by publisher – Retraction Watch

Technology journal pulls papers for unauthorized author changes, fictitious emails

An Elsevier energy-technology journal has retracted six papers from 2022 whose authors changed without editorial approval during revision of the manuscripts.

The authors also provided fictitious email addresses during the submission process, but changed them after the papers were accepted, according to retraction notices in the February issue of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments.

While the issues don’t necessarily indicate foul play, authorship changes and the use of non-institutional email addresses can be signs of paper-mill involvement. In 2021, we reported on a website in Iran that listed “articles ready for acceptance,” including one to appear in Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments. The year after our story, the journal pulled the paper, whose author list had also changed at the revision stage.

Most editors at math journal resign over multiple reviews, ‘cloak-and-dagger’ removal of EIC

Nearly two dozen editors of a mathematics journal have resigned after its publisher removed the top editor and implemented a multiple review system, “running roughshod over the standard practices of the refereeing process in mathematics.”

Of the 31 members of the Communications in Algebra editorial board, 23 signed a March 10 resignation letter sent to Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal. In the letter, the editors said the publisher “unilaterally” implemented a system in which more than one reviewer would be expected to look over a paper.

The peer review process in mathematics is more labor-intensive than for other topics, the editors said, including “not only an assessment of the impact and significance of the results but also a line-by-line painstaking check for correctness of the results. This process is often quite time-consuming and makes referees a valuable commodity.” The letter continues: “Doubling the number of expected reviews will quickly either deplete the pool of willing reviewers or vastly dilute the quality of their reviews, and both of these are unacceptable outcomes.”

Embattled journal brand mistakenly invites out-of-scope researchers to join board

Springer Nature has launched a new agriculture journal under the troubled Cureus brand. As part of its launch, the publisher invited at least one researcher with irrelevant specialities to join its editorial board, Retraction Watch has learned.

The new journal comes after Clarivate’s Web of Science delisting the original and long-embattled Cureus Journal of Medical Science in October for concerns about article quality.

The flagship Cureus was founded in 2009 by John Adler Jr., a Stanford University neurosurgeon, as an open-access journal for clinicians who didn’t have grants. Springer Nature acquired the journal in December 2022. In 2024, the publisher launched Cureus Journals — open-access journals on engineering, computer science and business — using the brand name.

Controversial editorial practices boost plastic surgeon’s publishing empire

In the summer of 2022, a researcher in Indonesia submitted a case report to Annals of Medicine and Surgery, one of several open-access journals founded and edited by Riaz Agha, a plastic surgeon and publisher in London. The manuscript, Agha responded, needed various changes to be considered for publication.

Among them: It should cite Agha’s paper on how to write surgical case reports, published two years earlier in the highly ranked International Journal of Surgery (IJS), the plastic surgeon’s flagship publication.

“Thanks Sir,” the Indonesian researcher replied. “I’ve added [the reference] to the manuscript.”

Although practices vary, the journals Agha founded aren’t alone in requiring authors to follow, and sometimes even cite, reporting guidelines. But a conflict of interest can arise when an editor demands authors reference guideline papers published in the editor’s own journals – as Agha does in his instructions to authors, reporting guidelines and editorial correspondence.

Librarian finds ‘preposterous number’ of fake references in paper from Springer Nature journal

As a hospital librarian, Jessica Waite is typically successful at tracking down elusive articles for clinicians at Royal Hallamshire Hospital in England. So when a colleague couldn’t locate two references in a paper and asked for help, the librarian grew suspicious.

“These were recent references, which usually we have no problem finding,” Waite told us. “I looked at the issues of the journals where the article should have been, and there were completely different articles, so I immediately thought that the articles we had been asked to find were not real.”

The references were from an article exploring mental health integration after bowel diversion surgery published in Digestive Diseases and Sciences (DDS), a Springer Nature title.

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction

A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional.

Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal of the Canadian Paediatric Society, has published the cases since 2000 in articles for a series for its Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program. The articles usually start with a case description followed by “learning points” that include statistics, clinical observations and data from CPSP. The peer-reviewed articles don’t state anywhere the cases described are fictional.

The corrections come following a January article in New Yorker magazine that mentioned one of the reports — “Baby boy blue,” a case published in 2010 describing an infant who showed signs of opioid exposure via breast milk while his mother was taking acetaminophen with codeine. The New Yorker article made public an admission by one of the coauthors that the case was made up.

Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines

A preprint server has withdrawn a study that suggested children vaccinated in the second month of life are more likely to die soon after when compared to those who did not receive the vaccinations.

The paper, posted at Preprints.org last December, was written by Karl Jablonowski and Brian Hooker of Children’s Health Defense, a New Jersey-based nonprofit organization founded by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The group is known for anti-vaccination advocacy.

Jablonowski and Hooker conducted their analysis using a dataset provided by the Louisiana Department of Health. It included 1,775 children who died before turning 3 years old between 2013 and 2024 and had a record of being vaccinated. The preprint suggested children who received six recommended vaccinations in the second month of life were more likely to die in their third month compared to those who had not received the vaccinations.

Exclusive: Unrest at Wiley journal whose EIC is cited in more than half of its papers

Timothy Lee of Macau University of Science and Technology was named editor-in-chief of the *International Journal of Tourism Research* in 2023.

On Feb. 18, a researcher in Italy sent a disgruntled email to the editorial board of a Wiley tourism journal. Salvatore Bimonte had waited more than a year for his manuscript to be peer-reviewed, he complained, and then months more while the editor-in-chief was “actively working on” the revised version Bimonte submitted.

When Bimonte’s paper was finally rejected after 18 months — for reasons such as the topic not being “highly suitable” and the work not being submitted in the form of a case study — the researcher felt compelled to vent his frustration to the entire editorial board of the International Journal of Tourism Research (IJTR).

“Maybe, I would have been treated better if I had cited some of the editor in chief’s papers,” Bimonte, of the University of Siena, wrote in boldface in the email, which we have seen. Two days later, an unhappy editor at the journal quit, Retraction Watch has learned.

Chemist nears three dozen retractions for image duplication, self-citation and more

A screenshot of Louis’ LinkedIn profile before we reached out to him.

Racking up 35 retractions in just 24 months, chemist Hitler Louis has scored a place on our leaderboard.

The papers at issue, most of them published in Elsevier and Royal Society of Chemistry journals, exhibit a variety of problems, according to the retraction notices: identical plots supposedly representing different chemical systems, self-citations multiplying between manuscript submission and publication, compromised peer review and fundamental errors in chemical analyses.

Louis – who also goes by Louis Hitler Muzong – did not respond to Retraction Watch’s requests for comment. Until recently, his LinkedIn page named him as a Ph.D. student in computational chemistry at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, with an expected completion date of October 2027. But retraction notices for two papers say Louis requested his Leeds affiliation be removed. One states “the research described in the article is not associated with that institution,” and the other that the affiliation “was given incorrectly.” The University of Leeds did not respond to a request to verify whether he was a student there.

Publisher flags more than 120 papers three and a half years after learning of problems

What started as a small editorial conundrum several years ago has turned into an expression of concern for dozens of papers in a medical journal, thanks to the work of an Australian physician and scientific sleuth.

In February 2022, we wrote about the decision by publisher Wolters Kluwer to retract a table that was missing in a paper in Medicine. In the end the journal pulled the whole article, which described a protocol for a clinical trial, because its authors had “not responded to multiple requests.”

The story left one reader intrigued. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” said John Loadsman of the University of Sydney, an anesthesiologist and journal editor. “I thought, I’ve got to have a look.”

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