Category: elsevier

Researchers in Australia have retracted a 2020 nanotechnology study after their institution’s research integrity office found the paper had misappropriated the work of undergraduate students at their school. 

According to the retraction notice, the study stated the data belonged to an industry consulting project when in fact they originated from undergraduate work. The notice reads: 

Post-publication, the University of Sydney’s Research Integrity Office found that the article misrepresented research data as being derived from an industry consultancy project when it was from an undergraduate unit of study. In doing so, the work of the undergraduate students and a tutor for the unit of study was misappropriated.

The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation (JHLT) has decided against retracting a November 2024 paper that  violated the ethics policy of the publication. 

After publishing the paper, which describes a new mechanical circulatory support device used to treat heart failure that was developed in China, staff at the journal realised two of the patients in the study had received organ transplants in that country. 

Dozens of research articles have been retracted or flagged for appearing to have used organs procured from executed prisoners in China, and many journals around the world have introduced policies to avoid such research. JHLT’s ethics statement, published in 2022, bans data on human organ transplants from journals or scientific sessions when they originate from countries, particularly China, where organ procurement from prisoners has been observed.

Elsevier is investigating the journal Geoscience Frontiers after a PubPeer thread flagged an editorial advisor whose articles in the journal were edited by his frequent co-authors. 

The editorial advisor, M. Santosh, is a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia and a “Highly Cited Researcher” with more than 1,500 published articles, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The PubPeer commenter, “Desmococcus antarctica,” noted that two associate editors of the journal, Vinod O. Samuel of Yonsei University in Seoul and Erath Shaji of the University of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram, India,  are often listed as “Handling Editors” of Santosh’s articles published in Geoscience Frontiers — despite each frequently publishing other work with him. 

As Retraction Watch recently reported, three of the top 10 philosophy journals in the highly influential Scopus database turned out to be fakes: Not only did these dubious journals manage to infiltrate the list, but they also rose to its top by trading citations. This news is embarrassing in itself, but it is hardly shocking. Our rankings-obsessed academic culture has proven time and again that it is prone to data manipulation. Rankings for both publications and institutions are routinely hacked by scholars, editors, and administrators who are ready to tweak or even falsify numbers as needed. 

The problems with the Scopus journal rankings, however, run much deeper. The issue is not that inflated citation numbers have occasionally propelled impostor journals to the top of the list. Rather, at least in my own field of literary studies, the ranking makes no sense whatsoever: the list is full of journals that have no business being there at all because they belong to entirely different areas of scholarly enquiry, and even when the ranking gets the field right, it systematically places marginal publications close to the top. In what follows, I briefly break down the major ways the Scopus Literature and Literary Theory Ranking is not just skewed but downright nonsensical.