by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

Complaint from engineering software company prompts two retractions

An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used its software without a valid license.

Both retracted papers were published by Ain Shams Engineering Journal in the last couple of years by different authors based in Egypt. Both papers used FLOW-3D, software that is used to simulate the dynamics of liquids and gasses, which is developed by the firm Flow Science, Inc., in Santa Fe, N.M.

Tom Jensen, vice president of Flow Science, told Retraction Watch the firm offered the authors of both studies to legalize their version of the software by purchasing a license.

But the company didn’t receive a response, Jensen said, despite informing the researchers a retraction would be sought from the journal without a valid license. “We offer greatly reduced prices for licenses for academic institutions and we have numerous academic users around the world,” he added.

Plagiarizing papers retracted from engineering journal after Retraction Watch report

An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction.

As we reported in August, the editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later.

The following papers have now been retracted:

Journal pulls pesticide article a year after authors engaged lawyer to fight retraction decision

A public health journal has retracted an article on unintentional pesticide poisonings a year after the authors enlisted a lawyer’s help to fight the decision.

Last year, we reported BMC Public Health had decided to retract the article, “The global distribution of acute unintentional pesticide poisoning: estimations based on a systematic review,” which appeared in December 2020. The article has been cited nearly 300 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, including more than 100 since the journal told the authors it would be retracted.

The authors listed affiliations with the Pesticide Action Network, a collection of organizations opposed to pesticides. In their review, they declared unintentional pesticide poisoning “a problem that warrants immediate action.”

The retraction notice cites a letter to the editor from employees of pesticide manufacturer Bayer, and the trade organization CropLife International, which criticized the analysis. The authors stood by their findings in a response, stating the critics “do not seem to have understood our estimation method.”

Exclusive: Cancer researchers in Iran under investigation as questions swirl around dozens of studies

Year after year, a husband-and-wife team at a university in Iran has been publishing studies involving research on cell lines ostensibly purchased from the Pasteur Institute of Iran, in Tehran.

But the couple may never have been in possession of the cells. In correspondence obtained by Retraction Watch, the Pasteur Institute told their employer, Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, only three of the many cell lines described in their publications had been available at the national cell bank over the past decade.

A university official confirmed the two researchers – Fraidoon Kavoosi, an associate professor in the department of anatomical science, and his wife Masumeh Sanaei, an assistant professor in the same department – were under investigation.

Former Columbia University psychiatrist committed research misconduct, says federal watchdog

A psychiatry researcher who received a warning letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this year committed research misconduct, another federal watchdog found.

Bret Rutherford, formerly a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University, “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly falsely reporting that all human research subjects met the inclusion/exclusion criteria for late-life depression studies,” according to a case summary from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) published today.

As The Transmitter previously reported, a suicide that occurred during one of Rutherford’s trials in 2021 was followed by a suspension of his research a few months later. The U.S. Office of Human Research Protections subsequently halted all federally funded research involving human participants at the institute in June 2023 and launched a review of its research practices.

Authors sue Sage over “discriminatory” retractions of papers cited in abortion pill case

The authors of three papers about abortion Sage retracted earlier this year have sued the publisher, alleging the company pulled the articles “for pretextual and discriminatory reasons.”

In February, Sage retracted three articles from Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology “because of undeclared conflicts of interest and after expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions,” according to the publisher’s statement at the time. Sage also removed the paper’s lead author from the editorial board of the journal.

A federal judge cited two of the articles last year in his decision to suspend approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortions.

Hidden hydras: uncovering the massive footprint of one paper mill’s operations

At the heart of any paper mill’s operations sits an unavoidable contradiction. On the one hand, paper mills must keep their operations clandestine lest they be discovered and have their clients’ articles retracted en masse. On the other, paper mills must make themselves visible to some degree to attract new customers. For instance, advertisements for paper mills abound on services like WhatsApp and Telegram. This contradiction makes it difficult for researchers like us who study systematic fraud to get a full sense of the scope of any paper mill’s operations. By charting the web presence of one shady business, we sought to do just that.

About a year ago, we began probing search engines with queries a scientist desperate for publications might make: “authorship for sale,” “call for co-authors,” “scopus-indexed publications,” “guaranteed journal acceptance,” etc. We figured paper mills would litter their pages with these phrases in a bid to be easily found by customers. Sure enough, one of our first searches directed us to the front page of the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), based in Chennai, India.

ARDA presents itself as a professional organization that offers services including “Conferences and Meetings”, “Journal Publications” and “Article Writing Services”. ARDA also maintains lists of indexed journals in which it can guarantee publication, along with guidelines on how long acceptance should take and instructions to limit plagiarism to a journal-specific threshold. All of these journals claim to be peer-reviewed on their own websites. Many of the titles listed on ARDA’s site are well-known hijacked journals already found on the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Other journals, such as the International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results, are favorites of authors from Saveetha Dental College, a school caught inflating its rankings in a large self-citation scheme.

1 in 7 scientific papers is fake, suggests study that author calls ‘wildly nonsystematic’

In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career.

Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said.

The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies — collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies — that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output.

Exclusive: One university’s three-year battle to retract papers with fake data

In 2021, the provost of the University of Maryland, Baltimore sounded the alarm about a troubling batch of papers from the lab of Richard Eckert, the former chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the institution.

The provost sent letters to the editors of seven journals calling out a string of serious issues. Based on the university’s investigation, the papers contained duplicated, fabricated and falsified data, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.

But more than three years later, the results of those alerts are mixed: Of the 11 papers the university flagged in 2021, editors corrected three and retracted two. Six still await resolution, with no apparent action taken by the journals.

Former Harvard cancer researcher plagiarized data, federal watchdog says

A former research fellow at Harvard Medical School faked data and used images from another scientist without attribution in a published paper and two grant applications, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The researcher, Arunoday K. Bhan, was also a former staff scientist at City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., and first author on “Human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived platelets loaded with lapatinib effectively target HER2+ breast cancer metastasis to the brain,” which appeared in Scientific Reports in October 2021. The article has been cited eight times.

The paper was retracted in March. The retraction note cited an investigation by City of Hope and detailed “discrepancies in the data” that match ORI’s findings.

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