Category: wiley

A study purportedly of scars left by caesarean sections included women yet to undergo the surgery, say sleuths. But an investigation into the research by the author’s employer and the journal that published it found no evidence of research misconduct.

The paper, published in Wiley journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, was flagged on PubPeer in February by Ben Mol, an ob-gyn researcher at Monash University in Australia whose efforts have led to scores of retractions and corrections, and Jim Thornton, emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Nottingham, in the UK. The study looks at how the scar left behind on a woman’s uterus after a c-section is affected by the dilation of her cervix at the time of the procedure.

Continue reading A study of C-section scars – in women who hadn’t undergone the surgery

Wiley, whose Hindawi subsidiary has attracted thousands of paper mill papers that later needed to be retracted, has seen widespread paper mill activity among hundreds of its journals, it announced yesterday.

More than 270 of its titles rejected anywhere from 600 to 1,000 papers per month before peer review once they implemented a pilot of what the publisher calls its Papermill Detection service. That service flagged 10-13% of all of the 10,000 manuscripts submitted to those journals per month, Wiley told Retraction Watch.

Wiley said the service includes “six distinct tools,” including looking for similarities with known paper mill papers, searching for “tortured phrases” and other problematic passages, flagging “irregular publishing patterns by paper authors,” verifying researcher identity, detecting hallmarks of generative AI, and analyzing the relevance of a given manuscript to the journal.

Continue reading Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool

Two-thirds of the associate editors of the Journal of Biogeography, a Wiley title, have resigned in a dispute with the publisher, and more resignations are likely, according to those involved. 

Most of the resignations, reported first by Times Higher Education, were effective immediately, but a portion of the associate editors set August 28 as their effective date in hopes Wiley may negotiate with them about their concerns. 

Most of the associate editors stopped processing new manuscripts at the end of June, as we reported last month, due to the dispute. 

In interviews with Retraction Watch, two associate editors who had put in their resignations described concerns with the journal’s high article processing charges (APCs) fueling Wiley’s profitability, as well as the “breakdown in negotiations” between the publisher and the journal’s lead editorial team. 

Continue reading Wiley journal editors resign en masse, fired chief editor speaks

The publisher Wiley has fired the chief editor of the Journal of Biogeography after he resigned over conflicts with the company.  

Michael Dawson, a professor at the University of California, Merced, submitted his resignation on June 21, tweeting that he made the decision “because journal management declined to explore productive solutions to a suite of challenges facing the journal.” 

He also tweeted:

Continue reading An editor resigned in protest. Now, Wiley is firing him four months earlier than he planned to leave.

The editor in chief of a Wiley journal has resigned, saying the publisher recently has “seemed to emphasize cost-cutting and margins over good editorial practice.” 

Most of the journal’s associate editors are in the midst of a work stoppage protesting the same issues. After Wiley responded to the associate editors in a way they found “troubling,” the editors replied with a list of 12 demands, and a deputy editor in chief tendered her resignation. 

Editorial boards of at least three other journals have recently resigned en masse, or threatened to resign, amid similar disputes. 

Michael Dawson, editor in chief of the Journal of Biogeography, published a blog post announcing his resignation on June 21. In it, he wrote: 

Continue reading Journal editors resign, strike in dispute with Wiley over ‘business model that maximises profit’

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. 

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

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.”

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