What should happen to the millions of dollars publishers rake in from authors whose work is later retracted?
Guillaume Cabanac, one of the developers of the Problematic Paper Screener, has repeatedly suggested publishers donate such revenue to charity.
And now one is doing just that.
Continue reading Publisher donating author fees from retracted articles to charity
A journal says a content management mishap led to the publication, and subsequent retraction, of a gag essay not intended for wide distribution.
Why the retraction happened three and a half years after the paper’s publication remains murky.
This story belongs to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, back when Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics, a Wiley title, used to gather spoof papers for its annual April Fools edition.
As Kristofer Barr, an assistant research integrity auditor at Wiley, told us:
Continue reading Publisher error claims joke paper, April Fools’ tradition – three years later
On March 12, a senior administrator at a university in India sent a business proposal to a prolific economist in Ethiopia. If he joined the school’s stable of adjunct professors, the administrator promised, easy money could be made.
All the economist had to do was “add our affiliation for incentives in your papers,” explained Lakshmi Thangavelu, dean of international affairs at Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences (SIMATS), in Chennai, in a written exchange.
“Surely I will do that. Not a big deal,” replied Mohd Asif Shah, an associate professor at Kebri Dehar University, in eastern Ethiopia.
But the deal turned sour. Although Shah listed SIMATS as an affiliation on at least two research papers he published this fall, in December he still hadn’t received any payments from the school, he complained. Then he turned to LinkedIn to share his frustration in a post that included screenshots of his conversation with Thangavelu, who is also a professor at Saveetha Dental College, part of SIMATS.
Continue reading Exclusive: Researcher outs Indian university’s publishing scam after it fails to pay him
A U.S. federal agency that oversees research misconduct investigations and issues sanctions appears to be doling out punishments fairly, according to researchers who analyzed summaries of the agency’s cases from the last three decades.
But the authors of the study also found more than 30 papers the ORI said should be retracted have yet to be.
The researchers looked for associations between the severity of penalties the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) imposed on scientists it found responsible for research misconduct and their race and ethnicity, gender, academic rank, and other qualities. The researchers published their findings in late November in Accountability in Research, as the agency is in the process of revising its key regulations,
According to the new analysis, ORI’s sanctions correlated with factors indicating the seriousness of the misconduct, such as being required to retract or correct publications, but not with demographics.
“We did not find evidence of bias,” Ferric Fang, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of the study’s authors, said.
Fang, also member of the board of directors of The Center For Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent nonprofit organization, told us:
Continue reading What analyzing 30 years of US federal research misconduct sanctions revealedRetraction Watch readers may know that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which has oversight of misconduct investigations of work funded by the National Institutes of Health, has proposed changes to its regulations. It’s the first such proposal since 2005, and has generated discussion in various quarters. We’re pleased to present this guest post by James Kennedy, a longtime observer of these issues.
One of the most controversial points about the federal policies for research misconduct is the extent to which a laboratory director, principal investigator, or lead author is held responsible for misconduct by others on their research team.
It is surprisingly common in cases of extensive research fraud that the person who committed the offense cannot be identified. Data management in such cases is usually uncontrolled, with no tracking of changes to the data or preservation of the original data. The principal investigator is often at the center of the pattern of misconduct, but should they also be held accountable for it when the only provable fact is that they allowed a work environment that was vulnerable to bad behavior?
The regulations for handling misconduct in research funded by the U.S. Public Health Service are currently being modified, and the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which implements the rules, is asking for public comment. This opportunity to influence the handling of misconduct is all the more important given that the regulations are often used as a model for misconduct policies at universities and research institutions. The comment period was recently extended until Jan. 4, 2024.
Are you responsible for misconduct by others?
Continue reading Guest post: Why I commented on the proposed changes to U.S. federal research-misconduct policies – and why you should, too
Retractions are the stuff of nightmares for most academics. But they aren’t necessarily a career obstacle, and sometimes may be the only way forward, according to Andrew P. Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department of Reed College, in Portland, Ore. Last month, the journal Evolution pulled and replaced a study Anderson had conducted as a PhD student under Adam G. Jones at the University of Idaho, in Moscow. The study’s findings suggested sexual selection shaped the responsiveness of the human genome to male sex hormones. Below is a lightly edited Q&A we did with Anderson about his experience.
Retraction Watch (RW): In the summer of 2022, shortly after your paper was first published, you realized it contained a significant error. What happened?
Continue reading ‘I felt like a fraud’: A biologist goes public about a retraction
Just four months after an allegedly stolen dinosaur fossil was returned from Germany to Brazil, a prominent European paleontologist published a paper bound to spark renewed controversy in an already-divided research community.
And so it did: Less than a month after the article, which criticized the online repatriation campaign, was published on October 2 in The Geological Curator, it vanished again.
“This flawed corporatist rant, loaded with racist undertones, has been retracted,” Juan Carlos Cisneros of Universidade Federal do Piauí, in Teresina, Brazil, wrote on the social media platform X.
The reasons for the retraction are not entirely clear, but the journal may have faced external pressure, according to the paper’s author.
Continue reading ‘Trump’ vs. ‘Indiana Jones’: Paper reviving bitter quarrel over dino fossil pulled for murky reasons
Readers who have been with us for the long haul may remember we used to collect a catalog of our favorite euphemisms for plagiarism. That list died with the demise of Lab Times, for which we used to write a regular column (although we did write this piece a bit later) – but the magazine’s passing did not mark the end of journals that speak with mealy mouths.
The latest such euphemism to catch our eye comes from the Journal of STEPS for Humanities and Social Sciences, which in 2022 published a piece by a pair of authors in Iraq about trauma fiction.
“Trauma Reverberations: A Study of Selected Novels,” appeared in 2022, and was written by Intisar Rashid Khaleel and Raed Idrees Mahmood, both of Tikrit University.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Copy and euphemize: When ‘an honor mistake’ means plagiarism
A paper that claimed to have developed a new method to predict acid drainage from mines was not so novel after all, according to one of its authors.
In a series of emails to Retraction Watch, Dulian Zeqiraj of the Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania, admitted to lifting figures and tables from other articles and said he might also have left some “text as it is in original.”
His paper, “A Novel Stochastic Approach for Modeling Acid Mine Drainage in Three Dimensions,” was published November 17 in Process Safety and Environmental Protection, an Elsevier title.
That the article managed to clear peer review is astonishing, said Muhammad Muniruzzaman, a senior scientist at the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo, who discovered last week that Zeqiraj’s team had plagiarized his work.
Continue reading Author of ‘gibberish’ paper admits to extensive plagiarism
A PhD student in Switzerland who blogged about a series of dubious conferences linked to potential citation fraud is being sued by one of the conference chairs, a professor of computer science, Retraction Watch has learned.
The professor, Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology, reaped a prodigious number of citations from the conference proceedings, often in highly questionable ways.
“Fraud can pay off,” Solal Pirelli, a doctoral student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, wrote on his blog in January. “Shadi Aljawarneh has 6082 citations and an h-index of 38 per Google Scholar, above many well-regarded researchers. This probably helped him sit on the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science, alongside well-regarded researchers.”
Continue reading Professor in Jordan sues sleuth who exposed citation anomalies