Category: elsevier

An Elsevier journal has disappeared a paper claiming that gay men seeking sex on the beach is damaging dunes, after critics lambasted the work as terrible science and an “egregious” attack on gays and bisexuals. 

The article, “Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers, the “five S’s”. Characterizing “cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield [WebArchive link],” argues that the littoral lovemaking habits of some particularly enthusiastic mariners might be damaging key ecological species: 

Continue reading Elsevier makes “sand, sun, sea and sex with strangers” paper disappear following criticism

A paper claiming that cases of myocarditis spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines that earned a “temporary removal” earlier this month will be permanently removed, according to a publisher at Elsevier.

As we reported last week, the article, “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products,” was published in Current Problems in Cardiology on October 1.

Sometime between then and October 17, the article was stamped “TEMPORARY REMOVAL” without explanation other than Elsevier’s boilerplate notice in such cases:

Continue reading COVID-19 vaccine-myocarditis paper to be permanently removed: Elsevier

A paper claiming that myocarditis cases spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines has earned a “temporary removal” — without any explanation from the publisher.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The article, “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products,” was published in Current Problems in Cardiology, an Elsevier journal, on October 1.

It was co-authored by Jessica Rose and Peter McCullough, whose affiliations are listed as the Public Health Policy Initiative at the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge — a group that has been critical of vaccines and of the response to COVID-19 and has funded one study that was retracted earlier this year — and Texas A&M’s Baylor Dallas campus. [See update at the end of the post.]

Continue reading Paper linking COVID-19 vaccines to myocarditis is temporarily removed without explanation

The corresponding author of a new paper in an Elsevier journal that claims “there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic” says he “fully expected” the criticisms — and that the “real-world situation is far worse than our best-case scenario.”

Ronald Kostoff and colleagues published “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” in Toxicology Reports in mid-September. In the paper, they colleagues conclude:

Continue reading Author defends paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save

As readers of this blog know, we’re fond of highlighting euphemisms, particularly for plagiarism: “inadvertently copied text,” “a significant originality issue” and and “inclusion of significant passages of unattributed material from other authors” come to mind.

But here’s a euphemism for “bullshit” that’s new to us.

Continue reading Authors admit they “published the paper without completely studying their work.”

Sometimes, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.

Ask Farukh Iqbal. Earlier this year, Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, was alerted to a recent paper in the journal Fuel that cited a 2020 article he’d written with some colleagues. 

Iqbal read the paper and realized with dismay that not only was his work — which included parts of his thesis — cited, it was plagiarized:

Continue reading Vice-chancellor of university in Pakistan loses paper for plagiarizing from a thesis

What do subterranean insect provinces and motion to clamor have to do with microprocessors and microsystems?

That’s an excellent question. Read on, dear reader.

Continue reading ‘Tortured phrases’, lost in translation: Sleuths find even more problems at journal that just flagged 400 papers

It keeps happening. 

There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the world’s leading databases for scholarly literature. The Transylvanian Review did the same thing, and so did Test Engineering and Management.

These journals — which can make millions of dollars for their illegitimate publishers — exploit vulnerabilities in Scopus, owned by Elsevier, by making themselves look close enough to real journals, often exploiting the real ISSN and other metadata of those titles. That, in turn, entices potentially unknowing authors whose careers may depend on publishing in journals in major indexes.

Now into the mix comes Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology. This time, the tip-off, discovered by Russian scholar Dmitry Dubrovsky, was almost unbelievable: an article about the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet resistance to Germany’s 1941 invasion — in a journal specializing in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology.  

Continue reading How hijacked journals keep fooling one of the world’s leading databases