physical sciences retractions – Page 2

More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings

The tip came from the leadership of another scientific conference.

Did the Association for Computing Machinery know that they had published the proceedings of a conference with essentially the same name as that organization, IEEE, on the same dates, in the same venue, and with lots of overlapping authors?

The two versions of the meeting – the International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech) – both allegedly happened in Jakarta, Indonesia from Aug. 19-20, 2021, the tipster told ACM.

When ACM dug deeper, Scott Delman, the organization’s director of publications, told us, they saw something that looked familiar because of an investigation that led to a mass retraction of conference proceedings months earlier: A company in China billing itself as a conference organizer had handled all of the peer review.

Author asks ‘Why? Why? And why?’ as his paper is retracted

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2020 paper on exposure among cement workers to a potentially harmful chemical for a litany of errors that one might have expected peer reviewers to catch before publication – and the corresponding author is not happy.

Titled “Citrate stabilized Fe3O4/DMG modified carbon paste electrode for determination of octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane in blood plasma and urine samples of cement factory workers,” the article, which appeared in BMC Chemistry, was written by Rashid Heidarimoghadam and Abbas Farmany, of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

Farmany, of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, also happens to be a member of the journal’s editorial board, although he joined after the paper was accepted.

According to the retraction notice:

Publisher retracts 350 papers at once

IOP Publishing has retracted a total of 350 papers from two different 2021 conference proceedings because an “investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

The case is just the latest involving the discovery of papers full of gibberish – aka “tortured phrases” – thanks to the work of Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, Cyril Labbé, of University Grenoble-Alpes and Alexander Magazinov, of Skoltech, in Moscow. The tool detects papers that contain phrases that appear to have been translated from English into another language, and then back into English, likely with the involvement of paper-generating software.

The papers were in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series (232 articles), and IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (118 articles), plus four editorials.

According to IOP’s Rachael Harper, head of marketing communications, 20 of the papers were listed in the Problematic Paper Screener:

‘Highly professional, but the process seems to take a long time’: Is this the best way to correct the record?

A Nature journal has retracted a 2021 paper which made a bold claim about certain chemical reactions after several researchers raised questions about the analysis – but not before another group pulled their own article which built on the flawed findings.

The first article, “The amine-catalysed Suzuki–Miyaura-type coupling of aryl halides and arylboronic acids,” appeared in Nature Catalysis in January. Most of the authors were affiliated with Hefei University of Technology, in China. The paper has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

After publication, at least three groups of researchers published Matters Arising letters in the journal questioning the validity of the results, all of which appeared on December 2:

Mathematician ranked as Clarivate “highly cited researcher” has third paper retracted

A math professor named as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics has had his third paper retracted after issues with it were flagged last year.

The mathematician, Abdon Atangana, is a professor at The University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and China Medical University, Taiwan.

Atangana’s article, “Derivative with two fractional orders: A new avenue of investigation toward revolution in fractional calculus,” was published in The European Physical Journal Plus — where Atangana is an editor — on Oct. 24, 2016, and has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Publisher retracting 68 articles suspected of being paper mill products

It appears to be Paper Mill Sweeps Week here at Retraction Watch.

On Tuesday, we reported on an editor who believes one such operation was responsible for the withdrawals of at least two articles in her journal.

Now, the Royal Society of Chemistry is retracting 68 articles, across three of its titles, after an investigation turned up evidence of what it suspects was the “systemic production of falsified research.” The society said it is in the process of beefing up its safeguards against milled papers and plans to train its editors to have “extra vigilance in the face of emerging, sophisticated digital fraud.”

“Confrontation is an important element of physics progress:” Paper on black holes retracted

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2019 article by a Slovenian physicist who claims that both Creationism and Big Bang theory are wrong, and that black holes are the engines driving the universe.

The paper, in Scientific Reports, was titled “Mass-energy equivalence extension onto a superfluid quantum vacuum,” and was written by Amrit Srečko Šorli. It has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and four posts by Šorli’s institute that refer to it have been removed by Medium because the institute’s “account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.”

In 2010, Šorli founded the Bijective Physics Institute, whose proponents — we’re not sure how many there are beyond him and a few others named on the site — believe:

Nanoscience researcher loses four papers for image manipulation, forged authors

Journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry have retracted four articles by a researcher in China for a range of misconduct, including manipulation of images, fabrication of authors and more.

The papers were written by Rijun Gui, of Qingdao University and formerly of the School of Chemistry and Molecules Engineering at East China University of Science and Technology, in Shanghai, and published in 2013 and 2014. Gui has a sizable entry on PubPeer, where many of his studies have come under scrutiny for years. Together, the four papers have been cited nearly 150 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

It’s not quite Rashomon, but each of the retraction notices adds a bit of detail to the story.

Algebra paper retracted because of questions about the “integrity of the mathematics”

A physicist who in 2016 threatened to sue Elsevier after the publisher retracted one of his papers has lost another article over concerns about the “integrity of the mathematics” in the paper.

The article, “Eight-dimensional octonion-like but associative normed division algebra,” by Joy Christian, of the Einstein Centre for Local-Realistic Physics in Oxford, UK, appeared in Communications in Algebra in July 2020. According to the notice:

30 years later, physics journal retracts paper that blamed feminism for many of society’s ills

For those of you who think that critiques of feminism have no place in journals about physics, the Canadian Journal of Physics agrees. But it took them 30 years to get there.

The journal has retracted a 1990 article by a notorious male chauvinist who claimed, among other things, that feminism was responsible for an increase in cheating in school, psychological damage in young children and an overall decay in society.

The case has echoes of the controversy over Thomas Hudlicky, another Canadian chemist who recently lost a ~~30-year-old~~ paper for sexism and anti-diversity views.

This time, the author was Gordon Freeman, a now-emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Alberta, in Canada. Its title is one of those science-y-sounding strings of words that say both very little and, on reflection, quite a lot: “Kinetics of nonhomogeneous processes in human society: Unethical behaviour and societal chaos.”

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