Category: springer retractions

Last year, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology found itself on the receiving end of what its editor Roland Seifert called a “massive attack of fraudulent papers” that were the product of paper mills. 

In response Seifert — who says the journal ultimately will have retracted 10 of those articles and stopped another 30 from being published — has produced a 20-point list of red flags that indicate the possibility of a paper mill in action, and features of these papers in general.

We won’t reproduce the list in its entirety, but here are a few highlights, in no particular order. 

Springer Nature is retracting a book chapter describing conference research after scholars in the deaf community blasted it for being “unbelievably insulting.”

The chapter, “Implementation of Hand Gesture Recognition System To Aid Deaf-Dumb People,” appeared in Advances in Signal and Data Procesing: Select Proceedings of ICSDP 2019. The authors were  Supriya Ghule and Mrunalini Chavaan, of the MIT Academy of Engineering in Pune, India. 

According to the abstract: 

A neuroscientist once dubbed the “prince of panspermia” has lost a 2019 paper claiming that Venus may hold life seeded from Earth. 

The paper, titled “Life on Venus and the interplanetary transfer of biota from Earth,” was written by Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, whose affiliations have included outfits called Astrobiology Associates of Northern California San Francisco and the Brain Research Neuroscience Laboratory. 

A once-avid YouTuber, Joseph also has a consulting business, charging $500 for a 30-minute phone call, $500 an hour to review documents and $250 per page for his writing services. He’ll also sit with you face-to-face (six feet away and fully masked, we trust) for three hours if you have $5,000 for the privilege. 

That’s high-priced lawyer money. Speaking of which, according to Vice, Joseph in 2014 tried to use the courts to force NASA to investigate what he believed was evidence of life on Mars. 

Less than two weeks after publication, an essay on poverty and race which critics decried as “unscholarly” and “overtly racist” has been retracted.

The essay, by Lawrence Mead, of New York University, appeared in the journal Society on July 21. It immediately drew the ire of hundreds of academics and advocates who, in a pair of petitions, demanded among other things that the journal retract the paper. 

Earlier this week, Springer Nature, which publishes Society, flagged Mead’s essay with an editor’s note stating that it was investigating the matter. Now the publisher has decided to remove the article. The retraction notice reads:

A journal has retracted a 45-year-old case study over concerns that the authors had failed to obtain proper informed consent from the family they’d described. 

The article, “Stickler syndrome report of a second Australian family,” appeared in Pediatric Radiology, a Springer Nature title, in 1975. The first author was Kazimierz Kozlowski, a prominent radiologist who was born in Poland and worked in the United States and Australia, where he studied skeletal diseases in children.