The other day, Jamie Burr, an exercise physiologist in Canada, received a curious email from an overseas colleague. The researcher wanted to know if Burr, of the University of Guelph, had written a particular article.
Burr wondered:
Why are they questioning if I wrote something?
Turns out, something was real shady with the slim article.
Continue reading An exercise in frustration: A researcher is impersonated
It just keeps happening.
For at least the fourth time in two years, a journal has been scammed by someone impersonating a guest editor. The latest: Behaviour & Information Technology, a Taylor & Francis title, has retracted an entire special issue — at least 10 articles published between 2019 and 2020 — because the guest editor “was impersonated by a fraudulent entity.”
As the retraction notices for the 10 papers report:
Continue reading ‘Galling’: Journal scammed by guest editor impersonator
A timing glitch prompted the temporary removal of a letter to the editor calling out a previously published study for “perpetuating historical harms” through its framing of race and ethnicity.
The letter, “Race is not a risk factor: Reframing discourse on racial health inequities in CVD prevention,” appeared online in April in the American Journal of Preventive Cardiology, an Elseiver property. It came in response to a review article, published the month before, titled “Ten things to know about ten cardiovascular disease risk factors.”
As the abstract of the review stated:
Continue reading Elsevier glitch prompts temporary removal of critique of review on race and heart disease
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So the saying goes.
What about fool me 20 times?
In December of last year, Dove Press — a unit of Taylor & Francis — retracted 14 papers by Marty Hinz, a Minnesota physician who has been sanctioned by the U.S. FDA as well as the Minnesota state medical board. In March, Dove retracted six more. A typical notice:
Continue reading Publisher retracts 20 of a researcher’s papers — then asks him to peer review
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) has sanctioned a researcher who violated the journal’s policy by refusing to share a strain of algae that he used in a 2018 paper.
Zhangfeng Hu was one of two corresponding authors, and the last author, of the paper, “New class of transcription factors controls flagellar assembly by recruiting RNA polymerase II in Chlamydomonas.” The paper has been cited three times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
May Berenbaum, PNAS’ editor in chief, tells Retraction Watch:
Continue reading PNAS bans author for refusing to share algae strain
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which oversees investigations into allegations of misconduct in grants from the NIH, is once again without a permanent director.
Elisabeth (Lis) Handley, who became director in 2019, has taken on a new role in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which ORI is a part. Wanda Jones, who has served as interim and deputy director of the agency, will serve as acting director, according to an HHS spokesperson.
Handley has become principal deputy assistant secretary for health. In a memo to staff, assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine wrote:
Continue reading US federal watchdog loses director to another government role
Never let it be said that journals are not deliberative when it comes to correcting the record.
Of course, “deliberative” also means “slow.”
Take a 2018 article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) by a group of authors in India.
Continue reading First, this paper was corrected. Now it has an expression of concern. And maybe, just maybe, it will be retracted.
When the University of Colorado at Denver completed an investigation in 2015 into the work of a former faculty member, the school recommended that nine papers be corrected or retracted.
But six years after the close of that investigation, the researcher, urologist Hari Koul, has had just two papers retracted and one corrected.
Multiple journal editors told Retraction Watch they had not been informed that papers published in their journals were recommended for retraction or correction, according to documents obtained by Retraction Watch via a public records request. And emails show Koul was still negotiating the retraction of at least one of the papers last year.
Continue reading Exclusive: Six years after a misconduct investigation, more than half of suspect papers remain unflagged
The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia.
The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. But in December, Tom Rauchfuss, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “tipped off by an Finnish editor on Wikipedia,” alerted the authors and Elsevier about the apparent plagiarism from the online encyclopedia.
On January 6, an Elsevier representative told Rauchfuss:
Continue reading Elsevier retracts entire book that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia
A journalist in Washington, D.C. prompted a correction in both Nature and the New York Times after finding that the lead author of a paper on fish farming failed to disclose financial ties to one of the world’s largest aquaculture companies.
The article, “A 20-year retrospective review of global aquaculture,” found that the practice of fish farming has become significantly more friendly to the environment than it was two decades ago.
The paper caught the attention of the New York Times, which wrote about the findings. It also grabbed the attention of Tim Schwab, who noticed something a bit, well, fishy, about the study.
Continue reading Reporter prompts corrections in Nature, New York Times after researcher fails to disclose ties to Cargill