a suite of challenges facing the journal.”

He also tweeted:

Journal editors resign, strike in dispute with Wiley over ‘business model that maximises profit’

The editor in chief of a Wiley journal has resigned, saying the publisher recently has “seemed to emphasize cost-cutting and margins over good editorial practice.”

Most of the journal’s associate editors are in the midst of a work stoppage protesting the same issues. After Wiley responded to the associate editors in a way they found “troubling,” the editors replied with a list of 12 demands, and a deputy editor in chief tendered her resignation.

Editorial boards of at least three other journals have recently resigned en masse, or threatened to resign, amid similar disputes.

Michael Dawson, editor in chief of the Journal of Biogeography, published a blog post announcing his resignation on June 21. In it, he wrote:

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