by publisher – Page 21 – Retraction Watch

Journal about ‘ambient intelligence’ retracts more than 50 papers at once

Perhaps the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing needs to look for a different kind of smarts.

The journal – a Springer Nature title – has just retracted 51 papers. The episode is the latest in a string of high-volume retractions by major publishers of papers included in special issues. In at least five cases, editors have claimed that their peer review processes were scammed by what some have called rogue editors.

All of the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing retractions begin this way:

‘Conclusions related to vaccine safety are not validated’: COVID-19 spike protein paper retracted

It took about five months, but a virology journal has retracted a paper on the microbe that causes COVID-19 after tagging it with an expression of concern back in December.

As we reported then, the paper, “SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,” was a hit with vaccine skeptics who used the article to buttress their claims that Covid vaccines are unsafe.

The paper, which appeared in MDPI’s Viruses, generated enough buzz on social media and in the news to make it into the top 5% of all articles tracked by Altmetric. This Week in Virology, a podcast on, well, virology, devoted part of an episode of the show to deconstructing the findings.

But as the journal noted last year:

A college that doesn’t exist. An email address that goes dark. Who wrote this paper?

Alexander Templeton works at the math library of Glen Liberty Community College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

At least that’s what a paper, “A bibliometric analysis of Atangana-Baleanu operators in fractional calculus,” Templeton appears to have published in the Alexandria Engineering Journal claims. But no Glen Liberty Community College appears to exist in Scottsbluff – or anywhere – and the Gmail address Templeton used as contact information no longer works. (There is a Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, but no Glen Liberty.)

UPenn prof retracts three papers for ‘substantive questions’

A pharmacology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania is up to four retractions for problems with the data in his articles after a neurology journal pulled three papers late last month.

According to the Journal of Neurotrauma, a Mary Ann Liebert title, William Armstead – who holds a research professorship in Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Penn [please see an update on this post] – requested the retraction of three articles while informing that, in his words:

substantive questions have arisen regarding the findings, presentation and conclusions reported in the paper that could not be answered with available source data.

But beyond that, Armstead – who has not responded to a request for comment from Retraction Watch – left things a bit of a mystery.

Elsevier retracts papers when it realizes one of the authors hid fact he was guest editor of issue

A researcher who guest edited an issue has lost two papers after a journal’s publisher discovered that he had changed his name on the manuscripts following submission.

The retraction notices in Computers in Industry, an Elsevier title, for “Evaluation of the green supply chain management practices: A novel neutrosophic approach” and “An integrated neutrosophic ANP and VIKOR method for achieving sustainable supplier selection: A case study in importing field” read the same way:

Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction

It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year:

Figure 5: There is an overlap between two images taken from different experimental conditions. I’ve added a version below with the contrast enhanced. It’s difficult to match the brightness perfectly, but all of the same structures can be matched between these two sections. Would the authors comment?

Vincent Rotello of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the corresponding authors, responded right away. “Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention,” Rotello wrote on PubPeer. “We take data integrity seriously and are investigating the origin of the image duplication.”

Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.

If the writers of “Welcome Back, Kotter” wanted to issue a retraction statement, it might look something like this one from Mary Ann Liebert. We’ll call this one a hat tip to Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein, a Sweathog whose permission slips “from his mother” became a meme.

The paper in question appeared in 2016 in Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals and written by a group in China led by Liqun Yang, of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical Center and the State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology at Southwest University in Chongqing.

In November 2021, Yang emailed the journal asking to swap out the original figure in the article with a corrected version. What Yang didn’t know was that a week earlier, the journal had received word of a post on PubPeer raising questions about the figures in the paper.

The post received the following response from someone writing as co-author Hongjuan Cui:

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.

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