At least two more journals are fighting decisions by Clarivate — the company behind the Impact Factor — to suppress them from the 2019 list of journals assigned a metric that many rightly or wrongly consider career-making.
In a letter to the editorial board of Body Image, an Elsevier journal that was one of 33 suppressed by Clarivate for excessive self-citation, editor in chief Tracy Tylka and nine journal colleagues write:
In early June, as controversy swirled over a high-profile study of hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19, Christian Funck-Brentano started receiving aggressive emails, texts and tweets.
Funck-Brentano, professor of medicine and clinical pharmacology at Sorbonne Université and Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris, and a colleague had published an editorial in The Lancet alongside the study — purportedly based on data from a company called Surgisphere — citing the results and sounding an alarm about the cardiac risks of hydroxychloroquine. Within days, that paper was retracted, along with a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine about different medications also allegedly based on Surgisphere data.
“I’m 65 and I have no real concerns,” Funck-Brentano told Retraction Watch, but his co-author was in an earlier stage of his career, and Funck-Brentano wanted to handle the situation in a way that would cause the least collateral damage.
Three researchers who study consumers’ relationships with brands have lost their second paper, this one a study which sought to explain why some people buy things to relieve inner conflicts, because of “data and analysis anomalies.”
The study was authored by Nicole Coleman of the University of Pittsburgh, Patti Williams, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrea Morales of Arizona State University.
At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:
Zoologists are up in arms that a leading taxonomy journal is being called out for excessive self-citation and being denied an Impact Factor.
Last week, Clarivate announced that it was suppressing 33 journals from its Journal Citation Report, which would mean no Impact Factor for those journals, because of high levels of self-citation that distorted journal rankings. One of those journals was Zootaxa, which since 2015 has published more than a quarter of all newly described taxa in the literature.
Denying Zootaxa an Impact Factor — which is used, for better or for worse, by universities and other institutions to determine whether a journal is worthy of publishing in — is unfair and damages the field, taxonomists said this past week.
For example, Wayne Maddison, a professor of botany and zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, tweeted:
Researchers compared Impaza with sildenafil (Viagra)
Over the objection of all of the authors, a journal has retracted an article on a homeopathic approach to penis enlargement and virility after deciding that the putative remedy wasn’t potent enough for the task at hand.
Among the authors of the article was Oleg Epstein, a Russian scientist whose company, OOO NPF Materia Medica Holding, of Moscow, makes homeopathic products. Epstein’s research has been the subject of multiple retractions, as we’ve reported, embarrassing reputable journals into whose pages he managed to publish papers on homeopathy.
Impaza, a name which sounds more like a Subaru than a sexual aid, purportedly:
For more than a decade, I have been working with colleagues to request retractions from editors and publishers for plagiarizing articles, mostly in my discipline of philosophy and related fields. But almost two years ago I requested a retraction from a seismology journal. Since I have no training in the science of earthquakes, how did I get involved?
In June 2017 I read an article on Retraction Watch, “Plagiarism costs author five papers in five different journals” involving a researcher in civil engineering. The unrelated subject matters represented by each of the journals surprised me, as they involved refugee studies, educational philosophy, disaster medicine, and life quality studies. These are important disciplines, but they are not obviously related to each other, nor to civil engineering.
A year later I wondered whether any more retractions had appeared for that same researcher, and I came across an unretracted 2011 article by that researcher in the journal Earthquake Science. After two minutes of online searching I discovered it was a near-identical copy of a 2002 article by different authors in the Elsevier journal Engineering Structures. My lack of training in seismology was not an impediment to making this determination; the only major differences between the two articles were the titles and the authors of record. (The detailed tables, figures, photos, data visualizations, and paragraphs were identical but for minor elements.)
More than 70% of the citations in one journal were to other papers in that journal. Another published a single paper that cited nearly 200 other articles in the journal.
The list includes some of publishing’s biggest players: Nine journals published by Elsevier, seven by Springer Nature, six by Taylor & Francis, and five by Wiley.
