physical sciences retractions – Page 2

Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?

The Internet of Things. Computer science. Botany. COVID-19.

All worthwhile subjects, to be sure. But what do they have to do with materials science?

That’s what James Heathers, who will be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch as a “data thug,” found himself wondering after he spent a weekend looking into articles published by Materials Today: Proceedings. He found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing “tortured phrases” that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.

He detailed his findings in a blog post today, and says that the journal – an Elsevier title – has published many articles that look like the work of a paper mill.

14 retractions for researchers who falsely claimed US physicist as co-author

Groups of researchers from around the world have racked up a total of 14 retractions for faked authorship. And one author seems to have been up to those and other shenanigans for a decade.

All of the 14 papers include David Ross, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. There was just one problem: Ross retired in 2003.

We first reported on two of the retractions in March 2021. At the time, we noted that two papers in journals published by Emerald also included Ross’ name somewhat improbably. Emerald apparently retracted those two articles in June of this year, along with four others. (Emerald does not date the retraction notices, nor does it give the notices their own DOIs. Both steps are considered best practice.)

All of the notices include this passage:

Crystallography database flags nearly 1000 structures linked to a paper mill

A chemistry database of crystal structures has marked nearly 1000 entries with expressions of concern after finding they were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill.

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) added notes to 992 structures in its database, according to a notice posted to its website in May. And a crystallography researcher tells us the impact on the field could be significant.

The notes state:

Chemistry group at Hokkaido up to three retractions

A group of researchers in Japan who lost a paper earlier this spring in Science for misconduct have notched two more retractions, bringing their total to three.

As we reported in April, Science pulled a 2020 article led by Masaya Sawamura, of Hokkaido University, in Sapporo, saying the authors discovered:

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.”

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