Category: duplication retractions

Possession is nine-tenths of the law — at least, it seems, for one journal editor, who is refusing to retract a study despite learning that one of its images previously appeared in another journal. The reason? The other study has been removed from the web. 

The paper is among 40 articles in Construction and Building Materials flagged by a whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. The whistleblower says that most of the issues are serious, and are:

Here’s a retraction notice after our own hearts. 

Brain Research Bulletin, an Elsevier journal, has retracted a 2017 article which duplicated a substantial amount of previously published papers by some of the same authors. But unlike many journals, which merely point out the overlap, BRB explains to readers why the copying matters. 

The article, “Erythropoietin rescues primary rat cortical neurons from pyroptosis and apoptosis via Erk1/2-Nrf2/Bach1 signal pathway,” was written by Rui Li, Li-Min Zhang and Wen-Bo Sun, anesthesiologists at Cangzhou Central Hospital in China. 

According to the notice: 

If you’re looking for more evidence that researchers are flooding the zone with COVID-19 papers that do little to advance the state of the science, we present Psychology, Health & Medicine. 

The journal, a Taylor & Francis title, in April published “Mental health burden for the public affected by the COVID-19 outbreak in China: Who will be the high-risk group?,” by a pair of authors in China. The researchers submitted their manuscript on March 19, received acceptance on April 6 and saw the work published on April 14.

Evidently, that wasn’t enough time to run a plagiarism check — or, as you’ll see, other due diligence — because now the journal has retracted the article for being a duplicate of two other papers in different journals. The move came after a staffer at Elsevier — a competing publisher — alerted a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis about the issue.

In part, PHM can be considered the victim of what looks to be a scheme that took advantage of gaps in the ability to check manuscripts prior to publication. 

A group of researchers in China is teetering on the edge of losing a paper because they have apparently tried to publish it three times.

Our story starts in Turkey, home to Taner Kemal Erdag, the editor in chief of Turkish Archives of Otorhinolaryngology. In August 2018, Erdag received a submission titled “Increased maternal serum placental growth hormone variant in pregnancies complicated by otosclerosis.” The corresponding author on the work was Ruiying Chen, an ear, nose and throat specialist at The First Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University. 

Three weeks later, Chen contacted Erdag and asked to withdraw their article. Request denied. Erdag told us:

A Springer Nature journal has retracted four papers by a group of materials scientists in France, Spain and Tunisia, and slapped expressions of concern on four more.

All eight papers, from Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics, share three common authors: Abdelmajid Lassoued, Salah Ammar, and Abdellatif Gadri, of Université de Gabès in Tunisia. The retractions and expressions of concern all relate to duplicate publication of other work by papers that include various members of the team as authors.

A typical retraction notice, for “Synthesis and characterization of Ni-doped α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles through co-precipitation method with enhanced photocatalytic activities”:

Journal stings come in various shapes and sizes. There are the hilarious ones in which authors manage to get papers based on Seinfeld or Star Wars published. There are those that play a role in the culture wars. And then there are some on a massive scale, with statistical analyses.

That’s how we’d describe the latest paper by Ottawa journalologists Kelly Cobey, David Moher and colleagues. We asked Cobey and Moher to answer some questions about the recently posted preprint, “Stress testing journals: a quasi-experimental study of rejection rates of a previously published paper.”

Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to do this study?