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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.)
Sometimes, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.
Ask Farukh Iqbal. Earlier this year, Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, was alerted to a recent paper in the journal Fuel that cited a 2020 article he’d written with some colleagues.
Iqbal read the paper and realized with dismay that not only was his work — which included parts of his thesis — cited, it was plagiarized:
Tilda Swinton has no more to do with TILDA than the data these authors used (credit: Manfred Werner (Tsui)
Irish eyes most definitely were not smiling on three papers that purported to contain data from a national repository from the Emerald Isle.
The articles, which appeared in a trio of journals from Dove Medical Press — part of Taylor & Francis — were written by various researchers at Nanchang University, in China.
Two of the articles have been retracted. “Serum Human Epididymal Protein 4 is Associated with Depressive Symptoms in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,” from 2020, was published in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Per the abstract:
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