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.
Ultramicroscopy has retracted a paper it published earlier this year after the corresponding author admitted to submitting the paper without the consent of his colleagues.
The article, “The post-peak spectra in electron energy loss near edge structure,” came from a group led by one Feng Tian, a materials scientist at Shanghai University for Science and Technology. The other authors were Peter Shattschneider and Micheal Stoger-Pollach, of the Vienna University of Technology. Except that they weren’t.
The Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology has retracted a 2011 paper on depersonalization disorder by a pair of authors in Azerbaijan who got a bit too familiar with their source material without proper attribution. And the journal has offered its readers a handy — if depressingly obvious — admonition about publication ethics.
Two Oxford journals have now put out three more retractions for ob-gyn and former University of Florida professor Nasser Chegini, who has been under ORI investigation since at least 2012. That makes a total of five retractions, by our count.
