Do journal editors have the responsibility to ensure authors are disclosing relevant conflicts of interest?
According to the editor of one Elsevier journal, the answer is “no.”
The case marks the second time this year that the editor of an Elsevier journal has been less than dogged about enforcing the company’s clearly stated policies about undisclosed conflicts.
Continue reading Authors who don’t disclose conflicts of interest? “[W]e cannot force them to do so,” says editor
Less than two weeks after Retraction Watch reported that an abstract from 2019 included what appeared to be text from plagiarism detection software, the publisher has subjected the paper to an expression of concern and is investigating all of the lead author’s papers.
The paper,”Identification of Selective Forwarding Attacks in Remote locator Network utilizing Adaptive Trust Framework,” appeared as part of an IOP Conference Series. Nick Wise, an engineering graduate student at Cambridge, flagged the incident on Twitter, which IOP Publishing told us they had not yet heard about.
Today, IOP Publishing spokesperson Rachael Harper told Retraction Watch:
Continue reading Publisher investigating all of an author’s papers following reporting by Retraction Watch
A top intelligence official in the Obama administration failed to adequately credit a research assistant for a 2015 book but eventually relented after the grad student refused to back down about the slight, Retraction Watch has learned.
Gregory Treverton, who served as chairman of President Obama’s National Intelligence Council, wrote “National Intelligence and Science: Beyond the Great Divide in Analysis and Policy” with Wilhelm Agrell, a Swedish political scientist. At the time, Treverton was at the RAND Corporation, and he enlisted the help of Tyler Lippert, then a student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a RAND analyst.
According to Lippert, Treverton used extensive passages of text that Lippert provided to him with no acknowledgment that Lippert had done the work. Emails between Lippert and Treverton obtained by Retraction Watch show an increasingly acrimonious exchange between the two scholars.
Continue reading Obama intelligence official shortchanged grad student in 2015 book
A researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia plagiarized a former student’s thesis, according to a summary of a university investigation obtained by Retraction Watch.
Andy Eamens, who at least until recently was an agronomy researcher at Newcastle, published a paper in 2019 that included work by Kate Hutcheon, whose PhD work he supervised, without any credit. Hutcheon, who earned her PhD in 2017, contacted the journal, Agronomy, an MDPI title, in November 2019.
The journal, Hutcheon told Retraction Watch, “forwarded a copy of my complaint directly to my PhD supervisor (without my consent). Thankfully they also forwarded me a copy of his response.” In what we found a bit confusing, to say the least, Eamens wrote, in part:
Continue reading University orders PhD supervisor to retract paper that plagiarized his student
Two years ago, we reported on a website based in Russia that claimed to have brokered authorships for more than 10,000 researchers. (Apparently, neither our coverage nor a cease-and-desist letter from Clarivate Analytics had any effect on the site’s operations.)
And now, we bring you news of what look like two very similar sites — one out of Iran, and one out of Latvia.
The site in Iran, Teziran.org, claims to offer a variety of services, from help with immigration issues to scientific training. What caught our eye in particular was a section of the site (pictured above) that lists a number of “articles ready for acceptance” — at least by Google Translate:
Continue reading Introducing two sites that claim to sell authorships on scientific papers
A former veterinary student at Tufts University has settled a $1 million lawsuit alleging that she was punished for claiming that her mentor at the school falsified data in a 2014 article.
In 2019, Kristy Meadows sued Tufts and two faculty members, Elizabeth Byrnes and Dean Joyce Knoll, whom she said retaliated against her for claiming that Byrnes cooked her results in an article Meadows and Byrnes published in Neuroscience titled “Sex- and age-specific differences in relaxin family peptide receptor expression within the hippocampus and amygdala in rats.”
According to Law360, which first reported on the settlement:
Continue reading Former Tufts grad student settles lawsuit alleging retaliation for whistleblowing
It’s happened to all of us: You’re putting the final touches on your manuscript and run plagiarism detection software against it. Somehow, part of the software’s report ends up in your abstract — and neither you nor the peer reviewers nor the publishing team notices.
Well, it’s happened to one group of researchers, anyway.
Here’s one such passage, which appears right in “Identification of Selective Forwarding Attacks in Remote locator Network utilizing Adaptive Trust Framework,” a 2019 paper that was part of the IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering:
Continue reading Pro-tip: Before submitting your manuscript, delete the plagiarism detection report text
Worried about scarce research funding? Does the prospect of paying rent on that meager post-doc salary keep you up at night? Fear no more!
Innoscience Research in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to the rescue.
The company has launched an innovative (read: shady) scheme to pay researchers to cite studies from several journals it controls. How much can you earn? That depends. The payout is structured this way: $6 a citation and up to five cites, or $30, per paper, or $150 in total across all five journals.
Continue reading Publisher offers cash for citations
A paper that sought to bring some math to the idea that the spread of COVID-19 could be tracked in human excrement has been retracted because of the authors submitted it to two different Elsevier journals on the same day — and because of some eyebrow-raising behavior by the alleged peer reviewers.
The first author of the article was Ernestine Atangana, a researcher in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein.
The article, “Will the extraction of COVID-19 from wastewater help flatten the curve?,” appeared in Chemosphere in May — where it caught the eye of a researcher in the field (who did not want to be identified) who was struck by its sheer awfulness. (We should note that others have explored the same idea, and come to mixed conclusions.)
Among the more risible sections, the researcher told us, was this:
Continue reading COVID-19 wastewater tracking paper ends up in the sewer
What do aerobics and dance training have to do with geology?
If that sounds like an odd question, take a look at more than 70 articles in a special collection of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, published by Springer Nature, with titles such as:
Continue reading Guest editor says journal will retract dozens of inappropriate papers after his email was hacked