by reason for retraction – Page 10

Elsevier withdraws plagiarized paper after original author calls journal out on LinkedIn

In late May, one of Sasan Sadrizadeh’s doctoral students stumbled upon a paper with data directly plagiarized from his previous work.

Sadrizadeh, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, was the last author on “Supply-demand side management of a building energy system driven by solar and biomass in Stockholm: A smart integration with minimal cost and emission,” published in September 2023 in Energy Conversion and Management.

The paper with matching data, “Optimizing smart building energy systems for sustainable living: A realistic approach to enhance renewable energy consumfaption [sic] and reduce emissions in residential buildings,” appeared online as an “article in press” in Elsevier’s Energy and Buildings in May.

Seventeen journals lose impact factors for suspected citation manipulation

Clarivate, the company that calculates Journal Impact Factors based on citations to articles, didn’t publish the metric for 17 journals this year due to suspected citation manipulation. That’s a substantial increase from last year, when only four were excluded.

The increase is, in part, case of rising tides lifting (sinking?) all boats: In its 2024 Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate included an additional 7,200 journals from the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and the the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), a spokesperson for the company said, resulting in a larger number of impact factor suppressions than in past years.

Clarivate suppressed nearly twice as many journals in 2020, when it penalized 33 for self-citation. The company suppressed 10 in 2021, and three the following year.

What a database of more than a thousand dismissive literature reviews can tell us

I was once required to testify in a court case. My lawyer gave me a few pieces of advice, but he repeated one several times, which may be why I remember it. “Never say never,” he said. Or, conversely, never say always. Declarations of absolutes present opposing attorneys too wide an opening. They need to identify only a single example to contradict. In trial courts, one cannot get away with making reckless absolutist claims unchallenged.

In academic scholarship, however, it happens all the time.

Meet the dismissive literature review, in which an author at the beginning of a journal article declares the published research literature on the topic either nonexistent or so poor in quality that all of it is … dismissible. Typically, no evidence supports the claim. You’ve seen the claims yourself (e.g., “little previous research has, …” “few studies have looked at …,” “there is no research on …,” etc.). With one type of dismissive review — a firstness claim — authors boldly declare themselves to be the first in the history of the world to study a particular topic (as in, “this is the first study of …”).

Expression of concern coming for paper some used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths

The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.”

The article, “Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022,” appeared online June 3, and quickly attracted attention and criticism. The expression of concern is not yet live.

In their conclusions, the authors wrote:

‘Perplexed’ author’s identity forged on plagiarized paper in ‘probably fake’ journal

In February, Steffen Barra Googled his name. A clinician working in the field of forensic psychiatry, he was in the habit of periodically checking if anything negative had been written about him. What he didn’t expect to find was a plagiarized paper with his name attached to it.

Barra, a researcher at the University of Saarland in Germany, told us the 2023 article, “Introducing the Complexities of Forensic Psychology: Decoding the Mind Behind the Crime,” plagiarized from an information page from a company offering online courses. The article also resembles many college informational pages about the field, such as this one from the University of North Dakota, he said.

Concerned he might be blamed for the misconduct, Barra immediately contacted the publisher, Hilaris.

A company representative responded to Barra the same day, February 29, with one phrase: “We will remove the link.”

Climate paper retracted from Science over miscalculations

The authors of a paper published in Science have retracted their article following the discovery of calculation errors.

The article,“Drought sensitivity in mesic forests heightens their vulnerability to climate change” by Robert Heilmayr of the University of California, Santa Barbara and colleagues found that in drier areas, trees are less sensitive to drought and in hotter regions with a wet climate, tree growth is expected to decrease.

It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Since its publication in December, the article has been downloaded 4,641 times, posted by 154 X users, and written about by 20 news outlets and press release sites.

Veterinary journal retracts pet food company’s paper about copper in dog food

leisergu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A veterinary journal has retracted a paper from a major pet food company after criticism prompted the authors to re-examine their data.

The retraction is the first in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s 180 years of publication, Lisa Fortier, the journal’s editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. But veterinary researchers who wrote to the journal with concerns about the article say the retraction doesn’t address all the issues they raised.

The article, “Sixteen years of canine hepatic copper concentrations within normal reference ranges in dogs fed a broad range of commercial diets,” appeared online March 7. Most of the authors are affiliated with Hill’s Pet Nutrition.

Within weeks of the article’s publication, the journal got the first of seven letters “crying foul,” Fortier said.

A look at plagiarism at the Pontifical Gregorian University

Retraction Watch readers may recall the work of Michael Dougherty, who has established a reputation as a sleuth focused on plagiarism. We are pleased to present an excerpt of Dougherty’s new book, New Techniques for Proving Plagiarism: Case Studies from the Sacred Disciplines at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Studies in Research Integrity, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill 2024).

The principles of textual criticism—borrowed from the fields of classics and medieval studies—have a valuable application for plagiarism investigations. Plagiarists share key features with medieval scribes who worked in scriptoriums and produced copies of manuscripts. Both kinds of copyists—scribes and plagiarists—engage in similar processes, and they commit certain distinctive copying errors that fall into identifiable classes. When committed by plagiarists, these copying errors have probative value for making determinations that a text is copied, and hence, unoriginal.

To demonstrate fully that a text is a plagiarism of another text, one must show how the text is plagiarizing the other text. Many plagiarism researchers, as well as members of institutional research integrity committees, miss this step. They take the mere identification of textual overlap to be the upper limit of analysis. By stopping short, they leave themselves vulnerable to the typical defenses made—sometimes in bad faith—by academic malefactors and their apologists. Those defenses can include: a claim of independent fortuitous discovery; a claim that one was simply recalling a lecture from memory; a claim that one had cryptomnesia from reading many sources; and the like.

‘A disturbing experience’: Postdoc fights to have work that plagiarized her thesis retracted

In December, Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was notified by her friend of a paper published in the MDPI journal Nutrients that sounded similar to her dissertation. Saxby pulled up her 2020 dissertation, “The Potential of Taro (Colocasia esculenta) as a Dietary Prebiotic Source for the Prevention of Colorectal Cancer,” and compared it to the 2023 Nutrients article.

To her dismay, the paper “Taro Roots: An Underexploited Root Crop,” co-authored by researchers at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, overlaps significantly with Saxby’s work, including some passages of word-for-word copying with no citation.

While the corresponding author of the paper has called the omission of any citation to Saxby’s work “unfortunate” and said that she is working with Nutrients’ publisher – MDPI – to add one, the publisher said the behavior did not amount to plagiarism because the prior work was a thesis.

Pharmaceutical researcher faked data in two papers, says federal watchdog

A former professor and vice provost for research at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York, falsified data in two published papers, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Shaker Mousa, who was also chairman and executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute at Albany, already has at least 10 retractions and two corrections, by our count.

The falsified data appeared in “Tetraiodothyroacetic acid-conjugated PLGA nanoparticles: a nanomedicine approach to treat drug-resistant breast cancer,” which appeared in Nanomedicine in 2013, and “The proangiogenic action of thyroid hormone analogue GC-1 is initiated at an integrin,” which appeared in the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology in 2005 and was retracted last September. ORI called for Mousa to request a correction or retraction of the Nanomedicine paper as well.

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