Category: springer retractions

A journal has retracted an entire special issue over concerns the guest-edited papers underwent a “compromised” peer review process. 

In a supplement to Volume 337 Issue 1 of Annals of Operations Research, 23 papers were retracted with the same statement: 

The Editor-in-Chief and the publisher have retracted this article. The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue. An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised editorial handling and peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references or not being in scope of the journal or guest-edited issue. Based on the investigation’s findings the Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions of this article.

The articles in the guest-edited issue, Prescriptive Analytics Using Machine Learning and Mathematical Programming for Sustainable Operations Research, were published between June 2022 and October 2023. 

A Springer Nature journal retracted 34 papers earlier this month, including, ironically enough, one on how to detect fake news, which appeared in special guest-edited issues hacked by publication cheats.

Special issues have emerged over the past few years as particularly vulnerable to paper mills. Last March, we reported that Wiley was taking a $9 million write-down after its Hindawi subsidiary paused publication of such issues because they were badly hacked by paper mills.

“Hybrid deep learning model for automatic fake news detection,” from a group in Turkey led by Othman A. Hanshal, was published last February in Applied Nanoscience. The retraction notice reads: 

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. 

Springer Nature has retracted a book chapter which critics say was plagued with “extremely offensive and outdated” statements about the deaf community. 

The chapter, “Literature Review on Sign Language Generation,” was published in September 2022 as part of Data Management, Analytics and Innovation: Proceedings of ICDMAI 2022 (International Conference on Data Management, Analytics and Innovation). The authors, five researchers at the Cummins College of Engineering for Women in Pune, India, attempted to review work on sign language translation – specifically with artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

From the abstract: 

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2017 paper on induced brain injuries in piglets over questions about the data – making us wonder if the animals weren’t essentially tortured (if the experiments truly took place) as part of someone’s misconduct.  

Meanwhile, Springer Nature seems to have wiped its hands clean of the matter involving a paper from the lab of William Armstead, a now-retired pharmacy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who is up to five retractions. The publisher agreed to refer any questions about the case to the main institution involved, a private university, meaning that readers and the public have little if any recourse to learn the truth unless it releases a report on the matter – which rarely happens. 

No one at Penn has responded to repeated requests for comment from us. And even if they release a report, as we’ve written, the record of the misconduct might leave much to be desired. 

A Springer Nature journal has decided not to retract a paper it had been investigating for plagiarism since receiving allegations in January 2021. The decision came 1.5 years since the editor-in-chief apparently agreed the paper should be retracted, and just a few days after we reported on the case. 

Systems engineer Paola Di Maio notified Springer Nature in January 2021 that the article, “Robotic Standard Development Life Cycle in Action,” published in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, described a methodology she had developed without crediting her work. As we wrote in our post on Friday, Aug. 5th: