A professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia who once served as a dean at the Stevens Institute of Technology in the United States, has received expressions of concern on 93 of his conference proceedings for what a publisher said were irrelevant self-citations and âartificially inflating the number of citations.â
The notes by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on the work of Yehia Massoud, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, take two forms. One reads:
More than two years after retracting an article by one of its former editors in chief for plagiarism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has retracted six more pieces by the editor, Paul McCrory, a noted concussion researcher in Australia.
The retractions join 11 more of McCroryâs works, including 10 from BJSM and one from Current Sports Medicine Reports.The BJSM, published by The BMJ, is also correcting two additional articles by McCrory.
Troubles for McCrory â for decades âthe worldâs foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally,â according to the New York Times â began in 2021 when Steve Haake, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, told the BJSM McCrory had plagiarized a 2000 article by Haake in Physics World. (It would not be the only time the work was plagiarized.)
The journal Cureus has retracted a 2022 paper on cancer and the environment just weeks after Retraction Watch raised questions about apparent plagiarism in the article.
As we reported in early April, the paper, âCauses of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factorsâ, had a bit of a twinsies thing going with a 2005 article in The Lancet â sharing a title, figures, and wording that âfollows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,â according to the anonymous tipster who informed us of the issue.
A professor of aerospace engineering in India who developed a scientific theory critics call âabsolute nonsenseâ said he is suing journal editors and publishers for pulling three papers he claims could help protect âmillions of lives.â
The articles, one in Springer Natureâs Scientific Reports and two in Wileyâs Global Challenges, described a highly technical concept eponymously dubbed âSanal flow choking.â The first was retracted last summer, the othertwo in March.
âThe retractions of our papers are unjustified,â V. R. Sanal Kumar of Amity University in New Delhi told Retraction Watch. âOur legal representatives are actively pursuing a defamation lawsuit against these editors and their illicit agents who were responsible for retracting articles crucial for safeguarding countless lives.â
An academic editor at Wiley who vowed to âuphold publication ethicsâ is being investigated by the company for allegedly publishing three of his papers twice, in violation of journal policies, Retraction Watch has learned.
One of the duplicates, which appeared last year in Nurse Education in Practice, an Elsevier title, has already been slated for retraction, according to emails we have seen. The other offending articles were published in Wiley journals.
The editor, Daniel Joseph Berdida, is a nurse and faculty member at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, the Philippines. He joined the editorial board of Wileyâs Journal of Nursing Management four months ago, announcing on LinkedIn that he would âbe serving with integrity and uphold publication ethics.â
Earlier this year, a group of lecturers in Malaysia received a WhatsApp message from a colleague who had made a disturbing discovery.Â
The colleague, who wished to remain anonymous for this story, was looking through Google Scholar and noticed their name, and many others from their department, repeatedly appeared alongside that of an unfamiliar author: Kumba Digdowiseiso, dean of the economics and business faculty at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia.
âWe didnât even know who this person was,â said Safwan Mohd Nor, an associate professor of finance at the university, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, adding that he was âextremely angryâ when he first found out his name had been used.Â
An Elsevier journal has issued just over 100 expressions of concern for papers published by a group of researchers led by the French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who also notched a new retraction â his tenth â in a separate publication.
As we and others have reported, Raoultâs work during the COVID-19 pandemic drew intense scrutiny from data sleuths, most notably Elisabeth Bik â whose critiques, which extended beyond his COVID studies, were met with vicious online trolling and a legal complaint filed by Raoult himself.
Sometime last summer, Ben Mol, an obstetrician-gynecology researcher in Australia, and his colleagues were adapting a European guideline on unexplained infertility when they came across a 2006 paper from Maria Luisa Casini, a pharmacologist in Rome, that gave them pause because of results that were not statistically significant.
When they looked further, they ended in a rabbit hole. Casiniâs previous work revealed identical patient data across papers published two years apart, despite purporting to come from different groups of patients. The similarities were striking: In the 2006 paper, the womenâs mean height was 165.5 centimeters; in the study published two years earlier that reported having more than triple the number of participants, the women had the exact same mean height, with the same standard deviation.
The guideline update would eventually lead to half of the included trials beingflagged for integrity issues, and as a result, left out of the Australian version of the guideline. From that one paper by Casini that had initially raised doubts, the team was able to unearth a trail of suspicious data connected to several ob-gyns in Italy. An Italian medical society and one of the implicated authors have threatened to sue over the allegations, claiming the complaints were made to interfere with a high-profile society election, but the papers are now part of a wider Elsevier investigation.
A JAMA journal has retracted a paper on vaping it published two months ago after the researchers alerted the editors to âsignificant coding errorsâ and other problems with the work.
According to the researchers, the study found use of vapes was no worse than a prescription medication, and better than nicotine gum, at helping people quit smoking.
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2008 paper suggesting artificial sweetener Splenda could disrupt the gut microbiome and cause other havoc with the gastrointestinal system â and which is cited by a paper at the center of a lawsuit against one of its authors by the maker of the sugar substitute.
The article, âSplenda Alters Gut Microflora and Increases Intestinal P-Glycoprotein and Cytochrome P-450 in Male Rats,â appeared in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, a Taylor & Francis title. The journal has a Part B, too, which also is part of this story.
The paper, which has been cited more than 200 times, according to Clarivateâs Web of Science, caught the attention of Elisabeth Bik, who last year commented on the article on PubPeer, noting potential problems with four of the figures, including Western blots and missing error bars.Â
