by publisher – Page 15 – Retraction Watch

In which we ask: What exactly did peer review accomplish here?

A retraction notice for a 2021 paper in an environmental sciences journal has us wondering if the peer review process for the publication should be declared a Superfund Site.

The article, “Experimental study and numerical prediction of HTO and 36Cl− diffusion in radioactive waste at Téguline Clay,” appeared in Environmental Technology, a Taylor & Francis title, and was written by a group at Central South University, in Changsha.

Evidently, little in that title was accurate.

According to the retraction notice:

Publisher retracting more than 30 articles from paper mills

The publisher SAGE is in the process of retracting more than 30 papers across three of its journals after determining that they were churned out by paper mills — prompting the company to take a closer look at its policies and procedures.

The suspect papers were initially flagged by Elisabeth Bik and others as part of a group of some 400 articles that showed signs of having been milled. As we reported in March, a dozen of the articles were hit with expressions of concern — prompting some head-scratching from Bik, in particular, about why they weren’t being retracted outright.

A spokesperson for SAGE told us:

Journal retracts more articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

Eight months after a psychology journal retracted a pair of articles that were “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda,” the publication has pulled three more papers — all at least a quarter century old — for the same reason.

All five papers were written by J. Philippe Rushton, formerly of the University of Western Ontario, who died in 2012. As we wrote in December 2020, Rushton published dubious studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that:

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

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.

Authors blame a “ghoul” for retraction of paper claiming vaccines lead to health and behavioral issues

A pair of authors have lost a 2020 paper claiming to link children’s vaccines to health and behavior problems after the journal concluded the data didn’t support the conclusions of the study.

The authors of the paper, “Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses along the Axis of Vaccination,” were James Lyons-Weiler, the president and CEO of the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge, in Pittsburgh, and Paul Thomas, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore.

The pair have published at least one other paper on vaccines, in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, a periodical that seems dedicated to the proposition that immunizations, and not the diseases they prevent, are a scourge. (Check out the journal’s special edition on Covid-19, for example.)

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

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:

Pro-tip: When claiming to use a dataset, make sure it collects what you say it does

Tilda Swinton has no more to do with TILDA than the data these authors used (credit: Manfred Werner (Tsui)

Irish eyes most definitely were not smiling on three papers that purported to contain data from a national repository from the Emerald Isle.

The articles, which appeared in a trio of journals from Dove Medical Press — part of Taylor & Francis — were written by various researchers at Nanchang University, in China.

Two of the articles have been retracted. “Serum Human Epididymal Protein 4 is Associated with Depressive Symptoms in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,” from 2020, was published in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Per the abstract:

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

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.

Publisher won’t retract most papers by chemist editor-in-chief who left university post under a cloud

The retractions appear to be trickling in for Thomas Webster, a once-prominent chemistry researcher who left his post at Northeastern University after nearly 70 of his papers were flagged on PubPeer for concerns about the data in the studies.

But while the publisher of a journal he co-founded — and left earlier this year — has retracted one paper, it said it would correct, not retract, nine of the papers he co-authored.

So far, we have seen two recent retractions for Webster, one involving a previously corrected 2015 paper in the journal Nanomedicine titled “Antibacterial and osteogenic stem cell differentiation properties of photoinduced TiO2 nanoparticle-decorated TiO2 nanotubes,” which has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The retraction notice for that article states:

Britney Spears story “remains as part of the publication record,” says Nature

A 2008 story in Nature about Britney Spears that prompted an apology from the author and the journal earlier this week “remains as part of the publication record,” Nature said in an editor’s note.

The story, titled “When Britney Spears comes to my lab,” appeared in a section of the journal called Nature Futures and refers to Spears “wearing a silver strapless stretch top that doesn’t show too much of her belly (unless she actually moves her arms), and black Capri pants with a little dip in the waistband.”

Spears, it said, would eventually go on to earn a PhD from Harvard and develop a treatment for diabetes. Before that, however, “Britney will pump out a lot of good data (she is something of a workaholic), but gradually, with her music, her intermittent marriages and pregnancies, not to mention her classes, the amount of time she spends in lab will begin to dwindle.”

In a note appended to the article sometime this week, following thousands of tweets and a Retraction Watch post, the editors write:

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