by publisher – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

MDPI backtracks on claim that a thesis can’t be plagiarized

The publisher MDPI has reversed itself on one reason it said a paper does not need to be retracted following allegations the authors had plagiarized a thesis.

As we reported earlier this week, the editorial office at Nutrients told Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, NH, in May that it didn’t consider apparent overlap between a 2023 paper and her 2020 thesis plagiarism “because thesis materials are not classified as prior publications.”

Yesterday, MDPI did a 180, blaming a “mismatch in their internal communications” for the responses Saxby received.

‘A disturbing experience’: Postdoc fights to have work that plagiarized her thesis retracted

In December, Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was notified by her friend of a paper published in the MDPI journal Nutrients that sounded similar to her dissertation. Saxby pulled up her 2020 dissertation, “The Potential of Taro (Colocasia esculenta) as a Dietary Prebiotic Source for the Prevention of Colorectal Cancer,” and compared it to the 2023 Nutrients article.

To her dismay, the paper “Taro Roots: An Underexploited Root Crop,” co-authored by researchers at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, overlaps significantly with Saxby’s work, including some passages of word-for-word copying with no citation.

While the corresponding author of the paper has called the omission of any citation to Saxby’s work “unfortunate” and said that she is working with Nutrients’ publisher – MDPI – to add one, the publisher said the behavior did not amount to plagiarism because the prior work was a thesis.

Give or take a year or two: Case reveals publishers’ vastly different retraction times

On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.”

“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.

Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:

A study of C-section scars – in women who hadn’t undergone the surgery

A study purportedly of scars left by caesarean sections included women yet to undergo the surgery, say sleuths. But an investigation into the research by the author’s employer and the journal that published it found no evidence of research misconduct.

The paper, published in Wiley journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, was flagged on PubPeer in February by Ben Mol, an ob-gyn researcher at Monash University in Australia whose efforts have led to scores of retractions and corrections, and Jim Thornton, emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Nottingham, in the UK. The study looks at how the scar left behind on a woman’s uterus after a c-section is affected by the dilation of her cervix at the time of the procedure.

Publisher retracts more than a dozen papers at once for likely paper mill activity

The Scottish Medical Journal has retracted more than a dozen papers dating back to 2020 after concluding the articles were likely produced by one or more paper mills.

The articles, all by researchers in China, covered a range of topics including back pain, pancreatic cancer, hand hygiene and sepsis. Most were meta-analyses.

Here’s the blanket notice for the 13 papers, which the publisher, Sage, lists by url but not title:

Publisher flags papers found by university to involve misconduct more than a year ago

Toxicologic Pathology – a Sage title – has issued expressions of concern for six papers that were among the subjects of an investigation by Azabu University that concluded in November 2022.

The expression of concern, dated March 7, 2024, includes a list of the six articles and reads:

Following mass resignation, obstetrics journals place editor’s notes on studies

Two BMC journals – part of the Springer Nature stable – have flagged studies a month after 10 editors at one of the journals resigned to protest the publications’ failure to respond quickly to allegations of data fabrication.

As we reported earlier this month, obstetrician-gynecologist and sleuth Ben Mol sent allegations about papers published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health on Jan. 29, 2024. When BMC had not responded to Mol by February 28, 10 editors quit.

Mohamed Abdelmonem Kamel of Fayoum University in Egypt, the corresponding author of both articles, did not initially respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch. However, he left a comment defending the work on our post and said his team could not share the data behind one of the papers “before publishing it first as a paper to prevent stealing the data in another paper by different authors.” The study said that the data “are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.”

Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool

Wiley, whose Hindawi subsidiary has attracted thousands of paper mill papers that later needed to be retracted, has seen widespread paper mill activity among hundreds of its journals, it announced yesterday.

More than 270 of its titles rejected anywhere from 600 to 1,000 papers per month before peer review once they implemented a pilot of what the publisher calls its Papermill Detection service. That service flagged 10-13% of all of the 10,000 manuscripts submitted to those journals per month, Wiley told Retraction Watch.

Wiley said the service includes “six distinct tools,” including looking for similarities with known paper mill papers, searching for “tortured phrases” and other problematic passages, flagging “irregular publishing patterns by paper authors,” verifying researcher identity, detecting hallmarks of generative AI, and analyzing the relevance of a given manuscript to the journal.

Editorial board members resign from obstetrics journal to protest handling of allegations

A group of 10 members of the editorial board of BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth have resigned to protest the journal’s failure to respond to allegations of data fabrication.

Last week, in an email obtained by Retraction Watch, the editors wrote to Tovah Aronin, the managing editor of the journal, regarding “concerns about the publication of fraudulent research in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health in 2023.”

The allegations about two papers had been sent to the journal on Jan. 29, 2024, by Ben Mol, an obstetrician-gynecologist who has earned a reputation as a sleuth for his efforts to clean up the literature in the field:

Exclusive: Physician in India who coauthored review with US profs is running a paper mill

A recent review article whose authors included two assistant professors at universities in the United States was written by a physician in India who is running a paper mill, Retraction Watch has learned.

“Current Status and Emerging Trends in Colorectal Cancer Screening and Diagnostics” appeared last year in a special issue of Biosensors, an MDPI title. The article came to our attention because it matched an ad posted by the Indian paper mill iTrilon, as we reported earlier this year; some of the author names appeared on other iTrilon publications as well.

The two assistant professors – Yuguang Liu of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and Ajeet Kaushik of Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland – have not previously been tied to paper-mill publications and denied any knowledge of the ad.

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