Elsevier says it is investigating how one of its journals managed to publish a paper with patently absurd assertions about the genetic inheritance of personality traits.
The paper, “Temperament gene inheritance,” appears this month in Meta Gene and was written by authors in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. It states:
Continue reading ‘Transparently ridiculous’: Elsevier says journal shares critic’s concerns about bizarre genetics paper
If bats and pangolins could review scientific papers, they’d definitely have given the following article an “accept without revisions.”
An international group of researchers has proposed that COVID-19 hitched a ride to this planet from space. Same for the fungal infection Candida auris.
We’ve heard plenty of bizarre theories about the novel coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, from its having been manufactured in a Chinese lab to its links to 5G cell technology. But this one wins the prize for being, as one Twitter user said, “batshit.”
Continue reading COVID-19 arrived on a meteorite, claims Elsevier book chapter
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.
Continue reading Let me get this straight: You added a bunch of co-authors without their consent, and you couldn’t be bothered to include me?
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.
Continue reading How did content from a hijacked journal end up in one of the world’s most-used databases?
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:
Continue reading ‘Beggers’ can’t be choosers as another meta-analysis is retracted
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:
Continue reading Authors retract highly cited 2014 Science paper
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:
Continue reading Study of China’s ethnic minorities retracted as dozens of papers come under scrutiny for ethical violations
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:
Continue reading Springer Nature retracts paper that hundreds called “overtly racist”
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.
Continue reading Why did a journal suddenly retract a 45-year-old paper over lack of informed consent?
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,
Continue reading French hydroxychloroquine study has “major methodological shortcomings” and is “fully irresponsible,” says review, but is not being retracted