Over the past year, a professional society for cognitive therapists has been pondering what to do with dozens of decades-old articles about conversion therapy – the practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – in the archives of the journals it publishes.
The society, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), was considering a variety of options, including retraction.
But in a statement the group published earlier this month, ABCT said Elsevier, the journals’ publisher, would not allow retraction of the articles.
Elsevier is retracting 500 papers from a journal dedicated to conference proceedings because “the peer-review process was confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected,” Retraction Watch has learned.
As we reported a month ago, “data thug” James Heathers “found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing ‘tortured phrases’ that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.”
Shortly thereafter, Elsevier told us they were beginning an investigation of the title, Materials Today: Proceedings. Yesterday, they said the retractions were beginning.
A kidney researcher and former dean of a medical school has now had six papers retracted and one marked with an expression of concern in a little more than a year.
The latest retraction for Joseph I. Shapiro, of a 2015 paper in Science Advances, comes two years after PubPeer commenters began posting about potentially duplicated images in the article, and one year after the authors corrected two of its figures.
Shapiro, the corresponding author on the article, stepped down as dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., on June 30th of this year, but remains a tenured professor at the institution. Neither he nor Komal Sodhi, the first author on the article and also of Marshall, have responded to our request for comment.
Retractions of work Shapiro led began last September, according to our database, following critical comments on PubPeer.
On April 15, 2021, as COVID-19 was waning several months prior to the surge in deaths associated with arrival of the Delta variant, the journal Cell published an eye-catching paper.
The paper was notable because it claimed that vasopressin, also known as antidiuretic hormone, worsened COVID-19 infections. Vasopressin is known for its ability to promote water retention in the kidneys as well as to constrict blood vessels, but had not previously been associated with COVID-19 infections.
Upon reading the paper, one of us (MB) noted a large number of inaccuracies. The authors had used the wrong reagent: a high molecular weight precursor of vasopressin rather than vasopressin itself. They also incorrectly portrayed ACE2, the V1B vasopressin receptor, and the AT1 angiotensin II receptor – the primary mediators of their hypothetical mechanism of COVID-19 infection. (PubPeer commenters also pointed out problems in the paper, including a failure of the authors to post their original data.)
A physics publisher is retracting 494 papers after an investigation “indicated that some papers may have been created, manipulated, and/or sold by a commercial entity” – aka a paper mill.
A journal whose editor who has refused to investigate strong claims of misconduct by an anonymous whistleblower appears to be investigating anyway following our coverage of the case. Meanwhile, the editor has found other ways to express his lack of concern for nonsense that may appear in the journal’s pages.
As we reported late last month, Guido Schmitz, the editor in chief of the International Journal of Materials Research has been rock-ribbed in his refusal to investigate claims of misconduct brought by the data sleuth Artemisia Stricta. The reason: Artemisia refused to divulge their identity – which, to Schmitz, evidently appears to be a more grievous sin than research misconduct itself.
Schmitz even went as far in emails to us to state that researchers are free to publish “bullshit and fiction.”
A journal regarded as the leader in its field is without editors after they resigned as a group earlier this month in a dispute over their workload and compensation.
On August 11, the four editors-in-chief of Aging Cell tendered their resignations to Wiley and the Anatomical Society, which together publish the monthly periodical. Explaining their decision in a letter dated August 23 and posted to Twitter by an account unrelated to the journal, the editors – Peter Adams, Julie Andersen, Adam Antobi, Vera Gorbunova, along with John Sedivy, the reviews editor – said they had reached the breaking point after trying to work with the publishers for the last “2-3 years” on “serious issues in running the journal.”
We were unable to immediately reach the editors or Wiley, but Adams retweeted the letter and asked his followers to “Please distribute.”
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2017 paper on induced brain injuries in piglets over questions about the data – making us wonder if the animals weren’t essentially tortured (if the experiments truly took place) as part of someone’s misconduct.
Meanwhile, Springer Nature seems to have wiped its hands clean of the matter involving a paper from the lab of William Armstead, a now-retired pharmacy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who is up to five retractions. The publisher agreed to refer any questions about the case to the main institution involved, a private university, meaning that readers and the public have little if any recourse to learn the truth unless it releases a report on the matter – which rarely happens.
No one at Penn has responded to repeated requests for comment from us. And even if they release a report, as we’ve written, the record of the misconduct might leave much to be desired.
A Springer Nature journal has decided not to retract a paper it had been investigating for plagiarism since receiving allegations in January 2021. The decision came 1.5 years since the editor-in-chief apparently agreed the paper should be retracted, and just a few days after we reported on the case.
Systems engineer Paola Di Maio notified Springer Nature in January 2021 that the article, “Robotic Standard Development Life Cycle in Action,” published in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, described a methodology she had developed without crediting her work. As we wrote in our post on Friday, Aug. 5th:
Should publishers acknowledge the work of sleuths when their work has led to retractions?
We were prompted to pose the question by a recent retraction from International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics of a 2021 paper. The notice reads:
