by publisher – Page 13 – Retraction Watch

‘My egregious delay’: Science journal takes more than three years to retract paper after university investigation

The editor of a Science family journal waited three years before beginning the process of retracting a paper after learning that the University of Wisconsin at Madison had found duplication and mislabeling but no misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported last November, the paper, “The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL mediates nuclear translocation of the epidermal growth factor receptor,” was published in 2017 in Science Signaling. It was retracted this past November, and the notice referred to a university investigation.

That prompted us to submit a public records request on November 12 for the investigation as well as any correspondence between the university and the journal. In a response on January 12, the university denied our request for the report of the investigation, saying that “There is a review still underway at the federal level regarding this issue.” (That is a good reminder of how long the U.S. Office of Research Integrity can take to review such investigations.)

But the university released correspondence between Deric Wheeler, the corresponding author of the paper, and John Foley, the editor of the journal, which we’ve made available here. The thread begins on July 6, 2021 – just one month shy of three years after Foley learned of an investigation into the research – with an email from Foley in which the editor acknowledged “an egregious delay”:

‘This is really ridiculous’: An author admitted plagiarism. His supervisor asked for a retraction. The publisher said, “nah.”

Behrouz Pourghebleh is perplexed. And also exasperated.

Pourghebleh, of the Young Researchers and Elite Club at the Urmia branch of Islamic Azad University in Iran, noticed a paper published on December 15, 2020 in an IEEE journal that overlapped 80 percent with an article he’d co-authored the year before.

Pourghebleh wrote to Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, the associate editor who had handled the paper, on December 31, 2020, expressing concern. Bhuiyan responded the same day, saying the paper hadn’t been flagged in a similarity check, and that he would contact the authors for a response.

The first author, Karim Alinani, wrote to Pourghebleh less than two weeks later, admitting the plagiarism but citing personal circumstances:

‘Why did this take over five years?’ Reflecting on two new retractions

In September 2015, after a lengthy investigation, the Committee on Scientific Integrity (CSI) of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) advised the LUMC Board of Directors to ask for retraction of two publications because of major data manipulation in images. The case involved Maria Fousteri, who by then had left LUMC.

In the Netherlands it is possible to ask a second opinion, as a non-binding but influential appeal procedure, from the national LOWI (Landelijk Orgaan Wetenschappelijke Integriteit). Fousteri did so. In May 2016, after careful deliberations and a hearing of individuals directly involved, the LOWI fully supported the conclusion of the CSI.

This led the Board to inform several parties, including the defendant’s current employer, and agencies that had provided grants based on the fraudulent work, and to formally ask the journal Molecular Cell to retract two publications. They would not do so for more than five years, with retraction notices published only this month that list data manipulations in several figures.

Journal retracts 122 papers at once

A SAGE journal has retracted 122 papers because of “clear indicators that the submission and/or peer review process for these papers was manipulated.”

Those indicators, according to The International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education:

include but are not limited to submission patterns consistent with the use of paper mills, collusion between authors and reviewers during the review process, inappropriate subject matter as compared to the Journal’s Aims and Scope, poor quality peer review and requests for inappropriate citation.

A look at the first three titles suggests that they were, indeed, far out of scope:

Journal retracts three papers — including two on COVID-19 — because ‘trainee editor’ committed misconduct

A psychiatry journal has retracted two papers on Covid-19 and mental health, and a third on racism, after concluding that an author on the articles rigged the peer-review process.

The papers, which appeared in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry (IJSP), were co-authored by Debanjan Banerjee, then geriactric psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bengaluru, and his colleagues.

Banerjee, who has since left the institution, was also until recently a “trainee editor” at the journal, as Neuroskeptic noted on Twitter last week, as well as an associate editor of the Journal of Psychosexual Health — both of which are SAGE titles. He’s also an associate editor for the Frontiers journal Aging Psychiatry.

According to the IJSP:

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

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:

IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year.

We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American Control Conference, the other in the Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA) — from a reader in early October.

We alerted IEEE to the identical papers on October 7. The next day, a spokesperson said she was initiating an inquiry. And on November 10, the spokesperson sent us this statement:

Anatomy journal retracts 13 papers

The Anatomical Record is correcting itself in a big way, pulling 13 articles, including several linked to paper mills.

The papers, all by authors in China, were published between 2019 and 2021.

Some were flagged in a September 2021 report on research misconduct by the Chinese government. They join a slew of articles The Anatomical Record has retracted since 2020 for similar concerns.

Here’s an example of a retraction notice, this one for “Long noncoding RNA TUG1 facilitates cell ovarian cancer progression through targeting MiR-29b-3p/MDM2 axis,” which appeared in January 2020 from a group at the Department of Pharmacy at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University:

Springer Nature geosciences journal retracts 44 articles filled with gibberish

Springer Nature has retracted 44 papers from a journal in the Middle East after determining that they were rubbish.

The articles, which showed up in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences starting earlier this year, many of which involve at least some researchers based in China, and from their titles appear to be utter gibberish — yet managed still to pass through Springer Nature’s production system without notice.

The retractions follow the flagging of more than 400 papers by the publisher for concerns about “serious research integrity” breaches in the articles. Those concerns were first surfaced by a commenter on PubPeer and by a group of researchers who have been identifying and exposing nonsense papers.

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

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:

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