If you had a book retracted for plagiarism, would you submit a book proposal to the same publisher? And if you were that publisher, would you entertain said pitch?
These, dear reader, are not idle questions.
Continue reading Authors whose Springer Nature book was retracted for plagiarism solicit chapters for another
Svein Åge K. Johnsen and Ingeborg Olsdatter Busterud Flagstad, of the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, have been trying to publish a manuscript on the psychology of green entrepreneurship.
In January 2021, they submitted it to the International Small Business Journal, a SAGE publication. The editors rejected it without sending it to peer review. So did The Journal of Entrepreneurship, another SAGE title. So Johnsen and Flagstad submitted it to Cogent Business & Management, a Taylor & Francis title.
And then, on December 25, as perhaps the worst Christmas present ever, they saw the paper published – by someone else.
Continue reading ‘I needed a publication in order to submit my thesis’: Author admits to stealing a manuscript
A leading repository of social science which is owned by Elsevier has reposted an article it removed on New Year’s Day after the author was accused of defamation and the site was threatened with legal action if it didn’t remove the paper.
The article in question was written by Ann Lipton, the associate dean for faculty research at Tulane University Law School and appeared on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
Titled “Capital Discrimination,” the paper – which has been accepted by the Houston Law Review – explores:
Continue reading Preprint on discrimination against women reinstated by Elsevier server after removal for legal threats
Yes, you read that headline right.
In January 2021, we reported that The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (JSCR) would soon be retracting two papers because a graduate student had committed misconduct in the work.
The journal – the official research publication of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NCSA) – did retract the papers, according to a notice posted to PubMed and on the title’s site, both dated March 2021.
But that didn’t stop one of the articles – which had first gone online in December 2019 – from appearing in the February 2022 issue of the journal, without any indication it had been retracted, as Universidad Autónoma de Madrid professor Carlos Balsalobre noticed yesterday:
Continue reading Journal retracts a paper, then publishes it in an issue 11 months later
A journal has issued expressions of concern for a pair of 2021 meta-analyses purporting to find that ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid-19 after data sleuths raised questions about some of the research in the studies.
As we reported last fall, one of the two papers – “Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines” – began to wobble when data central to its conclusion were retracted from the journal Viruses. That article has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, making it a highly-cited, “hot” paper.
The other article was titled “Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19” and was written by a group led by Pierre Kory. Kory is a controversial Wisconsin physician whose ideas about how to treat the infection, and particularly ivermectin, have made him a darling of ivermectin proponents like Joe Rogan.
Kory’s group lost a different Covid-19 paper last November over problems with the data, and a paper similar to the one now subject to an expression of concern was removed from a Frontiers journal last year.
The two meta-analyses were the subject of an editorial in the November/December 2021 issue of the journal by its editor, Peter Manu, who cautioned that:
Continue reading Ivermectin papers slapped with expressions of concern
A 2018 study in PNAS that claimed to show a biotech company’s platform for creating immunotherapies was better than existing methods has earned an expression of concern over the reproducibility of some of its findings.
When the article appeared, STAT called “Cell engineering with microfluidic squeezing preserves functionality of primary immune cells in vivo,” a “major paper that showed more clearly why companies like Roche are so interested in using its technique.”
The technique was developed by SQZ Biotech, which was founded by MIT’s Robert Langer, a founder or co-founder of numerous biotechs including Moderna, and with whom Roche partnered in 2015.
The paper has been cited 55 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. According to a press release announcing the work:
Continue reading Biotech’s ‘cell squeezing’ technology paper earns expression of concern
The head of a Japanese university has been found guilty of research misconduct for self-plagiarism – technically, duplication – and has agreed to pay a one-time cash penalty for his transgressions.
According to the University of Aizu, a computer science and engineering school in Aizuwakamatsu, Toshiaki Miyazaki, the president and CEO, failed to appropriately cite his own work in four papers:
Continue reading University president in Japan self-plagiarized and will forfeit some pay
The National Institute for Ocean Science (Ifremer) in France has flagged 11 papers on PubPeer for concerns including faked authorship and plagiarism, and has blasted the journals involved for their failure to adequately address the unethical work.
In some cases, for example the International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, editors have removed the names of the forged authors without informing readers.
Continue reading French ocean institute goes public about authors who forged their researchers’ names
A journal has retracted a 2020 paper about looking for “suspicious activities” on the India-China border — including an incursion in which 20 Indian soldiers were reportedly killed – citing “legal reasons.”
The abstract in Springer Nature’s Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, which alleges that the soldiers were “brutally killed,” is rife with grammatical and punctuation errors:
Continue reading Paper on “suspicious activities” on India-China border retracted
In September 2018, I wrote to the managing editor of FEBS Letters with my concerns about the extensive textual overlap between a 2011 article by Sonia A. Melo and Manel Esteller and other articles, including some that were not cited, such as a 2009 article in the Annual Review of Pathology by Yong Sun Lee and Anindya Dutta.
The Melo and Esteller article has received considerable attention, and has been cited more than 375 times.
My initial efforts were met with a response that the iThenticate software they used only identified overlap with the published Melo and Esteller article. I then had to guide the editor in the proper use of the program – including searching for partial overlap – that would lead to the finding of a 29% overlap with Lee and Dutta.
On October 4, 2018, after seeing the results, the journal said they would look into the matter.
In April 2019 I asked for an update. There was no answer.
Continue reading ‘[T]he authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but…retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors’