A journal that lost its impact factor in June is in the midst of a cleanup operation, issuing nearly 140 retractions so far this year.
The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles.
Cabanac and Magazinov have now flagged 1,850 articles from the journal, Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR), with the Problematic Paper Screener, which looks for evidence of bad practices in academic papers.
A group of researchers in Iran now have had more than 60 papers retracted for concerns about peer review and plagiarism as a publisher investigates its back catalog. One of the researchers, A. Salar Elahi, now ranks 7th on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.
Previously, Elsevier said they would retract 26 papers from the research group at Islamic Azad University in Tehran for fake reviews in 2017 and 2018. The latest batch of 33 retracted papers originally appeared in Springer Nature’s Journal of Fusion Energy as far back as 2009.
Tim Kersjes, head of research integrity at Springer Nature told us in addition to investigating specific concerns as they arise, his unit also is running “ongoing deep-dive investigations to assess published content that has connections with content that has already been retracted for integrity concerns by ourselves or other publishers.” The recent retractions came from such an investigation that is ongoing, he said.
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.
Two BMC journals – part of the Springer Nature stable – have flagged studies a month after 10 editors at one of the journals resigned to protest the publications’ failure to respond quickly to allegations of data fabrication.
As we reported earlier this month, obstetrician-gynecologist and sleuth Ben Mol sent allegations about papers published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health on Jan. 29, 2024. When BMC had not responded to Mol by February 28, 10 editors quit.
Mohamed Abdelmonem Kamel of Fayoum University in Egypt, the corresponding author of both articles, did not initially respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch. However, he left a comment defending the work on our post and said his team could not share the data behind one of the papers “before publishing it first as a paper to prevent stealing the data in another paper by different authors.” The study said that the data “are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.”
A group of 10 members of the editorial board of BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth have resigned to protest the journal’s failure to respond to allegations of data fabrication.
Last week, in an email obtained by Retraction Watch, the editors wrote to Tovah Aronin, the managing editor of the journal, regarding “concerns about the publication of fraudulent research in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health in 2023.”
The allegations about two papers had been sent to the journal on Jan. 29, 2024, by Ben Mol, an obstetrician-gynecologist who has earned a reputation as a sleuth for his efforts to clean up the literature in the field:
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.
“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:
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 journal BMC Public Health plans to retract an article that found smoking rates fell faster than expected in the US as use of e-cigarettes increased, Retraction Watch has learned.
The authors contend that they addressed the issues cited in the retraction notice during the peer review process and say they addressed them even more extensively when the journal said they intended to retract.
Some journals, including several in the BMJ family and the American Journal of Public Health, will not publish research funded by the tobacco industry, which has led to at least one retraction. But the planned BMC Public Health retraction notice does not refer to that conflict of interest.
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.
