The publisher Elsevier is investigating an unspecified number of articles by authors affiliated with a French research institute for concerns about “the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants.”
According to a “Publisher’s Note” that appeared November 9 in Elsevier’s New Microbes and New Infections, “concerns have been raised about a number of articles” published in the journal by researchers affiliated with the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection (IHU-MI) in Marseille.
The journal and Elsevier’s “Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics Centre of Expertise” are investigating the allegations “by confidentially consulting with the authors and, where necessary, liaising with the institution where the studies took place,” the note said. It continued:
The publisher Sage has retracted 209 articles from an engineering journal after an investigation found “compromised peer review or 3rd party involvement,” according to a company spokesperson.
At that time, the company marked 318 additional papers “with more complex issues” with expressions of concern as it continued investigating. All of the papers retracted today previously had expressions of concern.
The 209 articles were retracted with five different notices. Some articles “contain indicators of third-party involvement” and the corresponding authors “were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation,” one read.
When I began my graduate work almost 15 years ago, retractions of papers in academic journals were rare, reserved mainly for clear misconduct or serious errors. Today, rarity has given way to routine, with retractions coming more often and increasingly in bulk.
Sage is not immune to large-scale retractions, nor are we passive observers of their growth. As Retraction Watch wrote, we were “one of the first publishers to recognize large-scale peer review manipulation and begin retracting papers in bulk nine years ago.” Recently, we issued some major retractions; just in the last few months, we put out 37 from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and 21 from Concurrent Engineering. And there are more to come.
While we don’t celebrate this type of action, the news is not all bad. The high numbers of retractions at times reflect a problem of industrialized cheating, but also, as in our case, a belief that rigorous scholarship – robustly reviewed by researchers who are experts in their fields – can and should improve the world. Sage was founded on this principle, and it guides everything we do.
We take our role of vigorously correcting the academic record very seriously because we believe in the scholarly process. We also know that every part of the process is managed by humans with biases (conscious or unconscious), agendas, heavy workloads, and – at times – dubious incentives.
As research integrity manager at Sage, I work to safeguard the credibility of the research published in more than 60,000 articles every year across more than 1,100 journals. In my role, I see a lot of unethical practices: peer review rings, where researchers unfairly influence the review process; paper mills that produce mass-fabricated research papers, and the brazen trend of selling authorship or entire papers on private or public forums. When it comes to preventing and correcting this type of action, much goes on behind the scenes.
In February, David Allison came across a study with a familiar problem.
The authors of the study purported to show an educational program helped women lose weight, but they had not directly compared the treatment and control groups. Instead, they’d used a statistically invalid method to compare changes within the groups.
Allison, the dean at Indiana University’s School of Public Health in Bloomington, along with researcher Luis-Enrique Becerra-Garcia and other colleagues, in July submitted a critique of the study to the journal that had published it. Four days later, Nauman Khalid, the journal’s editor in chief, wrote to the study’s lead author.
“I got excellent feedback from Dr. Becerra-Garcia,” Khalid wrote. “According to their analysis, the statistical tool that you used in your research is wrong and not well-validated.”
Now, after a lack of adequate response from the authors, the study will be retracted, according to Khalid.
In 2022, Guillaume Cabanac noticed something unusual: a study had attracted more than 100 citations in a short span of less than two months of being published.
Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, initially flagged the study on PubPeer after it was highlighted by the Problematic Paper Screener, which automatically identifies research papers with certain issues.
The screener flagged this particular paper — which has since been retracted — for containing so-called tortured phrases, strange twists on established terms that were probably introduced by translation software or humans looking to circumvent plagiarism checkers.
But Cabanac noticed something weird: The study had been cited 107 times according to the ‘Altmetrics donut,’ an indicator of an article’s potential impact, yet it had been downloaded just 62 times.
A paper that found smoking rates in the United States fell faster than expected as more people started using e-cigarettes has been retracted over the objections of its authors, who have filed a complaint with the journal’s publisher.
The letter did not request retraction of the paper, but argued that its analyses “were flawed and therefore potentially produced misleading findings that would benefit tobacco industry profits and interests.”
The authors of the retracted paper are employees of Pinney Associates, a consulting firm that they disclosed “provide[s] consulting services on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc.” The article also disclosed that Juul Labs funded the research and reviewed and provided comments on a draft manuscript.
After we published our story about the pending retraction, 23 researchers wrote a letter to the journal expressing concern about the decision. They wrote:
The editor in chief, managing editors, and entire editorial board of a mathematics journal all resigned earlier this year following a dispute with their publisher over special issues and article volume.
Changes the publisher wanted to make to the journal “would have the effect of jeopardizing scientific integrity for the sake of financial gain,” the editors wrote in their announcement of their resignations, which took place on January 11.
A new editor’s note in Nature highlights concerns about a paper by Google researchers who claimed computer chips designed in just a few hours using artificial intelligence beat chip plans that human experts took months to develop.
In the note, published September 20, the journal stated:
Readers are alerted that the performance claims in this article have been called into question. The Editors are investigating these concerns, and, if appropriate, editorial action will be taken once this investigation is complete.
In the midst of a tumultuous year, the journal Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, a Sage title, is retracting 21 papers after an investigation identified signs of “compromised” peer review.
Clarivate delisted the journal from its Web of Science index in March for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Founding editor Biren Prasad, who managed the journal since 1992, also retired earlier this year, and the publisher took over management of peer review.
The journal’s online presence also needs attention: Neither of the associate editors listed on its website have been involved for many years, both told Retraction Watch – and one has threatened to sue the journal if she isn’t removed.
Two-thirds of the associate editors of the Journal of Biogeography, a Wiley title, have resigned in a dispute with the publisher, and more resignations are likely, according to those involved.
Most of the resignations, reported first by Times Higher Education, were effective immediately, but a portion of the associate editors set August 28 as their effective date in hopes Wiley may negotiate with them about their concerns.
Most of the associate editors stopped processing new manuscripts at the end of June, as we reported last month, due to the dispute.
In interviews with Retraction Watch, two associate editors who had put in their resignations described concerns with the journal’s high article processing charges (APCs) fueling Wiley’s profitability, as well as the “breakdown in negotiations” between the publisher and the journal’s lead editorial team.
