by publisher – Page 25 – Retraction Watch

Let me get this straight: You added a bunch of co-authors without their consent, and you couldn’t be bothered to include me?

This retraction reminds us of an old joke about food in the Borscht Belt resorts: It’s terrible, and such small portions!

A group of researchers in Japan and Singapore objected to being included on a 2019 paper without their consent — and someone’s feelings appear to have been hurt for having been left off the bogus list of authors.

The paper, “Effect of copper substitution on the local chemical structure and dissolution property of copper-doped β-tricalcium phosphate,” appeared in Acta Biomaterialia, an Elsevier title.

How did content from a hijacked journal end up in one of the world’s most-used databases?

Scopus is the world’s largest database of abstracts and citations, and calls itself “comprehensive,” “curated,” and “enriched.” But my recent experience with it suggests its curation could use some work.

In October 2019, I discovered that the Scopus profile of the journal Transylvanian Review contained numerous faked articles. How did I know? A few years ago, a legitimate Scopus indexed journal, Transylvanian Review, was hijacked and listed on the well-known — but controversial — Beall’s List of predatory and unscrupulous publishers.

Many of these articles appeared on the cloned website and were authored by Iraqi researchers.

‘Beggers’ can’t be choosers as another meta-analysis is retracted

A group of researchers in China may be asking for a refund after, they claim, they got bad advice from a course in writing meta-analyses that led to a retraction for plagiarism and other problems.

They may not be alone. We’re aware of at least nine articles with similar issues that have been retracted so far, part of a batch of eye-catching meta-analyses.

Suspicions about the now-retracted 2014 paper — and dozens of others — emerged in October of that year, when Guillaume Filion, now at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, wrote a blog post about the articles. Filion and a colleague, Lucas Carey, of Peking University, had noticed a flurry of meta-analyses by researchers in China that had appeared in CISCOM, the articles repository for the Research Council for Complementary Medicine. As Filion wrote:

Authors retract highly cited 2014 Science paper

The authors of a 2014 paper in Science have retracted it, after becoming aware that impurities in the chemicals they used for their experiments may have generated the apparent findings.

The paper, “Ammonia synthesis by N₂ and steam electrolysis in molten hydroxide suspensions of nanoscale Fe₂O₃,” has been cited 323 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “hot paper” designation. According to a summary of the work, “the protocol points to a way to produce ammonia from purely renewable resources.”

Here’s the retraction notice:

Study of China’s ethnic minorities retracted as dozens of papers come under scrutiny for ethical violations

A legal journal has retracted a 2019 article on the facial genetics of ethnic minorities in China for ethics violations, and the publisher, Springer Nature, is investigating more than two dozen other articles for similar concerns.

The article, “Y Chromosomal STR haplotypes in Chinese Uyghur, Kazakh and Hui ethnic groups and genetic features of DYS448 null allele and DYS19 duplicated allele,” appeared in the International Journal of Legal Medicine.

Three of the authors were affiliated with the notorious Karamay Municipal Public Security Bureau, which the U.S. government hit with sanctions in October 2019 for being:

Springer Nature retracts paper that hundreds called “overtly racist”

Less than two weeks after publication, an essay on poverty and race which critics decried as “unscholarly” and “overtly racist” has been retracted.

The essay, by Lawrence Mead, of New York University, appeared in the journal Society on July 21. It immediately drew the ire of hundreds of academics and advocates who, in a pair of petitions, demanded among other things that the journal retract the paper.

Earlier this week, Springer Nature, which publishes Society, flagged Mead’s essay with an editor’s note stating that it was investigating the matter. Now the publisher has decided to remove the article. The retraction notice reads:

Why did a journal suddenly retract a 45-year-old paper over lack of informed consent?

A journal has retracted a 45-year-old case study over concerns that the authors had failed to obtain proper informed consent from the family they’d described.

The article, “Stickler syndrome report of a second Australian family,” appeared in Pediatric Radiology, a Springer Nature title, in 1975. The first author was Kazimierz Kozlowski, a prominent radiologist who was born in Poland and worked in the United States and Australia, where he studied skeletal diseases in children.

French hydroxychloroquine study has “major methodological shortcomings” and is “fully irresponsible,” says review, but is not being retracted

A March 2020 paper that set off months of angry debates about whether hydroxychloroquine is effective in treating COVID-19 has “gross methodological shortcomings” that “do not justify the far-reaching conclusions about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19,” according to a review commissioned by the journal that published the original work.

The comments, by Frits Rosendaal, of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, came as part of a review commissioned by International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC), which publishes the journal along with Elsiever. ISAC had issued a statement about the paper in April, saying it “does not meet the [International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy’s] expected standard.”

The study, Rosendaal writes,

A mystery: How did this team plagiarize an unpublished paper?

A study on a wireless communication algorithm was retracted for being an exact duplicate of a paper submitted to a separate journal last year — but the authors were different and it’s unclear how they got hold of it.

The retracted study, “Energy-aware resource management for uplink non-orthogonal multiple access: Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning” was published in the Elsevier journal Future Generation Computer Systems. Neither the author of the original work who we were able to reach, nor either journal involved, say they know how the unpublished manuscript got into another group’s hands.

Here’s the (complicated) timeline:

“Where there are girls, there are cats” returns, with a new title

The cats are back.

As promised, Biological Conservation has replaced a controversial paper on feral cats in China whose cringeworthy title — “Where there are girls, there are cats” — prompted an outcry on social media that resulted in a temporary retraction.

The new article boasts a different, non-gendered title: “Understanding how free-ranging cats interact with humans: A case study in China with management implications.” But it makes more or less the same point: Where there are women, there are more cats:

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