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.
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.
A journal editor who disdains anonymous concerns about research integrity has just seen an article in his journal retracted, thanks to the work of a pseudonymous sleuth.
In 2020, the pseudonymous sleuth Artemisia Stricta first alerted IJMR leadership to possible image manipulation in the article as part of an extensive report on hundreds of compromised papers. Editors and the journal’s publisher De Gruyter did not investigate the case for two years.
During that time, Guido Schmitz of the University of Stuttgart became the journal’s editor in chief. When Artemisia followed up on their report, Schmitz said that he would not investigate the potential misconduct until Artemisia revealed their identity:
Public attention to the use of animals in research is on the rise, and with good reason. As scientists, we have a responsibility to avoid using animals in our work whenever possible. Not only does this prevent needless suffering and waste of resources, it also leads to better science, because findings from animal experiments often fail to hold up in humans. If studies can be conducted ethically with human subjects, tissues, or organs, they should not use animals.
On paper, some journals appear to clear this bar. In reality, however, they fall short of carrying out their ethical responsibility: We see many examples, especially in journals in the nutrition field, of published research that was conducted in animals but could have been carried out in humans or using human-relevant methods.
For example, a recent study fed monkeys Western- and Mediterranean-style diets to produce information about the diets’ effects on human mood and behavior. Another experiment used pigs to evaluate how diets rich in fruits and vegetables can improve human microbiome health.
This should give pause to the National Library of Medicine (NLM). When deciding if a journal merits inclusion in MEDLINE, the leading bibliographic database for life sciences, NLM may look at whether the journal’s ethical policies align with best practices and how well individual articles adhere to those policies.
In June of 2020, officials from the Veterans Affairs Medical Center of San Francisco and the University of California, San Francisco, sent a letter to the journal Oncogene with the findings of an investigation of scientific misconduct: A paper the journal had published in 2007 contained “falsified data,” and the officials recommended the journal “assess this paper for retraction.”
The 2020 letter – which we obtained through a public records request – was the second time the institutions had alerted the journal. As the officials stated, a previous investigation had found issues in the 2007 paper, and UCSF-VA had communicated “earlier evidence that this same paper had data fabrication and/or falsification constituting research misconduct” to the journal in 2017.
“Even though the journal has been notified after the last investigation and not taken action,” the 2020 letter stated, “they should be notified again because additional research misconduct has been found.”
In fact, a journal staffer was in the midst of discussing the issues in the article with Rajivir Dahiya, the corresponding author and then director of UCSF’s Urology Research Center with an appointment at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.
In October, the Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation tried – and failed – to publish its own ranking of important papers in the field. The article, “The Top 50 Articles on Knee Posterolateral Corner Injuries,” by a group at Tulane University in New Orleans, purported to give readers a run-down of the 50 most-cited papers on posterolateral corner injuries between 1976 and 2021.
If you’re afraid of numbers, you might want to skip ahead. If not: Within the top 50 was a Top 10 list, capped by this 2009 review article, which, according to the authors, had garnered 205 citations – and amassed a citation density of 15.77 (citations divided by years in print) – since publication.
Citation density, meet the dust. According to the retraction notice:
Last August 12th, Nick Wise came across a Facebook post advertising the first, third, and fifth author positions for sale on a scientific paper with the same title as a recently published article.
Wise, a scientific sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions, posted a comment on PubPeer with a screenshot of the advertisement and contacted the publisher of the journal.
Hindawi, the open access publisher that Wiley acquired in 2021, temporarily suspended publishing special issues because of “compromised articles,” according to a press release announcing the company’s third quarter financial results.
Brian Napack, Wiley’s president and CEO, specifically noted the “unplanned publishing pause at Hindawi” as a factor that “challenged” the company this year.
The pause began in mid-October and ended in mid-January, a Wiley spokesperson told us.
In Wiley’s third quarter that ended Jan. 31, 2023, the suspension cost Hindawi – whose business model is based on charging authors to publish – $9 million in lost revenue compared to the third quarter of 2022. The company cited the pause as the primary reason its revenue from its research segment “was down 4% as reported, or down 2% at constant currency and excluding acquisitions,” the press release stated.
In November of 2020, an economics professor wrote to the editor-in-chief of a journal with two requests: remove his name from an online paper on which he was the corresponding author, and retract the article.
More than two years later, neither of those things has happened.
A scholar who was involved in the work but left off the paper has provided evidence, seen by Retraction Watch, that the published article contains falsified data. Two of the paper’s authors also have had another article they co-authored together retracted.
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.
Hijacked journal: Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies
What happened: The journal became a perfect target for hijackers when it expanded its title from “Linguistica Antverpiensia” and changed its web domain.
Fraudulent publishers hijacked the journal in 2021, re-registering the old, expired domain under the original, shorter name Linguistica Antverpiensia.
