by publisher – Page 17 – Retraction Watch

The author of a retracted paper learns to be careful what he wishes for

Sometimes leaving well-enough alone is the best policy. Ask Teja Santosh Dandibhotla.

Upset that a paper of his had been retracted from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Santosh, a computer scientist at the CVR College of Engineering in Hyderabad, India, contacted us to plead his case. (We of course do not make decisions about retractions, we reminded him.)

Santosh’s article, “Intelligent defaulter Prediction using Data Science Process,” had been pulled along with some 350 other papers in two conference proceedings because IOP Publishing had “uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

Often, retractions take years. This one took three days.

“The retraction that took years” is a common enough refrain on Retraction Watch that it might as be its own genre. Here’s one that didn’t.

A journal wasted no time pouncing on a suspect paper, retracting the 2016 article just three days after a commenter flagged concerns about the images in the work on PubPeer.

As the commenter, Actinopolyspora biskrensis, wrote:

How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments

Finding papers produced by paper mills has become a major headache for many of the world’s largest publishers over the past year, and they’re largely playing catch-up since sleuths began identifying them a few years ago. But there may be a new way: Earlier this month, Adam Day, a data scientist at SAGE Publishing, posted a preprint on arXiv that used a variety of methods to search for duplication in peer review comments, based on the likelihood that paper mills “create fake referee accounts and use them to submit fake peer-review reports.” We asked Day several questions about the approach.

Retraction Watch (RW): Tell us a bit about the methods you used.

Publisher cancels special issue honoring plagiarizing dean following Retraction Watch inquiries

MDPI was about to publish a special issue in one of its journals to fete the career of a retired dean. But after Retraction Watch informed the co-editors of the issue that the researcher, Kishor Wasan, had abruptly retired after being found to have plagiarized a 2019 book review for The Lancet, the publisher evidently decided to cancel the planned celebration.

The special issue of Pharmaceutics – here’s a Wayback Machine link – was to be “in honour of Professor Kishor M Wasan’s remarkable contributions to the pharmaceutics field.”

But now it is gone, and prompts a 404 error rather than any explanation.

More than 100 of an anesthesiologist’s papers retracted

There’s a new entry on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. And this one is also the fourth member of the Retraction Watch Century Club.

An anesthesiology researcher in Japan is now up to 117 retractions – putting him third on our list of most-retracted authors.

Hironobu Ueshima, formerly of Showa University Hospital in Tokyo, was found to have committed misconduct in 142 papers, according to a pair of investigations, one by his erstwhile institution and another by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists (JSA). We first reported on the existence of the investigation in June 2020, some three months after Australian anesthesiologist and journal editor John Loadsman raised concerns with journals involved in the case.

‘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:

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