Retired Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax made a career out of making up papers, many of them on the Bosnian genocide.
He retired from the Free University in Amsterdam in 2002. It wasn’t until 2013 that the university published a report indicating that Bax never published 61 of the papers he listed on his CV, and many of the real articles were based on fabricated data.
Publisher Taylor and Francis retracted one of Bax’s papers from Ethnic and Racial Studies in April. Now they’re retracting a second, from Ethnos, using almost identical language.
A Nature Cell Biology article on insulin regulation has been retracted after scientists noted that the antibodies used in their research were not as specific as they had previously believed.
The notice is clear on the problems with the science, which together “call into question the main conclusions of the paper.” Three of the paper’s five authors were employed at Novartis at the time of publication.
A paper estimating the effects of limiting fast food meals with toys to under 550 calories has been retracted after concerns arose regarding the scientists’ use of an outdated model for estimating weight changes in kids.
The paper estimated that kids who eat fast food twice a week would avoid gaining two pounds a year if calorie limits are imposed on meals with toys. However, everyone we spoke to, and the notice, indicated that their estimate was inaccurate.
Here’s the notice for “Modeling Potential Effects of Reduced Calories in Kids’ Meals with Toy Giveaways”:
Most of the authors of two Molecular Cell papers have retracted them after becoming aware of inappropriate image manipulation by the first author of both — who refused to sign the notices.
Sixteen papers are being retracted across three Elsevier journals after the publisher discovered that one of the authors, Khalid Zaman, orchestrated fake peer reviews by submitting false contact information for his suggested reviewers.
This particular kind of scam has been haunting online peer review for a few years now, as loyal Retraction Watch readers know. This one is a classic of the genre: According to Elsevier’s director of publishing services, Catriona Fennell, an editor first became suspicious after noticing that Zaman’s suggested reviewers, all with non-institutional addresses, were unusually kind to the economist’s work.
Elsevier has actually hired a full-time staff member with a PhD in physics and history as a managing editor to do the grunt work on cases like this. Flags were first raised in August, at which point the ethics watchdog went to town digging through all of Zaman’s other publications looking for suspicious reviews coming from non-institutional addresses provided by the scientist, an economist at COMSATS Information Technology Center in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Faked peer reviews — a subject about which we’ve been writing more and more recently — are concerning enough to a number of publishers that they’ve approached the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to work together on a solution.
In the past, we have reported on a number of cases in which authors were able to submit their own peer reviews, using fake email addresses for recommended reviewers. But what seems to be happening now is that companies are offering manuscript preparation services that go as far as submitting fake peer reviews. And that, no surprise, worries publishers.
A group of gastroenterology researchers in Italy has lost their 2010 paper in Internal and Emergency Medicine, the journal of the Italian Society of Internal Medicine, for plagiarizing and duplicate publication.
Fuel, an Elsevier title, has pulled an article on coal pollution because the authors took much of the work from an earlier paper of theirs in another journal.
The article, “Co-firing of coal and biomass: Development of a conceptual model for ash formation prediction,” was published in September by a group from Australia and The Netherlands.
Retired Dutch anthropologist Mart Bax made a career out of making up papers, many of them on the Bosnian genocide.
