by reason for retraction – Page 30

How citation cartels give ‘strategic scholars’ an advantage: A simple model

Sincere scholars work to expand society’s knowledge and understanding. They cite all the relevant research, even that produced by those they disagree with or personally dislike. They encourage debate. For the sincere scholar, a citation is a responsibility, and proper and thorough citations demonstrate research quality.

For the strategic scholar, a citation is an asset to be used career-advantageously. As a certain former governor of the State of Illinois once said about his responsibility to fill an open US senate position, “I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden. I’m not just giving it up for (expletive) nothing.”

Strategic scholars cite the work of their friends, working colleagues, those they agree with, and those who reference them. Indeed, the most successful career-strategic scholars operate in groups of like-minded colleagues in which they promote each other’s careers together—citation cartels. They draw attention to that other work which supports their own and their careers.

Journal retracts paper listed on authorship for sale site following Retraction Watch report

An Elsevier journal has retracted a paper that was listed by a firm claiming to sell authorships months after we reported on the site.

On Sept. 7, 2021, we published a story about the company, Teziran. On Sept. 14, pseudonymous sleuth Artemisia Stricta wrote to Ioannis Ieropoulos, the editor of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, which had published one of eight papers listed by Teziran as “ready for acceptance”:

‘A terrifying experience’: A team of researchers does the right thing when they find an error

Mitch Brown was preparing last August to launch a follow-up study to a 2021 paper on coalitions when he found something in his computer coding that sent his stomach to his shoes.

As Brown, an experimental psychologist at the University of Arkansas, recalled for us:

Journal issues 55 expressions of concern at once

The journal Cureus has issued expressions of concern for a whopping 55 papers whose authorship has come into question.

The articles, including a couple like this one on COVID-19, were apparently submitted as part of an effort by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, in Saudi Arabia, to pad the publishing resumes of its medical students – and perhaps the school’s own metrics – who targeted Cureus for reasons that aren’t now clear.

Here’s the notice for “Sylvian Fissure Lipoma: An Unusual Etiology of Seizures in Adults,” which the journal published in January 2022:

Dermatology journal calls for investigation into Bordeaux-INSERM work

Two and a half years after critics raised concerns, a dermatology journal says it has called on two French institutions to launch an inquiry into a 2017 paper.

The Journal of Investigative Dermatology has issued an expression of concern for the article, “NADPH Oxidase-1 Plays a Key Role in Keratinocyte Responses to UV Radiation and UVB-Induced Skin Carcinogenesis,” which it published in June 2017.

The authors of the group were led by Hamid Reza Rezvani, the head of the dermatology team at Université de Bordeaux, and a research director with INSERM, France’s publicly funded science agency.

According to the article’s abstract:

Journals acknowledge that a critical “reader” has a name: Elisabeth Bik

Followers of this blog know that “a reader” seems to be the force behind a huge number of retractions – and that, despite the apparent unwillingness of journals to name them, they are real people. One of the more prolific “readers” is Elisabeth Bik, the data sleuth whose efforts to identify problematic images has led to the removal of hundreds of dodgy papers.

Journals now seem more willing to give credit where it’s due, by identifying Bik – who has faced threats for her efforts – in their notices.

A few recent examples: Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, an Elsevier title, has name-checked Bik in a dozen retractions of papers dating back to 2017.

Cancer researcher faked data for 24 images in work funded by nine NIH grants: Federal watchdog

Toni Brand

A cancer researcher faked data in a grant application, her PhD thesis, and seven published papers, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Toni Brand, who earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin and served as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying or fabricating western blot data, by reusing and relabeling data to represent expression of proteins in control experiments measuring the purity of cytoplasmic and nuclear cell fractionation, measurements of proteins of interest, and measurements of the same protein under different experimental conditions or loading controls,” the ORI said in a report published today.

Doing the right thing: Neuroscientist announces retractions in ‘the most difficult tweet ever’

A group of neuroscientists in Germany and Hungary is calling for the retraction of two of their recent papers after discovering a fatal error in the research.

Myriam Sander, a memory researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, took to social media on Wednesday to alert her followers to the decision. In what Sander called the “most difficult tweet ever,” she wrote:

Einstein fired researcher in 2019, more than two years before ORI finding

A researcher who agreed to a dozen years of supervision for NIH-funded research was fired from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at the end of 2019, Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported last week, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that the researcher, Hui (Herb) Bin Sun, and a colleague, Daniel Leong, faked data in 50 figures in 16 NIH grant applications going back to 2013. The ORI findings are dated March 21, 2022.

A spokesperson told Retraction Watch:

How critics say a computer scientist in Spain artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics

Want a higher h-index? Here’s a way – but be warned, it’s a method that will raise some eyebrows.

Take the example of Juan Manuel Corchado, a computer scientist at the University of Salamanca in Spain. He has the 145th-highest h-index in the country. But many of the nearly 39,000 citations are by him to his own work.

This conference abstract, about the Internet of things and blockchain for smart cities, for instance, cites 44 references to Corchado’s own papers out of a total of 322 references. While this conference abstract, presented to a conference about artificial intelligence in educational technology in Wuhan, China, in July 2021, contains the exact same references as the one about blockchain for smart cities.

Other examples of short conference abstracts by Corchado listing dozens of citations to his own previous papers also exist.

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