by publisher – Page 19 – Retraction Watch

Here’s what happened when a publisher looked more closely at a paper milled paper

Although it’s never too late to say sorry, sometimes the apology turns out to be worse than keeping quiet.

Consider the case of a group in China, who admitted that their 2020 paper on brain tumors was the work of a paper mill.

The article, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” came from a group led by Fangen Kong, of the Department of Neurosurgery at The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, in Zhuhai.

Missing from the list of authors, however, was another…well, something, as the retraction notice points out:

Author defends paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save

The corresponding author of a new paper in an Elsevier journal that claims “there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic” says he “fully expected” the criticisms — and that the “real-world situation is far worse than our best-case scenario.”

Ronald Kostoff and colleagues published “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” in Toxicology Reports in mid-September. In the paper, they colleagues conclude:

Elsevier corrects a retraction notice following questions from Retraction Watch

An Elsevier journal has corrected a retraction notice after we asked questions about what exactly it was saying — but not before the journal’s editor tried to defend what turned out to be a mistaken passage.

The article, “Measurement of performance parameters and improvement in optimized solution of WEDM on a novel titanium hybrid composite,” was published online in Measurement in December 2020. The retraction notice, which appeared online on September 17 of this year, read:

“[T]hese shit comments”: Author of a nonsense paper responds on PubPeer

A conference proceedings for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a 2021 paper which appears to have been produced in part by the fake article generator SCIGen — an allegation the corresponding author denies.

“Estimate The Efficiency Of Multiprocessor’s Cash Memory Work Algorithms” appeared earlier this year in the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Smart Information Systems and Technologies, where it came to the attention of Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé.

As readers of this blog might recall, Cabanac, Labbé and their colleague Alexander Magazinov recently wrote a preprint about how mangled translations into English — “tortured phrases,” in their words — can indicate that an article has been churned out by a paper mill.

Authors object after Springer Nature journal cedes to publisher Frontiers’ demand for retraction

The authors of a paper taking a major database to task for including papers from allegedly predatory journals are objecting to the retraction of the article, which followed a request by one of the publishers mentioned in the analysis.

And at least one of the journal’s editorial board members is considering resigning over the move.

The paper, “Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences,” was published in Scientometrics, a Springer Nature journal, on February 7. It used Jeffrey Beall’s now-defunct list of allegedly predatory publishers to identify relevant journals. The next day, the study’s findings were the subject of a news story in Nature.

On May 6, Fred Fenter, chief executive editor of Frontiers, a publisher which figured in the analysis, sent Scientometrics editor Wolfgang Glänzel a letter, obtained by Retraction Watch, demanding that the paper be retracted immediately. Much of the letter is a critique of Beall’s list, which has certainly come under fire before. Fenter — whose criticisms of of the list prompted an investigation by Beall’s university, after which Beall eventually retired — writes:

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.)

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