by publisher – Retraction Watch

Scientific Reports on hold in PubMed while NLM reevaluates journal

The National Library of Medicine has stopped indexing articles from Scientific Reports in MEDLINE because the journal’s inclusion in the world’s largest biomedical library is under review, Retraction Watch has learned.

“Following its significant growth in recent years, Scientific Reports is currently being reviewed by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM),” the journal’s chief editor Rafal Marszalek wrote in an Oct. 20 email we have seen. “We have been informed that during this period, indexing of newly published content in MEDLINE and archiving in PubMed Central (PMC) are paused, and will not appear in PubMed.”

Marszalek did not say why NLM is reviewing Scientific Reports, which is the largest journal in PubMed in terms of articles indexed. But according to MEDLINE’s policies page, NLM re-evaluates journals if “there are significant changes to a journal,” noting the library monitors journals “for changes in publication practices, such as annual publication volume or primary article content types.”

Springer Nature journal could lose registry standing for clearing author of duplication

A Springer Nature journal’s failure to find duplication in two papers by the same author could cost its official recognition as a scholarly publication in Norway.

The national register in Norway that decides which journals count toward academics’ publication records has concluded there is “no doubt” of duplication between two papers, which appear to use the same student survey. The ruling comes more than a year after Springer Nature, publisher of one of the journals, Innovative Higher Education, investigated the same issue and cleared the author.

Both papers were written by Artur Strzelecki of the University of Economics in Katowice, Poland, who denies there was any wrongdoing. Springer Nature told Retraction Watch it would consider the assessment from Norway, which it said was not available when the journal’s editors investigated.

Federal U.S. judge tosses $1 billion defamation lawsuit against Elsevier

A district judge has ended a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier over a study about air purification technology after concluding the plaintiff’s evidence was too weak to take to trial.

Global Plasma Solutions, which makes air quality products, sued Elsevier in 2022 after the publisher declined to retract a paper in Building and Environment about the company’s needlepoint bipolar ionization technology. GPS claimed Elsevier was responsible for the authors’ alleged omission of data and misleading conclusions in the paper that led to “massive” financial losses for the company, according to its complaint. GPS, which now goes by GPS Air, claimed Elsevier knew the paper “failed peer review” but still published the paper.

On Oct. 22, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina tossed out the suit. Judge Kenneth Bell wrote in his order there was “insufficient evidence” for a jury to conclude Elsevier acted with malice. “Actual malice” requires a plaintiff to prove the alleged defamatory statement was made with “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard,” which GPS could not support, according to Bell.

Game theory society yanks support for journal after Elsevier fails to renew EIC contract

The Game Theory Society is severing ties with one of its official journals. The move comes two months after the journal’s editors resigned because Elsevier failed to renew the contract for the journal’s editor-in-chief.

The society released a statement on October 9 announcing it will “withdraw its support for and end its association with” Games and Economic Behavior effective November 15.

“Our decision follows Elsevier’s decision not to renew Hervé Moulin’s contract and its subsequent search for new editors without the involvement of the existing editorial board,” the statement says. As we reported in August, Moulin, a business professor of the University of Glasgow, said the publisher “crossed a fundamental red line in the good faith agreement between the Editorial Board and the publisher” by not consulting with the editorial board regarding future editorial appointments. A spokesperson for Elsevier said the publisher asked the board members and Moulin for feedback but did not receive responses.

Journal updates retraction notice as Princeton student author stays in the spotlight

A Wiley journal has corrected a retraction notice to clarify the author, a Princeton student, never conducted the study in the first place, as the student has gained publicity for visits to the offices of Texas Congressional delegation.

The paper, by Rishika Porandla, purportedly described a new way to break down polyvinyl chloride plastic by mixing it with gold nanoparticles and blasting it with an electron beam. Macromolecular Materials and Engineering retracted the study this May after Porandla, an astrophysics student at Princeton who completed the study while in high school, notified editors of methodological errors in the work.

But following an Aug.10 Retraction Watch story highlighting Porandla’s decision to retract her own paper after she contacted us about her initiative to “correct the scientific record,” commenters on our site and on PubPeer raised doubts about whether the experiments described in the study were genuine. Porandla later told us she never conducted the experiments.

Thousands of research studies violate journal policies on collaborations between editors and authors

A tool developed to mine metadata and find past collaborations between handling editors and authors has turned up thousands of cases that breach journal policies on such relationships. *J. Di Scala et al/JCDL ’26*

Over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers from two publishers breach journal policies about past collaborations between handling editors and authors, a new analysis has found.

The work — presented October 15 at the 26th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Frisco, Texas — examined how often research studies published by journals run by the Public Library of Science and MPDI violate the publishers’ policies covering conflicts of interest.

PLOS requires that a handling editor of a manuscript and its authors haven’t coauthored papers together in the previous five years, while MDPI’s limit is three years.

To mine those relationships, Jules Di Scala, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, and his colleagues developed a tool called EditorCheck. It scans metadata files of published papers to collect the names of handling editors of each manuscript. It then searches the database Dimensions for any papers on which the handling editor and author were coauthors.

Journal founded by plastic surgeon touts studies of products he’s tied to – including one that has been retracted

*An illustration of a cell secreting exosomes. Meletios Verras/iStock*

In a February 2018 editorial, Rod Rohrich, a plastic surgeon and the former president of the World Association of Medical Editors, blasted predatory journals for “the damage that these illegitimate open access journals do to the reputation of legitimate, credible ones.”

Two years later, he wrote about how his team at Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery–Global Open, the journal he founded in 2013, had demonstrated to authors and readers that they had created a rigorous peer-review process and were “advancing patient safety and outcomes and elevating the science of plastic surgery globally.”

But an investigation by Retraction Watch raises questions about the way Rohrich, who is now editor emeritus at the journal, has promoted preliminary and sometimes misleading research about products to which he has financial ties. That includes exosomes, which are often derived from stem cells and have increasingly been touted — with limited evidence — for skin care, hair loss and wound healing.

Authors respond with ‘a bit like a threat’ after journal reveals postdoc’s identity

In March, Thomas Harvey sat in on a talk at the American Physical Society’s summit in Denver on a new model of the universe that claimed to eliminate the need for dark matter and dark energy. William George, a fluid dynamicist who spent his career studying turbulence and an emeritus professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, gave the presentation.

“It was very rambling,” said Harvey, a postdoc working in high energy theory at MIT, “and it was very clearly wrong.”

After the talk, Harvey found George’s paper on the topic in Physics of Fluids. He decided to flag the problems he saw on PubPeer under a pseudonym, including errors in the math and misapplied principles of general relativity, and then sent a “polite email” to the editors.

“That’s where it went very wrong,” Harvey said.

‘Cerebral torment’: IOP retracts nearly 100 conference papers for tortured phrases

IOP Publishing has retracted nearly 100 papers from three of its conference proceedings after the articles were flagged for containing tortured phrases.

Tortured phrases are rephrasings and synonyms — often awkward and nonsensical — substituted in text to evade plagiarism detectors. For example, one of the retracted papers described “savvy lattices” and “shrewd homes” instead of “smart grids” and “smart homes.” Tortured phrases pre-date AI technology.

The recent batch includes 29 retractions from Journal of Physics: Conference Series; eight from Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science; and 43 from Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering.

Wildlife journal issues corrections for missing ethics statements

In what one sleuth called a “systemic failure,” a wildlife journal has issued corrections to a handful of papers not for an error in the articles but to include an item that wasn’t: ethics statements.

The most recent such correction in the European Journal of Wildlife Research (EJWR) was on September 8. According to the notice, authors of a March article on mammal diversity in Mexico provided additional information on the camera trapping method employed in the study — namely, that their research did not require approval from an animal ethics committee.

At least three other similar corrections have appeared in EJWR in the last four years, with several more articles with missing ethics statements flagged on PubPeer by commenter “Pseudotocinclus tietensis.” For example, for a 2021 paper on “understanding human controversies on the return of the wolf through the use of socio-cultural values,” which included a survey of nearly 1,500 people, Pseudotocinclus pointed out the ethics approval section for the paper says “Not applicable.”

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