by publisher – Page 36 – Retraction Watch

Journal slaps 13 expressions of concern on papers suspected of being from a paper mill

The journal Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology has attached expressions of concern to 13 papers published in 2019 that a group of sleuths have flagged for potentially being from a paper mill.

In February, Elisabeth Bik wrote on her blog:

Based on the resemblance of the Western blot bands to tadpoles (the larval stage of an amphibian, such as a frog or a toad), we will call this the Tadpole Paper Mill.

Bik explains in her post that she and her colleagues — including pseudonymous sleuths @MortenOxe, @SmutClyde, and @TigerBB8 — had been working on a set of 17 papers that Jennifer Byrne and Jana Christopher had also been scrutinizing:

‘I shot at my own foot with my own gun’: Journal rebuffs attempt at un-retraction

An Elsevier journal has denied the efforts of a group of researchers — well, most of them, anyway — to reverse a retraction after having agreed to the move in the first place.

The dispute centers on a 2018 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports titled “Association between low-testosterone and kidney stones in US men: The national health and nutrition examination survey 2011–2012” — which, as the title implies, found that:

Fake peer review, made-up author take down a paper

Manipulated peer review strikes again, this time with a 2015 article whose authors appear to have created a straw mathematician to make their work seem more legit.

The paper, “Fixed point theorems and explicit estimates for convergence rates of continuous time Markov chains,” appeared in Fixed Point Theory and Applications, a Springer Nature title.

Its authors, purportedly, were affiliated with institutions in China and Japan. According to the acknowledgements for the article:

Heavily criticized paper blaming the sun for global warming is retracted

A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move

a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.

The 2019 article, “Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale,” appeared in Scientific Reports and was written by a group of authors from the UK, Russia and Azerbaijan. The first author was Valentina Zharkova, a mathematician/astrophysicist at Northumbria University, whose group reported having received funding for the work from the U.S. Air Force and the Russian Science Foundation.

The paper purported to find that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field are making the earth hotter:

Software error grounds pigeon-smarts paper

Pigeons definitely get a bad rap. Some might consider them mere rats with wings, purveyors of pestilence, distributors of dung, but rock doves aren’t, well, as dumb as their name might suggest. Pigeons are perhaps the world’s most accurate homers, they seem to have an innate knack for game theory and they can detect breast cancer in mammograms better than many doctors.

So when researchers in Germany reported in 2017 that pigeons were as adept, if not better, than people in multitasking, the findings seemed plausible. The study, which appeared in Current Biology, garnered a bit of media attention, including this piece in The Scientist, and has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics Web of Science.

Turns out, that was a flight of fancy.

Retractions could mean fewer submissions for journals, says new analysis

What affects the number of submissions a journal receives? A new study in Learned Publishing, led by staff at Wiley, aimed to find out — and the results, based in part on our database, suggest that retractions may correlate with submission numbers. We asked corresponding author Thomas Gaston to answer a few questions about the paper.

Tell us about your study — why and how you did it, and what you found.

Entire board of law journal resigns in a ‘small act of resistance’

The defense resigns.

The entire editorial board of the European Law Journal, along with its two top editors, has quit over a dispute about contract terms and the behavior of its publisher, Wiley.

In a statement posted on the blog of the European Law Blog, editors-in-chief Joana Mendes, of the University of Luxembourg, and Harm Schepel, of the University of Kent, in England, wrote:

Four dead authors, a duplicate publication and questions: Solve this one!

A study spanning dozens of years, four deceased authors and a retraction for duplicate publication. Sounds like a recipe for an episode of that new show about medical detectives (not epidemiologists; detectives with guns).

We’d like to be able to explain, but, well, we can’t. What we do know is that the authors of a 2019 article about the role of aluminum in neurologic disease have retracted their paper because it’s a duplicate of an article some of them had published in 2018. But that’s as clear as things get.

Here’s the retraction notice, which, like any good mystery, is full of question marks:

Tired of waiting for a university, a publisher commissions its own investigation — and retracts two papers

The journal Diabetes has retracted two 2006 papers by a group of researchers in Germany whose work has long been the subject of concerns about image duplication and manipulation.

The first author of the articles is Kathrin Maedler, a prominent diabetes specialist at the University of Bremen, where she’d been a named professor but lost the title over the affair. Maedler’s group now has four retractions resulting from problematic figures.

The University of Bremen in 2016 found insufficient evidence that Maedler committed research misconduct, but concluded that she was negligent. Maedler at the time told us:

Journal retracts paper claiming a link between the HPV vaccine and lower pregnancy rates

A paper on the human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) that was called a “very flawed and biased study with the potential of being misinterpreted or misused” has been retracted.

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