A neuroscientist once called the “prince of panspermia” has lost a lawsuit against Springer Nature stemming from a 2019 paper of his that a journal retracted.
Here’s the summary from United States District Judge John P. Cronan, who heard the original case:
Continue reading Court tosses $50 billion suit by ‘prince of panspermia’ against Springer Nature
The Journal of Neuroscience has slapped expressions of concern on a pair of papers linked to the maker of a controversial drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
As we and others have reported, Cassava Sciences has been under intense scrutiny lately. In August, the law firm Labaton Sucharow – who is representing Cassava short sellers – submitted a “citizen’s petition” to the FDA regarding a regulatory filing from the company for its drug simulfilam and called on the agency to halt trials of the experimental medication because it had:
Continue reading Two expressions of concern arrive for papers linked to beleaguered biotech CassavaIn 2019, Retraction Watch ran an exclusive story of a Russian paper mill operating under the business name “International Publisher LLC”. Since then, Retraction Watch and other scientific news and blogging sites have continued to report on the activities of research paper mills, including International Publisher and its primary website, 123mi.ru. These mills provide an array of fraudulent services to researchers and academics seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. The services they provide include ghostwriting, brokering authorship positions on papers accepted for publication, and falsifying data.
Our project augments this stream of reports about paper mills as we focus on the activities of International Publisher and the papers brokered through 123mi.ru. As part of this project we are curating a database of all the papers and authorship positions that have been advertised on this website. Our database consists of roughly 2,353 unique article titles with 8,928 authorship positions. While the majority of the known paper mill activity has been in the biomedical sciences, our work on just this one paper mill demonstrates that paper mill products have infiltrated multiple scientific disciplines in which career advancement is heavily reliant on academic publications.
So far, we have identified nearly 200 published articles that may have been brokered through this paper mill and which cross disciplines including (but not limited to) humanities, social sciences, nursing, and education. We also observe numerous papers on COVID-19 that have been or currently are advertised for sale.
Our project is far from complete, but we thought it important to report on our methods and preliminary findings via Retraction Watch. In doing so, we hope to raise awareness of a serious and potentially widespread problem, along with strategies to help detect and possibly prevent fraudulent activities.
Continue reading Revealed: The inner workings of a paper mill
You might say that the third time is not the charm for a paper on some elusive fermions.
For the third time this year, a leading science journal has raised concerns about a paper on the “Majorana” particle, which, if it exists, would hold promise for building a quantum computer.
In March, Nature retracted a paper on the particle, and in July, Science placed an expression of concern on a different paper that purported to find “a relatively easy route to creating and controlling [Majorana zero modes] MZMs in hybrid materials.”
Today, Science is slapping an expression of concern on another Majorana paper:
Continue reading Another setback for ‘Majorana’ particle as Science paper earns an expression of concern
A physics journal has retracted a 2017 paper after learning that the authors had tried to pass off the ideas of others as their own.
Normally, we’d just call that a case of plagiarism and move on. But in this case, the charge goes a bit deeper – less cribbing a few lines of the Principia and more claiming to have discovered gravity.
“Exploring multiband tunneling for uncoupled particles: A polynomial view,” was written by a group of a half-dozen researchers in Mexico City, Uruguay and Cuba, where senior author Leo Diago-Cisneros sits on the faculty of the University of Havana.
The paper, which appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics, purported to describe:
Continue reading Paper retracted because authors ‘misrepresented a published theoretical model as if they had found it’
This is an evolving story, and we will update as we learn more.
A paper in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports claiming there was essentially no evidence that lockdowns prevented COVID-19 deaths has been retracted.
As of late Monday US Eastern time, while the PDF of the paper was marked “RETRACTED ARTICLE,” a link to the retraction notice’s DOI that had appeared on the page — but did not resolve to anything — had disappeared. The notice appeared at approximately 7 a.m. US Eastern on Tuesday.
Here’s the retraction notice, provided to us by Springer Nature Tuesday morning before it went live:
Continue reading Paper claiming a lack of evidence COVID-19 lockdowns work is retracted
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a paper sourced from a paper mill – not an uncommon occurrence nowadays. What adds a bit of intrigue is that the manuscript was submitted with a fake email address to keep the alleged corresponding author from knowing about it.
The paper, “Electrophysiological Follow-Up of Patients with Chronic Peripheral Neuropathy Induced by Occupational Intoxication with n-Hexane,” was published in Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics on May 23, 2014 and has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Here’s the notice:
Continue reading Researcher uses fake email address to submit a paper mill manuscript without corresponding author’s knowledge
A scholar who famously fabricated a meeting between Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky used a bogus name to publish a 1985 paper in the journal History – and it was far from the first time.
Arnold Harvey, also known as AD Harvey, apparently created a small (precisely how small is unclear) community of scholars, including Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra, as well as the Latvian poet Janis Blodnieks.
In a ruse outlined in this 2013 article for the Times Literary Supplement by Eric Naiman, of UC Berkeley, this fictitious klatch would critique each other’s papers. (Take note, peer review rings of the 2010s.)
As The Guardian wrote in a 2013 profile of Harvey that’s well worth a read:
Continue reading Scholar with a history of making up author names has a 1985 paper corrected
For Pramod Sharma, the study of yoga tourism has proven to be a downward-facing dog.
Last year, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Roorkee blocked Sharma – who posed as a legit yoga researcher but in reality stole other people’s work – from receiving his PhD after determining that his thesis was “plagiarized and lacks originality.” What’s more, according to the institution, a 2018 article by Sharma contained a “discrepancy in data…casting a doubt on the validity of the results.”
Journals have now retracted five papers by Sharma, although earlier concerns about the work didn’t reach his PhD committee in time to prevent him from defending his thesis in 2019.
We reviewed the IIT report on the Sharma case, and pulled out a couple of the choicest passages:
Continue reading Student of yoga tourism won’t get PhD as he earns five retractions
Hey, researchers and universities, want to be included in a new ranking scheme? No problem, just pony up some cash.
Tanvir Ahmed, a postdoc at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says this year has seen a rise in news stories— for example from Bangladesh, Kashmir, and Nigeria — reporting so-called predatory rankings. These come to light due to the lack of knowledge about rankings at universities and the media in certain countries, he says.
Ahmed is referring to AD Scientific Index, which charges $30 USD for an individual researcher to be included in the ranking and an unspecified sum for institutions wishing to be ranked.
Continue reading Researchers sound alarm on ‘predatory’ rankings