by reason for retraction – Page 12

Judge orders cancer researcher’s art collection seized to pay fees from failed libel suit

The sheriff of Franklin County, Ohio, has received an order to seize and sell property of Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus, to pay his nearly $1.1 million debt to lawyers who represented him in failed libel and defamation suits.

Last December, a judge ordered Croce to pay $1,098,642.80, plus interest, to Kegler Brown Hill & Ritter, which was one of the firms that represented him in his libel lawsuit against the New York Times and his defamation case against David Sanders, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

He lost both cases, and the firm sued him for $900,000 in unpaid fees. Croce also lost a suit against Ohio State in which he sought to regain his post as chair of his department after the university removed him.

Did a ‘nasty’ publishing scheme help an Indian dental school win high rankings?

Each year, the 500 undergraduates at Saveetha Dental College in Chennai, India, participate in 4-hour exams that require them to write a 1500-word manuscript on research they have conducted. After faculty and students review and revise the papers, they use an online tool to add references to previously published work. Many of the papers are then submitted to and published by journals; the process contributed to the more than 1400 scholarly works the dental school published last year.

Saveetha, which calls itself a “pioneer in undergraduate publications,” says the exercise is designed to help every student gain practical research experience—as well as at least 10 publications listed in Scopus, the vast literature database maintained by the publisher Elsevier. The college’s website boasts that one Saveetha student published 24 papers.

But the torrent of undergraduate manuscripts—on topics including fruit intake by students and awareness of mental health among teenagers—also appears to serve a less savory purpose, an investigation by Retraction Watch has found. By systematically citing other papers published by Saveetha faculty—including papers on completely unrelated topics—the undergraduate publications have helped dramatically inflate the number of citations, a key measure of academic merit, linked to Saveetha.

Read the rest of this Science-Retraction Watch story here.

Journal pulls paper from Ethiopia for unlicensed use of questionnaire

A public-health journal has retracted a study from Ethiopia that made unlicensed use of a questionnaire developed by a U.S. researcher known to aggressively protect his intellectual property.

This time, he didn’t have to: The journal’s publisher flagged the copyright infringement itself, Renee Hoch, managing editor at PLOS Publication Ethics, told Retraction Watch:

“Flagrant and frankly, inexcusable” data duplication leads to retraction

Bardia Askari, who flagged the duplication

A biochemistry study has been retracted nearly a year after a whistleblower found significant overlap between the article and one published in a different journal by the same research group.

The study, “Berberine ameliorates renal injury in diabetic C57BL/6 mice: Involvement of suppression of SphK–S1P signaling pathway,” appeared in the journal Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics in July 2010. It has been cited 76 times.

The study examines how berberine, a compound found in plants such as tree turmeric, might improve kidney injury in diabetic mice. People sometimes take berberine supplements to help treat diabetes, but the evidence for its effectiveness is mixed. The authors of the paper are researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

The study was retracted on May 23 at the request of the journal’s editor-in-chief, according to the retraction notice. It states, in part:

Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned.

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

Three journals’ web domains expired. Then major indexes pointed to hijacked versions

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

When web domains of legitimate journals expire, fraudulent publishers have an opening to hijack them by registering the expired domains and creating clone websites that mimic the genuine journal.

In 2015, John Bohannon found fraudulent publishers had hijacked the websites of several legitimate journals indexed in Web of Science. The expired domains of GMP Review and Ludus Vitalis, which Web of Science listed as their official homepages, were registered by the fraudulent publishers, who created clone journals offering to publish papers for a fee.

Taking over expired domains remains a successful strategy for fraudulent publishers, because potential authors may use the websites listed in scientometric databases to verify the authenticity of a journal. Recently, three examples have come to light of journals with domains that expired and were hijacked by fake journals.

After backlash, publisher to retract article that surveyed parents of children with gender dysphoria, says co-author

Springer Nature will retract an article that reported results of a survey of parents who thought their children’s gender dysphoria resulted from social contagion. The move is “due to concerns about lack of informed consent,” according to tweets by one of the paper’s authors.

The article, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was published in March in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. It has not been cited in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, but Altmetric, which tracks the online attention papers receive, ranks the article in the top 1% of all articles of a similar age.

Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) is, the article stated, a “controversial theory” that “common cultural beliefs, values, and preoccupations cause some adolescents (especially female adolescents) to attribute their social problems, feelings, and mental health issues to gender dysphoria,” and that “youth with ROGD falsely believe that they are transgender,” in part due to social influences.

Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and the paper’s corresponding author, tweeted:

Texas dept. chair no longer in position amid university investigation and retraction

The chair of the Department of Pulmonary Immunology at the University of Texas at Tyler Health Science Center lost a paper last year after an institutional investigation found several issues with the data in the article.

Although the researcher, Ramakrishna Vankayalapati, is still identified as the chair on his online profile and the department’s website, he no longer holds that position, Retraction Watch has learned.

The paper, “Ornithine-A urea cycle metabolite enhances autophagy and controls Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection,” was published in Nature Communications in July 2020. It has been cited 21 times, according to the journal’s statistics.

Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted nearly two years after Retraction Watch report

An engineering journal has retracted an article that was posted on a website claiming to sell author positions. The retraction comes nearly two years after we reported on the website and a whistleblower informed the journal.

The study, “On the dynamics of an ultra-fast-rotating-induced piezoelectric cantilevered nanodisk surrounded by viscoelastic foundation,” appeared in Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines in December 2020. It listed researchers at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering in China as authors. The article has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The study was retracted on March 16, 2023. The retraction notice stated:

Article that assessed MDPI journals as “predatory” retracted and replaced

A 2021 article that found journals from the open-access publisher MDPI had characteristics of predatory journals has been retracted and replaced with a version that softens its conclusions about the company. MDPI is still not satisfied, however.

The article, “Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI),” was published in Research Evaluation. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

María de los Ángeles Oviedo García, a professor of business administration and marketing at the University of Seville in Spain, and the paper’s sole author, analyzed 53 MDPI journals that were included in Clarivate’s 2018 Journal Citation Reports.

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