Category: springer retractions

BMC retracts paper by scientist who banned use of his software by immigrant-friendly countries

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 12.24.42 PMA BioMed Central journal has pulled the paper of a scientist who decided to prohibit countries that are friendly to immigrants from using his software.

Recently, German scientist Gangolf Jobb declared that starting on October 1st scientists working in countries that are, in his opinion, too welcoming to immigrants — including Great Britain, France and Germany — could no longer use his Treefinder software, which creates trees showing potential evolutionary relationships between species. He’d already banned its use by U.S. scientists in February, citing the country’s “imperialism.” Last week, BMC Evolutionary Biology pulled the paper describing the software, noting it now “breaches the journal’s editorial policy on software availability.”

Many scientists have used Jobb’s software: The BMC paper that describes it, “TREEFINDER: a powerful graphical analysis environment for molecular phylogenetics,” has been cited 745 times since it was published in 2004, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Jobb told Retraction Watch that the software is still available to any scientist willing to travel to non-banned countries, and that he does not care about the retraction: Continue reading BMC retracts paper by scientist who banned use of his software by immigrant-friendly countries

Authors object to duplication verdict by environmental journal

10661An environmental journal has pulled a 2011 paper following an investigation, which revealed it contained “extensive similarities” with another paper published two years earlier by some of the same authors.

Two of the authors of the newly retracted paper — Zulfiqar Ahmad from Quaid-i-Azam University and Arshad Ashraf of the National Agricultural Research Center, both in Islamabad, Pakistan — were the sole authors of a 2008 paper about modeling groundwater flow in Indus Basin, Pakistan. The 2011 paper  — posted online in 2010 — focused on the same topic, but included two additional authors, one of whom told us he was unaware of the previous paper and agrees with the journal’s decision. Ahmad, however, has defended the 2011 paper and asked that the journal remove the retraction note.

Here’s the note, published in April by Environmental Monitoring and Assessment: Continue reading Authors object to duplication verdict by environmental journal

BMC investigating allegedly copied paper

logoBioMed Central is investigating a recent paper about a potential biomarker for liver cancer, which shows signs it was written using another article as a template.

According to Jeffrey Beall, who exposed the similarities between the two papers on his blog Scholarly Open Access yesterday, the paper in question is “obviously bogus,” and appears to have relied on the “template plagiarism” technique of creating a new article by modifying a previous paper’s text and data.

A spokesperson for BioMed Central, which published the allegedly “junk” paper, as Beall calls it, told us they are looking into the allegations: Continue reading BMC investigating allegedly copied paper

Serial plagiarist’s retractions upped to 14

We’ve done some digging, run the numbers, and present to you a new member of our leaderbcov200hoard: orthopedic researcher Bernardino Saccomanni. Nine newly unearthed retractions of his make for a total of 14.

We first reported on Saccomanni’s work back in 2011, and identified him as a “serial plagiarist.” In the years since, he’s continued to rack up retractions for papers on the likes of ligament reconstruction and shoulder pain. On every paper, he is listed as the sole author.

Bernardino Saccomanni’s most recently listed affiliation on the papers is “Ambulatorio di Ortopedia, via della Conciliazione.” He sometimes also lists his affiliation as Gabriele D’ Annunzio University Chieti, even though, as we learned a few years ago, he hasn’t worked there for many years.

There’s a lot to cover here, so stick with us:

1) First up, “A new test for acromio-clavicolar pathology” was published in the Journal of Clinical Orthopedics and Trauma and cited zero times according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. Here’s the retraction note:

Continue reading Serial plagiarist’s retractions upped to 14

Failure to reproduce key experiments retracts cancer study

Medical OncologyA group of Chinese cancer researchers has retracted a paper in Medical Oncology after they discovered that “several key experiments” were not reproducible.

The paper, “Decreased Warburg effect induced by ATP citrate lyase suppression inhibits tumor growth in pancreatic cancer,” was published in March. It found that suppressing the enzyme ATP citrate lyase could be used to treat pancreatic cancer.

However, the authors decided to pull the paper when some of the findings couldn’t be reproduced. 

Here’s the notice:

Continue reading Failure to reproduce key experiments retracts cancer study

A publication loophole? Authors can make changes editors won’t always see

SEEA few unusual acknowledgements added by authors after finalizing the manuscripts have highlighted a common element in science publishing – right before going to press, authors can make minor changes to manuscripts that editors won’t necessarily review before publication.

We were reminded of this when reading two opinion papers published in August by Science and Engineering Ethics.

For one, “Honor Killing: Where Pride Defeats Reason,” the acknowledgements read: Continue reading A publication loophole? Authors can make changes editors won’t always see

Boldt’s retraction count upped to 94, co-author takes legal action to prevent 95th

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We’ve found two recent retractions and an expression of concern for Joachim Boldt, former prominent anesthesiologist and currently Retraction Watch leaderboard’s 2nd place titleholder. He now has 94 retractions.

One of the retracted articles contains falsified data, along with a researcher who didn’t agree to be a co-author, according to an investigation by the Justus Liebig University Giessen, where Boldt used to work. The expression of concern is regarding some questionable data. The other new retraction is actually one of 88 papers that a group of editors agreed to retract back in 2011, after they were “unable to verify” approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the studies.

One of those 88 papers, we’ve discovered, has still has not been retracted. According to an editor at the journal, they haven’t removed it because one of Boldt’s co-authors has threatened them with legal action. Continue reading Boldt’s retraction count upped to 94, co-author takes legal action to prevent 95th

Authors “did not have permission” to use pesticide data

10661An environmental journal is retracting an article about the risks of pesticides to groundwater after determining it contained data that “the authors did not have permission (implicit or explicit) to publish.”

According to the retraction note in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, the paper said the data came from a non-author’s PhD thesis, but it’s not there. Those mysterious data were used to validate a model for pesticide exposures, described in an excerpt from the abstract:  Continue reading Authors “did not have permission” to use pesticide data

“Rigging of the peer-review process” kills parasite paper

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A paper on nematode parasites appears to have been infected with a nasty strain of a publishing problem known as fake peer review. By our count, the phenomenon has felled approximately 250 papers in total.

The affected review, “The important role of matrix metalloproteinases in nematode parasites,” explores a type of enzyme secreted by the parasite. Published in Helminthologia, it’s been cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Unfortunately, the retraction note doesn’t give us too many details about how the peer review process was manipulated:

Continue reading “Rigging of the peer-review process” kills parasite paper

Predatory journals published 400,000 papers in 2014: Report

BMC medicineThe number of so-called “predatory” open-access journals that allegedly sidestep publishing standards in order to make money off of article processing charges has dramatically expanded in recent years, and three-quarters of authors are based in either Asia or Africa, according to a new analysis from BMC Medicine.*

The number of articles published by predatory journals spiked from 53,000 in 2010 to around 420,000 in 2014, appearing in 8,000 active journals. By comparison, some 1.4-2 million papers are indexed in PubMed and similar vetted databases every year.

These types of papers have become a major problem, according to Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado Denver who studies the phenomenon: Continue reading Predatory journals published 400,000 papers in 2014: Report