by publisher – Page 11 – Retraction Watch

Physics publisher retracting nearly 500 likely paper mill papers

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.

The vast majority – 463 articles – are from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, while 21 are from IOP Conference Series: Materials Science & Engineering, and 10 are from IOP Conference Series: Earth & Environmental Science. A bit less than a third – 142 – are appearing today.

In a statement, Kim Eggleton, Head of Peer Review and Research Integrity at IOP Publishing, tells Retraction Watch:

Publisher says it will investigate allegations despite editor’s refusal

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.”

Editors-in-chief of aging journal resign en masse after ‘impasse with the Anatomical Society and Wiley’

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.”

Penn maintains wall of silence over now-retired prof as retractions mount

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.

On second thought: journal reverses course on paper it agreed to retract last year

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:

A tale of (3)2 retraction notices: On publishers, paper mill products, and the sleuths that find them

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:

Seven months after an author request, journal retracts

Two weeks after we reported on the unsuccessful efforts of a researcher at The Ohio State University to have one of his papers retracted for data manipulation, the journal that had been delaying the move has acted.

As we wrote earlier this month based on a request for public records, Philip Tsichlis had been urging Nature Communications since November of last year to retract a 2021 article from his group which contained fabricated findings. But although a second journal had reacted promptly to the request, retracting the paper in December, the Nature Communications editors didn’t – resulting in a series of emails in which the researcher negotiated the wording of the retraction notice and expressed increasing frustration with the delay. (Both journals are owned by Springer Nature.)

Now, two weeks after our story, the journal has retracted the article, “AKT3-mediated IWS1 phosphorylation promotes the proliferation of EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinomas through cell cycle-regulated U2AF2 RNA splicing.”

According to the notice:

Author demands a refund after his paper is retracted for plagiarism

The author of a 2021 paper in a computer science journal has lost the article because he purportedly stole the text from the thesis of a student in Pakistan – a charge he denies.

According to the editors of Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, a Hindawi title, Marwan Ali Albahar, of Umm Al Qura University College of Computer Science, in Saudi Arabia, plagiarized from the student for his paper “Contrast and Synthetic Multiexposure Fusion for Image Enhancement.”

As the retraction notice states:

An Elsevier journal said it would retract 10 papers two years ago. It still hasn’t.

An Elsevier journal has sat for two years on its decision to retract 10 papers by researchers with known misconduct issues, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

The Journal of the Neurological Sciences had decided by June 2020 to retract the articles by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who are currently in positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions, according to the emails. But the papers still haven’t been retracted, to the disappointment of one of the data sleuths who raised concerns about the work – and in the meantime have been cited more than a dozen times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

As Andrew Grey, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, wrote to a staffer at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) who became involved in the case:

An Elsevier book plagiarizes an abstract published by…Elsevier

Elsevier plans to remove the introduction from a book on mineralogy after investigating allegations of plagiarism, including from another Elsevier publication, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.

Photo Atlas of Mineral Pseudomorphism by J. Theo Kloprogge and Robert Lavinsky, was published in 2017 and still appears to be for sale for $100 for a hardcover and ebook bundle. (The usual price is $200, but there is a sale on at the time of this writing.) Its listing on ScienceDirect includes the introduction with no note about removal.

As we’ve previously reported, Elsevier last year retracted an entire book by Kloprogge, an adjunct professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas and honorary senior fellow at the University of Queensland, that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia.

According to the emails we obtained, Gloria Staebler, of mineralogical publisher Lithographie, Ltd., noticed the plagiarism in the book in May while preparing to formally publish a manuscript by Si and Ann Frazier that had been circulated in a mineral club newsletter in 2005. In a May 31st email to an editor at Elsevier, Staebler laid out her evidence:

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