by reason for retraction – Page 51

Major indexing service reverses decision to suppress two journals from closely followed metric

Following pushback from members of the taxonomy community, Clarivate Analytics, the company behind the Impact Factor, has reversed its decision to suppress two journals from receiving those scores this year.

As we reported in late June, Clarivate suppressed 33 journals from its Journal Citation Reports, which meant denying them an Impact Factor, for high levels of self-citation that boosted their scores and ranking. Many universities — controversially — rely on Impact Factor to judge the work of their researchers, so the move could have a dramatic effect on journals and the authors whose work appears in them.

As we reported earlier this month, at least three journals have appealed the move: Zootaxa, the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, and Body Image. Today, Clarivate announced it was reversing its decision on the two taxonomy journals, Zootaxa and the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

In a statement, Clarivate said:

Infectious disease researcher “recklessly” faked data in grants worth millions, says federal watchdog

A pediatric infectious disease specialist in California “recklessly” fabricated his data in a 2009 published study and four grant submissions, worth millions of dollars, to the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

The federal watchdog said in a settlement agreement published today that Prasadarao Nemani, of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly including falsified and/or fabricated data” in a 2009 paper — retracted in 2018 — and four NIH grant applications.

Specifically, Nemani (who has published under the name Nemani V Prasadarao):

Painfully awkward: Duplicate anesthesiology study retracted

A study that compared drugs used to reverse the effects of relaxants for surgery has been retracted because the majority of the results were already published.

The study, “Comparison of sugammadex and pyridostigmine bromide for reversal of rocuronium-induced neuromuscular blockade in short-term pediatric surgery,” appeared in the journal Medicine in February 2020.

The work found that the drug sugammadex worked faster than pyridostigmine in children undergoing surgery, and doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. But a study with the same authors and same name (barring a single uncapitalized letter) had already been published in the journal Anesthesia and Pain Medicine on July 31, 2019.

A mystery: How did this team plagiarize an unpublished paper?

A study on a wireless communication algorithm was retracted for being an exact duplicate of a paper submitted to a separate journal last year — but the authors were different and it’s unclear how they got hold of it.

The retracted study, “Energy-aware resource management for uplink non-orthogonal multiple access: Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning” was published in the Elsevier journal Future Generation Computer Systems. Neither the author of the original work who we were able to reach, nor either journal involved, say they know how the unpublished manuscript got into another group’s hands.

Here’s the (complicated) timeline:

“I am the first one to regret not being more careful in the first place”: Paper on rat semen retracted

A journal has retracted a paper on the semen of diabetic rats after learning about problems with authorship, and possibly more.

Physiology International, which also is called Acta Physiologica Hungarica, published the article, “The effects of sericin in recovering spermatogenesis and sexual hormone levels in diabetic rats,” in 2019. The first author was Ali Olfati, of Tabriz University in Iran. The second author — on paper, at least — was Felipe Martínez-Pastor, of the University of León, in Spain.

Not so. Per the retraction notice (which now directs to a “page not found” error):

“Stunned, very confused”: Two more journals push back against Impact Factor suppression

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:

A month after Surgisphere paper retraction, Lancet retracts, replaces hydroxychloroquine editorial

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.

Brand researchers have a second study retracted due to data “anomalies”

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, “Identity Threats, Compensatory Consumption, and Working Memory Capacity: How Feeling Threatened Leads to Heightened Evaluations of Identity-Relevant Products,” was originally published July 6, 2018 in the Journal of Consumer Research, an Oxford University Press title and retracted on July 3, 2020.

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.

The retraction notice says:

Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist

A Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million — then dropped the suit — has been ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees based on a statute “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Mark Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.

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:

Indexer “obviously made a mistake” in sanctioning taxonomy journal, says editor

The Clarivate logo

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:

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