by reason for retraction – Page 21

Plagiarism scandal engulfs high-profile academic in Latvia

Two years after it was quietly retracted “due to plagiarism,” a paper by a prominent researcher in Latvia has set the country’s media ablaze, drawing comments from, among others, the minister of education and science and the rector of a leading university.

The plagiarized paper came to public attention in March when the Latvian magazine Ir published serious allegations against Maris Klavins, a professor and former dean at the University of Latvia. The allegations concern “possible fraud” in an EU-funded project headed by Klavins and include not only plagiarism but data falsification, budget irregularities and suspicious cash payments.

According to Ir, the Latvian police have opened a criminal investigation into the case. Klavins told the magazine he has not been charged in the matter.

In an email to Retraction Watch, Klavins called the allegations “lies” and said the “person responsible” for “my defamation and persecution” was his former PhD student Dmitrijs Porsnovs.

Financial advisor failed to disclose he had sued the organization his paper criticized

Earlier this year, a financial advisor published a paper purporting to find that his colleagues who had pursued accreditation as “Certified Financial Planners” (CFPs) were more likely to engage in misconduct.

What the paper didn’t mention: That he had sued the CFP Board, the organization that offered that certification, and given up his own CFP marks “over a dispute regarding the integrity of the CFP Board’s disciplinary process,” according to a correction to the article published in April.

“The editors have determined its disclosure would not have impacted the peer review process, but it has since been added to the article for the benefit of readers,” the notice stated.

The article, “Badges of Misconduct: Consumer Rules to Avoid Abusive Financial Advisers,” was published in the Journal of Financial Regulation in February. In the abstract, the authors described their findings:

‘Deplorable’: Imaging journal to retract nearly 80 papers for compromised peer review

A journal co-published by two scientific societies is retracting nearly 80 papers after an “investigation into peer review fraud.”

The Journal of Electronic Imaging is retracting the articles – all originally published in special sections between 2021 and 2023 – starting this week. The journal is co-published by “SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics,” and IS&T, the Society for Imaging Science and Technology.

Paper retracted more than eight months after author admitted to plagiarism

Last September, a researcher at a university in Bangladesh emailed a journal about a paper he had published in 2019. He made a stark admission: the paper contained plagiarism, said Sorif Hossain, a lecturer in statistics at Noakhali Science and Technology University, who called for the article to be promptly retracted.

But the paper remained in place. Only after Retraction Watch contacted the European Journal of Environment and Public Health (EJEPH) last week did it issue a retraction.

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.

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