by publisher – Page 21 – Retraction Watch

Elsevier makes “sand, sun, sea and sex with strangers” paper disappear following criticism

An Elsevier journal has disappeared a paper claiming that gay men seeking sex on the beach is damaging dunes, after critics lambasted the work as terrible science and an “egregious” attack on gays and bisexuals.

The article, “Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers, the “five S’s”. Characterizing “cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield [WebArchive link],” argues that the littoral lovemaking habits of some particularly enthusiastic mariners might be damaging key ecological species:

IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year.

We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American Control Conference, the other in the Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA) — from a reader in early October.

We alerted IEEE to the identical papers on October 7. The next day, a spokesperson said she was initiating an inquiry. And on November 10, the spokesperson sent us this statement:

Anatomy journal retracts 13 papers

The Anatomical Record is correcting itself in a big way, pulling 13 articles, including several linked to paper mills.

The papers, all by authors in China, were published between 2019 and 2021.

Some were flagged in a September 2021 report on research misconduct by the Chinese government. They join a slew of articles The Anatomical Record has retracted since 2020 for similar concerns.

Here’s an example of a retraction notice, this one for “Long noncoding RNA TUG1 facilitates cell ovarian cancer progression through targeting MiR-29b-3p/MDM2 axis,” which appeared in January 2020 from a group at the Department of Pharmacy at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University:

Springer Nature geosciences journal retracts 44 articles filled with gibberish

Springer Nature has retracted 44 papers from a journal in the Middle East after determining that they were rubbish.

The articles, which showed up in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences starting earlier this year, many of which involve at least some researchers based in China, and from their titles appear to be utter gibberish — yet managed still to pass through Springer Nature’s production system without notice.

The retractions follow the flagging of more than 400 papers by the publisher for concerns about “serious research integrity” breaches in the articles. Those concerns were first surfaced by a commenter on PubPeer and by a group of researchers who have been identifying and exposing nonsense papers.

COVID-19 vaccine-myocarditis paper to be permanently removed: Elsevier

A paper claiming that cases of myocarditis spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines that earned a “temporary removal” earlier this month will be permanently removed, according to a publisher at Elsevier.

As we reported last week, the article, “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products,” was published in Current Problems in Cardiology on October 1.

Sometime between then and October 17, the article was stamped “TEMPORARY REMOVAL” without explanation other than Elsevier’s boilerplate notice in such cases:

When authors stop responding to requests for data, a journal retracts

In 2016 Genetic Testing and Molecular Biomarkers published a paper on osteoarthritis by a group at Linyi People’s Hospital in China. Five years later, the authors contacted the journal asking for the correction of a pair of figures — but, as the publisher, Mary Ann Liebert, explained, the new files were “not workable.”

In May 2021, the journal issued an expression of concern for the paper (which, we’ll note, unfortunately sits behind a paywall). And earlier this month, it was retracted. For the rest of the story, read the retraction notice (caution, the following text might contain trigger words for unethical researchers):

Publisher does a “thorough sweep” of alternative medicine journal after a paper is published in error

Last April, the The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine provisionally accepted a paper on the role of music therapy in palliative care settings. Unfortunately for authors, the article did not grab the guest editors of the supplementary issue to which it had been designated.

So far, so good. But a production error caused the paper to appear online — necessitating a retraction when the journal learned that the authors, understandably, had already found another home for their work.

According to the notice:

Paper linking COVID-19 vaccines to myocarditis is temporarily removed without explanation

A paper claiming that myocarditis cases spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines has earned a “temporary removal” — without any explanation from the publisher.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The article, “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products,” was published in Current Problems in Cardiology, an Elsevier journal, on October 1.

It was co-authored by Jessica Rose and Peter McCullough, whose affiliations are listed as the Public Health Policy Initiative at the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge — a group that has been critical of vaccines and of the response to COVID-19 and has funded one study that was retracted earlier this year — and Texas A&M’s Baylor Dallas campus. [See update at the end of the post.]

Publisher retracts paper with ethics committee discrepancy after question from Retraction Watch

Dove, a publisher owned by Taylor & Francis, has retracted a paper published last year after a Retraction Watch reader pointed out that the authors’ statements on ethical approval made no sense.

Dove’s Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy published the article, “Serum Human Epididymis Protein 4 is a Potential Biomarker for Early Chronic Kidney Disease in an Obese Population,” in April 2021. In August, we received an email from a puzzled reader which read, in part:

How one US organization hopes to make retractions more visible

As Retraction Watch readers likely know, there’s ample evidence that retracted papers — 2,500 per year and growing — continue to attract citations that do not mention the fact the paper has been retracted. Some of that may be because it’s not clear on publishers’ sites and databases that these papers have been retracted or flagged. (That is one of the main reasons we created our database, which now contains more than 30,000 retractions.)

The U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) project would like to make things better. We spoke to Todd Carpenter, NISO’s executive director in Baltimore, Maryland, about the new project, which aims to address the lack of visibility of notices added to published papers.

Retraction Watch (RW): You recently launched the ‘Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern’ project. Why did you do this, and what do you hope to achieve?

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