by publisher – Retraction Watch

Dental researchers fabricated data in two articles, university investigation found

Two former professors and a former graduate student at Osaka Dental University in Japan reused images between three published articles, according to the findings of an institutional investigation.

The school released the findings of its investigation in January, with a full report in Japanese. The university has not responded to our request for comment.

According to a machine translation of the report, the university found former graduate student Helin Xing, former assistant professor Isao Yamawaki, and former associate professor Yoichiro Taguchi were involved in misconduct. A recent paper of Taguchi’s lists his affiliation as Matsumoto Dental University in Nagano, Japan. He and Xing have not responded to our requests for comment. We were not able to find a current affiliation or email address for Yamawaki.

Five studies from “Bust Size and Hitchhiking” author retracted

A journal has retracted five papers about the appearance, sexual behavior and attractiveness of women.

Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of marketing at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, was an author on each of the papers, published in the Sage journal Perceptual and Motor Skills (PMS) at least 15 years ago. All of the articles garnered expressions of concern in 2023, but Guéguen’s history of misconduct long precedes the PMS papers.

Sleuths have been flagging Guéguen’s work for years for seemingly impossible results. In 2019, he was cleared of wrongdoing by his university, but since then has racked up at least four retractions, according to the Retraction Watch database.

Author forges document to claim USDA affiliation

A journal has retracted three papers after an investigation revealed one of the authors falsely claimed he was affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture.

All three retraction notices, issued February 13 by the Journal of Environmental Management, state study coauthor Tariq Shah claimed affiliation with the USDA Plant Science Research Unit. “When asked about these issues during an editorial investigation, Shah’s responses caused the editor to further lose confidence in the validity/integrity of the article,” the notices say.

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told us in an email “Shah provided a document claiming to show his official affiliation with USDA that we later learned through our investigation was forged.” Neither Shah nor Elsevier clarified what the document was.

Paper on conversion therapy retracted, authors planning to republish

A four-year-old paper claiming conversion therapy reduced same-sex thoughts in gay men has been retracted after criticism from other researchers prompted further review of the work.

“Efficacy and risk of sexual orientation change efforts: a retrospective analysis of 125 exposed men,” published in F1000Research in March 2021, found conversion therapy (referred to in the paper as sexual orientation change efforts) was “effective and safe.”

F1000Research is an open publishing platform where peer review takes place after publication. The title is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science but does appear in Scopus, which reports the paper was cited seven times.

Wiley journal retracts 26 papers for ‘compromised peer review’

A Wiley journal has retracted more than two dozen articles in the last few months for peer review issues.

The articles, which appeared in Environmental Toxicology, have been retracted in batches, the latest on February 16-17, with previous sets in January and November.

The retraction notices of all 26 papers read in part:

When a sleuth gets hired by a publisher: A Q&A with Nick Wise

Nick Wise had a prolific start to his sleuthing journey. In July 2021, the fluid dynamics researcher started looking for tortured phrases in published papers, and has since had a hand in at least 1,000 retractions. He also helped identify unique phrases for the Tortured Phrases Detector, a function of the Problematic Paper Screener that identifies signs of misconduct. Last month, Wise teamed up with other research fraud hunters in a Nature article that outlined “five essential steps to combat industrialized scientific misconduct.”

His success in calling out research misconduct helped him land a full-time job. In January, Wise started a new position as research integrity manager at publisher Taylor & Francis. We spoke with him about how his new position will impact his career trajectory and how he plans to use his sleuthing past in his new position.

Springer Nature retracted 2,923 papers last year

The 3,000+ journals in the Springer Nature portfolio published over 482,000 articles in 2024, according to data published this week on a new research integrity page on the company’s website. The page also shares a data point you don’t typically get from publishers: 2,923 articles were retracted.

The numbers are a small part of the page, which outlines the tools the publisher uses for quality control, what prompts a research integrity investigation, and what happens during such investigations.

The publisher breaks down the retraction numbers a little more:

ICYMI: Second paper by Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof retracted

A 2017 paper coauthored by Nobel laureate Thomas Südhof has been retracted.

The article, “Conditional Deletion of All Neurexins Defines Diversity of Essential Synaptic Organizer Functions for Neurexins,” was published in Neuron in May 2017 and has been cited 145 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, issued February 11, states:

We, the authors of this publication, have decided to retract the paper because we found that the images in Figure 1D and Figure S4B contain aberrations that cannot be explained, and the original data for these figures are missing. Raw data for the other components of the paper are available, and their reanalysis confirmed the conclusions of the paper. We would like to thank M. Schrag for bringing these image aberrations to our attention.

Two papers coauthored by a dean retracted, with a third in question

Two papers on a novel approach for flood prediction have been retracted for “substantial overlap” between the works. The authors, including Debopam Acharya, dean of the School of Computing at DIT University in Uttarakhand, India, are contesting both retractions.

The articles, published in 2023, are “FLOODALERT: an internet of things based real-time flash flood tracking and prediction system,” which appeared in Multimedia Tools and Applications, and “An IoT-based system for monitoring and forecasting flash floods in real-time,” from Journal of Earth System Science. They have been cited seven and five times, respectively.

The articles were retracted after a concerned researcher, who also reached out to Retraction Watch, emailed each journal about problems with the papers.

As Springer Nature journal clears AI papers, one university’s retractions rise drastically

Neurosurgical Review has begun retracting scores of commentaries and letters to the editor after getting inundated by AI-generated manuscripts. At the top of the affiliations list: Saveetha University in Chennai, India, an institution that, as we reported with Science in 2023, engages in aggressive self-citation.

At publication time, Neurosurgical Review had retracted 129 papers so far this year. The journal, a Springer Nature publication, paused acceptance of letters to the editor and commentaries last fall.

In December we reported in another collaboration with Science that Neurosurgical Review paused accepting commentaries and letters to the editor last year after getting overwhelmed by submissions that appeared to be generated using large language models (LLMs).

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