Category: genetics retractions

A journal that lost its impact factor and spot in a major index this year has made good on a promise to retract dozens of papers with “compromised” peer review.  

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified signs of citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations. Clarivate also dropped Genetika from its Web of Science index for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. 

Clarivate’s actions followed a blog post by scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik about what she called the “Iranian Plant Paper Mill, which included 31 papers published in Genetika. 

Surveys show spreadsheets are the most widely used analytical tool in academic research. But they are prone to errors. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Health England lost 16,000 test results after using an old Excel file format to handle data. Whether this mix-up hampered local infection control is anybody’s guess, but it certainly could have. 

The software is causing trouble for other lines of research, too, as our team and others have shown: Genomics studies that rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage data turn out to be riddled with erroneous gene names, or gene-name errors, and the issue is affecting more and more journals.