The authors of a 2019 paper on rubber gloves have retracted their work after the journal to which they’d submitted their manuscript somehow missed their request to put a hold on the article.
After more than four years of doing, well, not much, evidently, Scientific Reports — a Springer Nature title — has retracted a paper which plagiarized from the bachelor’s thesis of a Hungarian mathematician.
The article, “Modified box dimension and average weighted receiving time on the weighted fractal networks,” was purportedly written by a group of researchers from China led by Meifeng Dai, of the Nonlinear Scientific Research Center at Jiangsu University.
We have an update on a post we published late last month.
We reported on March 31 that Tissue Engineering had retracted a paper by Xing Wei, of the, National Engineering Research Center of Genetic Medicine at Jinan University, in Guangzhou, China, because of image manipulation. The retraction notice for that paper, “Use of Decellularized Scaffolds Combined with Hyaluronic Acid and Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor for Skin Tissue Engineering, referred to another paper in the journal that was being retracted, but had not yet been. It also referred to a paper in a different journal that showed signs of misconduct, but that had yet to be retracted, either.
We were checking this week to see if the other papers had been retracted, mostly just to make sure our database was up to date. The second paper, Promoting the Recovery of Injured Liver with Poly (3-Hydroxybutyrate-Co-3-Hydroxyvalerate-Co-3-Hydroxyhexanoate) Scaffolds Loaded with Umbilical Cord-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells, has indeed been retracted, although the one in Tissue Engineering Constructs and Cell Substrates has not.
What was far more interesting, however, was that when we looked at a retraction notice for the first paper, we saw something we hadn’t seen in it before: Wei had earned an “indefinite ban” from publishing in the journal:
Journals have retracted 30 papers, and added expressions of concern to 13 more, because the research likely involved organs from executed prisoners in China.
The issue surfaced as early as 2016, and two of the retractions occurred in 2017, but all of the other retractions, and all of the expressions of concern, happened after a February 2019 paper by Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues calling for the retraction of more than 400 papers
We make a point of never calling for a particular paper’s retraction, nor ever weighing in on whether a journal should have made that move. That would be, we often say, like a financial reporter recommending stocks. But a recent expression of concern is sorely testing our resolve on the matter.
Christos Damalas, an agriculture researcher at Democritus University of Thrace, has had more papers retracted from Elsevier journals for fake peer review reports, giving him a total of 15.
The three most recent retractions appear, as did some previously, in Science of the Total Environment. Damalas also had papers retracted from Chemosphere and Land Use Policy in October. We reported on nine of his retractions last October. (For background on how fake peer review works, read this.)
Here’s a typical notice (the repeated “request of” appears in the three from Science of the Total Environment):
The construction industry in New York City is notorious for rigged bids, but rigged peer review?
A Queens, NY, building consultant has lost four papers for forging — or having had forged — the peer reviews of his manuscripts. (For background on how this works, read this.)
Faruque Hossain’s articles appeared in a variety of engineering-based Elsevier publications between 2017 and 2019. Hossain is listed as being the owner of an outfit called Green Globe Technology Inc., which is based in Flushing.
Here’s the notice for “Green science: Decoding dark photon structure to produce clean energy,” which Energy Reports published in 2018:
Kang Zhang, a formerly high-profile geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who resigned his post last July amidst an investigation into undisclosed ties to China, has retracted a paper because some of its images were taken from other researchers’ work.
The paper, “Impaired lipid metabolism by age-dependent DNA methylation alterations accelerates aging,” was submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last fall, months after Zhang’s resignation. One of Zhang’s fellow corresponding authors, Jian-Kang Zhu, used the journal’s “Contributed Submissions” process, in which “An NAS member may contribute up to two of her or his own manuscripts for publication in PNAS each year.”
PNAS published the paper on February 6 of this year. But on February 18, authors of a different paper, in Aging Cell, sent the editors of PNAS a letter, writing:
Two years ago, Julia Strand, an assistant professor of psychology at Carleton College, published a paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review about how people strain to listen in crowded spaces (think: when they’re doing the opposite of social distancing).
The article, titled “Talking points: A modulating circle reduces listening effort without improving speech recognition,” was a young scientist’s fantasy — splashy, fascinating findings in a well-known journal — and, according to Strand, it gave her fledgling career a jolt.
The data were “gorgeous,” she said, initially replicable and well-received:
A researcher at the University of Maryland, along with two former colleagues, has had three papers retracted in the past six months following an institutional investigation that found evidence of image manipulation.
The three retractions share three authors: Hua Zhou, Ying Hua Yang and John Basile, an associate professor of oncology and diagnostic sciences at the institution. The original papers appeared in Angiogenesis and PLOS ONE between 2011 and 2013.
Basile told Retraction Watch that he was prohibited from discussing the matter, based on statements from the university’s investigation committee, but that he did not think other papers from his lab co-authored with Zhou would be retracted.
