wiley – Page 2 – Retraction Watch

Hindawi shuttering four journals overrun by paper mills

Hindawi will cease publishing four journals that it identified as “heavily compromised by paper mills.”

The open access publisher announced today in a blog post that it will continue to retract articles from the closed titles, which are Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, the Journal of Healthcare Engineering, and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

The closures follow reporting by Retraction Watch in February that a professor used the identity and email account of a former student to edit special issues of two of the journals, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

Wiley paused Hindawi special issues amid quality problems, lost $9 million in revenue

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.

Two years ago, an author asked a journal to withdraw a paper. It still hasn’t.

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.

Instead, the article, “Outward foreign direct investment and economic growth in Romania: Evidence from non-linear ARDL approach,” which appeared in August 2020 in the International Journal of Finance and Economics, was included in the January 2022 issue of the journal. It has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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.

Editors-in-chief of aging journal resign en masse after ‘impasse with the Anatomical Society and Wiley’

A journal regarded as the leader in its field is without editors after they resigned as a group earlier this month in a dispute over their workload and compensation.

On August 11, the four editors-in-chief of Aging Cell tendered their resignations to Wiley and the Anatomical Society, which together publish the monthly periodical. Explaining their decision in a letter dated August 23 and posted to Twitter by an account unrelated to the journal, the editors – Peter Adams, Julie Andersen, Adam Antobi, Vera Gorbunova, along with John Sedivy, the reviews editor – said they had reached the breaking point after trying to work with the publishers for the last “2-3 years” on “serious issues in running the journal.”

We were unable to immediately reach the editors or Wiley, but Adams retweeted the letter and asked his followers to “Please distribute.”

Anatomy journal retracts 13 papers

The Anatomical Record is correcting itself in a big way, pulling 13 articles, including several linked to paper mills.

The papers, all by authors in China, were published between 2019 and 2021.

Some were flagged in a September 2021 report on research misconduct by the Chinese government. They join a slew of articles The Anatomical Record has retracted since 2020 for similar concerns.

Here’s an example of a retraction notice, this one for “Long noncoding RNA TUG1 facilitates cell ovarian cancer progression through targeting MiR-29b-3p/MDM2 axis,” which appeared in January 2020 from a group at the Department of Pharmacy at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University:

Abstracts flagged because conferences — including one in Wuhan in late 2019 — may not have happened

A journal has issued an expression of concern after learning that it may have published abstracts from meetings that appear not to have taken place.

As many journals do, Basic & Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, a Wiley title, occasionally publishes meeting supplements. But according to the journal, it recently learned from several authors that a dozen of those supplements that it produced

between 2018 and 2020 might have contained suspect work. According to a statement we received from the journal:

A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title

What a difference a D makes.

Ask Kevin Pile. Pile edits the International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases (let’s call it the IJRD), a Wiley publication. Last year, he published a guest editorial by Vaidehi Chowdhary, a rheumatologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on a form of kidney disease.

But it turns out that Chowdhary, a member of Pile’s editorial team, had intended to submit her article, “When doing the right thing is wrong: Drug efflux pumps in steroid‐resistant nephrotic syndrome,” to a different journal, the Indian Journal of Rheumatology, or IJR. We think you can see how this all went down.

According to Pile, the episode was “a tail of consecutive mistakes”:

The bizarre anti-vaccine paper a Florida professor has been trying to have retracted to no avail

Fly, meet elephant’s back.

Robert Speth has spent the last 19 months trying to get two of the world’s largest medical publishers to retract an article he considers to be a “travesty” of pseudoscientific claims and overtly anti-vaccination bias. In the process, he has uncovered slipshod management of a journal’s editorial board that angered, among others, a former FDA commissioner.

The paper that triggered Speth, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., appeared in 2018 in Clinical and Translational Medicine. Titled (awkwardly) “Cancer; an induced disease of twentieth century! Induction of tolerance, increased entropy and ‘Dark Energy’: loss of biorhythms (Anabolism v. Catabolism),” it was written by Mahin Khatami, formerly a program director at the National Institutes of Health.

Although you might not be familiar with Khatami, who was born in Iran but trained in the United States, her bio speaks (loudly) for itself:

A Wiley journal makes another article disappear

In journalism, we have a running joke: Once something happens three times, it is a trend.

Well, one publisher’s propensity for making articles disappear from journal websites seems to be a trend. Twice this month, we have reported on Wiley’s disappearing act. Angewandte Chemie, a top chemistry journal, made an editorial decrying diversity efforts disappear. And Nursing Forum did the same thing with two letters that they said would only appear in print — but were briefly online.

Angewandte Chemie has done it again. This time the journal waved their magic wand on “What’s Hot, What’s Not: The Trends of the Past 20 Years in the Chemistry of Odorants,” published online last month. Its abstract:

A journal publishes a critical letter — then says it was a mistake

On Sept. 17, 2019, virologist David Sanders — who recently won a lawsuit brought against him for efforts as a scientific sleuth — wrote a letter to the Journal of Cellular Physiology about a 2004 paper whose images raised his eyebrows.

The response a day later from an editorial assistant was a hint of what was to come:

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