A journal has issued a dozen expressions of concern over articles that a group of data sleuths had flagged last year on PubPeer as showing signs of having been cranked out by a paper mill.
The 12 articles were published between 2017 and 2019 in the International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology and were written by authors in China. They carry the same notice:
Continue reading Journal flags a dozen papers as likely paper mill products a year after sleuths identified them
An integrative health journal has issued an expression of concern for an article it published two years ago last month about the “human biofield” and related topics after receiving complaints that the piece lacked scientific “validity.”
The article, “Energy Medicine: Current Status and Future Perspectives,” appeared in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, a SAGE title. The author was Christina Ross, of the Wake Forest Center for Integrative Medicine, in Winston-Salem, N.C. Which happens to be where the two top editors of the journal are based.
Ross also is the author of Etiology: How to Detect Disease in Your Energy Field Before It Manifests in Your Body, which is available on Amazon and elsewhere.
According to the abstract of the article:
Continue reading “I absolutely stand by the validity of the science” says author of energy field paper now flagged by journal
In August 2015, bioengineers gathered in Milan, Italy, for the 37th annual conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. About 2,000 papers were accepted and published online for the conference. But an author of one of those articles says he’s been trying to retract it since 2016.
As a PhD student at the Université de Lorraine, in France, Khuram Faraz worked with professors Christian Daul and Walter Blondel on the processing of biomedical images, mainly for dermatology. Faraz is listed as a co-author on a paper titled “Optical flow with structure information for epithelial image mosaicing,” which was published at the 2015 conference. The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
A few months after the conference, in January 2016, Faraz emailed Daul and Blondel about his concerns with the study, according to emails that Faraz shared on PubPeer last June. Faraz allegedly told Daul and Blondel that, for a specific method used in the paper, called RFLOW:
Continue reading Meet the postdoc who says he’s been trying to retract his own paper since 2016
A publisher is retracting five papers from one of its conference series after discovering what it says was “clear evidence” that the articles were generated by a computer.
The five papers were published from 2018 to 2020 in IOP Publishing’s “Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science.” According to an IOP spokesperson, the retraction notices will all read:
Continue reading Publisher retracting five papers because of “clear evidence” that they were “computer generated”Last year, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology found itself on the receiving end of what its editor Roland Seifert called a “massive attack of fraudulent papers” that were the product of paper mills.
In response Seifert — who says the journal ultimately will have retracted 10 of those articles and stopped another 30 from being published — has produced a 20-point list of red flags that indicate the possibility of a paper mill in action, and features of these papers in general.
We won’t reproduce the list in its entirety, but here are a few highlights, in no particular order.
Continue reading 20 ways to spot the work of paper mills
Ye Zhang, who as we reported yesterday is serving a six-month suspension from her post at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), in Japan, says she did not commit misconduct, as the school contends.
In response to a query from Retraction Watch, Zhang, a materials scientist, said she did not agree with the findings of an OIST investigation that found she fabricated data and plagiarized in a May 2019 paper in Chemical Communications. (A spokesman for the publisher told us that the journal only recently learned about the OIST report and is looking into the matter.)
In a lengthy email protesting her innocence, Zhang told us:
Continue reading Okinawa researcher suspended for faking data denies committing misconduct
Springer Nature is retracting a book chapter describing conference research after scholars in the deaf community blasted it for being “unbelievably insulting.”
The chapter, “Implementation of Hand Gesture Recognition System To Aid Deaf-Dumb People,” appeared in Advances in Signal and Data Procesing: Select Proceedings of ICSDP 2019. The authors were Supriya Ghule and Mrunalini Chavaan, of the MIT Academy of Engineering in Pune, India.
According to the abstract:
Continue reading Springer Nature to retract chapter on sign language critics call “unbelievably insulting”
What a difference a D makes.
Ask Kevin Pile. Pile edits the International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases (let’s call it the IJRD), a Wiley publication. Last year, he published a guest editorial by Vaidehi Chowdhary, a rheumatologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on a form of kidney disease.
But it turns out that Chowdhary, a member of Pile’s editorial team, had intended to submit her article, “When doing the right thing is wrong: Drug efflux pumps in steroid‐resistant nephrotic syndrome,” to a different journal, the Indian Journal of Rheumatology, or IJR. We think you can see how this all went down.
According to Pile, the episode was “a tail of consecutive mistakes”:
Continue reading A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title
We’re rounding out the week with a third post about paper mills: A Taylor & Francis journal is up to 39 retractions, 18 of which appear to have been the work of at least one such operation.
Last March, The publication, “Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology,” issued an expression of concern for 13 of the articles, after a group of data sleuths pointed out problems with the papers.
As Science magazine pointed out at the time, the sleuths, including Elisabeth Bik, found evidence that more than 400 articles generated by the suspected mill contained fabricated images. All of the papers came from research teams based in China, they noted.
Continue reading The mill and the loss: Journal up to 39 retractions, just under half linked to paper mills
[This post has been updated since publication; see update note at end for details.]
In July 2019, Kevin Hall, of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and colleagues published a study in Cell Metabolism that found, according to its title, that “Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain.”
A year and a half after its publication, the paper is the subject of two critical blog posts, one by Nick Brown and one by Ethan and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. In the days since we first shared embargoed drafts of those posts with Hall, he and the sleuths engaged in a back and forth, and Brown and the Ludwin-Peerys now say they are satisfied that many of the major issues appear to have been resolved. They have also made changes to their posts, including adding responses from Hall.
In short, it seems like a great example of public post-publication peer review in action. For example, the Ludwin-Peerys write:
When we took a close look at these data, we originally found a number of patterns that we were unable to explain. Having communicated with the authors, we now think that while there are some strange choices in their analysis, most of these patterns can be explained…
In a draft of their post shared with us early last week — see “a note to readers” below — the Ludwin-Peerys said that some of the data in the study “really bothered” them. In particular, they write, the two groups of people studied — 20 received ultra-processed foods, while 20 were given an unprocessed diet — “report the same amount of change in body weight, the only difference being that one group gained weight and the other group lost it.” They were also surprised by the “pretty huge” correlation between weight changes and energy intake.
Brown’s draft post, which digs into the data, concludes:
Continue reading NIH researcher responds as sleuths scrutinize high-profile study of ultra-processed foods and weight gain