by publisher – Page 7 – Retraction Watch

Plague of anomalies in conference proceedings hint at ‘systemic issues’

Hundreds of conference papers published by the U.S.-based Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) show signs of plagiarism, citation fraud and other types of scientific misconduct, according to data sleuths.

“I am concerned that the issue with these particular conferences is widespread enough such that it indicates systemic issues with their peer review systems,” Kendra Albert wrote last August in an email to IEEE that Retraction Watch has seen.

Albert is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School and a lecturer in women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. On the side, Albert has been working with Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse, in France, to ferret out research misconduct using a computer system called the Problematic Paper Screener.

Prominent nanoscientist retracts paper after PhD students flagged error

The authors of a 2018 nanoscience paper have retracted the article after three doctoral students highlighted a problem with its methods.

The 2018 study attracted media attention for suggesting that nanospears, microscopic structures similar to splinters, may be useful in delivering gene therapies.

Paul Weiss, a nanoscientist and a corresponding author of the paper, announced the retraction on Twitter April 5, the same day the retraction notice appeared. Weiss holds several academic positions, including Presidential Chair of Chemistry and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Article that assessed MDPI journals as “predatory” retracted and replaced

A 2021 article that found journals from the open-access publisher MDPI had characteristics of predatory journals has been retracted and replaced with a version that softens its conclusions about the company. MDPI is still not satisfied, however.

The article, “Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI),” was published in Research Evaluation. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

María de los Ángeles Oviedo García, a professor of business administration and marketing at the University of Seville in Spain, and the paper’s sole author, analyzed 53 MDPI journals that were included in Clarivate’s 2018 Journal Citation Reports.

Hindawi shuttering four journals overrun by paper mills

Hindawi will cease publishing four journals that it identified as “heavily compromised by paper mills.”

The open access publisher announced today in a blog post that it will continue to retract articles from the closed titles, which are Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, the Journal of Healthcare Engineering, and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

The closures follow reporting by Retraction Watch in February that a professor used the identity and email account of a former student to edit special issues of two of the journals, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

‘Misleading’ and ‘false’ portrayal of racism-related experiences leads to retraction

A health services journal has retracted a recent commentary about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) activities at the University of Minnesota after the authors said they had unintentionally “mischaracterized the authenticity of experiences represented.”

The four-page commentary, titled “Transactional and transformative diversity, equity, and inclusion activities in health services research departments,” had appeared in the journal Health Services Research for almost three months before its retraction in March. It was co-authored by three employees at the University of Minnesota: professor Janette Dill, lecturer Stuart Grande and Tongtan Chantarat, a research scientist at the institution.

The article details the DEI-related activities within the school’s Division of Health Policy and Management that were implemented from 2020 onwards amid calls for racial equity. (Minneapolis, where the university’s main campus is based, was the site of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020.) They label some efforts as “performative”, but go on to outline hopes for “transformative change” in the division – referring to attempts to build trust and relationships with students and faculty belonging to racial and ethnic minority groups.

Wiley and Hindawi to retract 1,200 more papers for compromised peer review

Hindawi and Wiley, its parent company, have identified approximately 1,200 articles with compromised peer review that the publishers will begin retracting this month.

Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of the research division at Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, wrote about the forthcoming retractions in a blog post at Scholarly Kitchen yesterday.

The plan to retract 1,200 articles, which the publisher expects to take a few months, follows Hindawi’s announcement last September that it would retract 511 articles across 16 journals for manipulated peer review. (We’ve tracked 501 retractions from 23 Hindawi journals since the announcement.)

A high-quality cloned journal has duped hundreds of scholars, and has no reason to stop

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

In 2021, I created an alert on Scopus to keep me updated about new publications in the Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences, which had been hijacked by fraudulent publishers. I wanted to know if unauthorized content from this hijacked journal ended up in the index.

However, I forgot about the alert until last month, when I received three notifications from Scopus regarding new publications in the journal.

These notifications included lists of a dozen papers indexed in Scopus, all of them originating from the hijacked version of the journal. Inspecting the profile of the journal showed that probably more than 55 papers from the hijackers are currently indexed in Scopus:

Journal pulls papers by embattled scientist at national research center in France

A nanotechnology journal has retracted two papers coauthored by a scientist in France who is accused of manipulating or reusing graphs and figures in nearly two dozen instances, Retraction Watch has learned.

The scientist, Jolanda Spadavecchia (pictured), is research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In December, an article in the newspaper Le Monde described allegations of misconduct in Spadavecchia’s lab.

Spadavecchia is second author of one of the retracted papers, “Interaction of Thermus thermophilus ArsC enzyme and gold nanoparticles naked-eye assays speciation between As(III) and As(V);” she is senior author of the other, “One-pot synthesis of a gold nanoparticle–Vmh2 hydrophobin nanobiocomplex for glucose monitoring.”

Norway demotes Hindawi journal after claims one published a stolen paper

In June 2021, Espen Flo Bødal began to believe that a paper he’d co-authored had been stolen.

The news came via a ResearchGate alert that the Norwegian researcher’s work had been cited, according to the publication Universitets (article in Norwegian). When Bødal checked the alert, he saw that part of his doctoral thesis had been published, essentially word for word.

But instead of his name and those of his collaborators at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the article listed researchers at the Huzhou Power Supply Company and North China Electric Power University as its authors.

Nearly 20 Hindawi journals delisted from leading index amid concerns of papermill activity

Nineteen journals from the open-access publisher Hindawi were removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science Monday when the indexer refreshed its Master Journal List.

The delistings follow a disclosure by Wiley, which bought Hindawi in 2021, that the company suspended publishing special issues for three months because of “compromised articles.” That lost the company $9 million in revenue.

Clarivate updates its Master Journal List of titles included in Web of Science on a monthly basis. It dropped more than 50 journals from its indexes in March, according to a blog post by Nandita Quaderi, editor in chief and vice president of Web of Science, for failing to meet 24 quality criteria such as adequate peer review, appropriate citations, and content that’s relevant to the stated scope of the journal.

Delisting 50 journals at once is more than usual for Clarivate, and may be the beginning of a larger culling. Quaderi wrote that the company developed an AI tool “to help us identify outlier characteristics that indicate that a journal may no longer meet our quality criteria.” The tool flagged more than 500 journals at the beginning of this year, according to her blog post, and Web of Science’s editors continue to investigate them.

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