Category: RW announcements

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

Earlier this week, The Retraction Watch Database surpassed 45,000 retractions. 

45,000.

That’s three times as many as you’ll find in other data sources. And in a recognition of the value of the Database, earlier this year Crossref acquired it – and made its contents freely available. The fact that the acquisition included five years of funding to cover the continued operation of the Database was critical to our sustainability. We were, in a word, overjoyed by the deal.

But the journalism side of Retraction Watch – the part that digs deep into stories about retraction and related issues, files public records requests, and occasionally faces legal threats – still needs regular sources of funding. At the moment, the salaries of our two reporter-editors – Ellie Kincaid and Fred Joelving – are funded by a combination of a generous two-year grant from the WoodNext Foundation, partnership with news outlets, and individual donations from readers like you.

In nonprofit parlance, we’ve diversified,  but we always face the risk that one or more of those streams may dry up. We have a few ways you can help.

Continue reading A new way to support Retraction Watch this Giving Tuesday

Today is a very big day for Retraction Watch and The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit. Bear with me while I explain, starting with some history.

When Adam Marcus and I launched Retraction Watch in 2010, we envisioned it as a journalism blog that would break stories no one else was covering, and examine whether scientific correction mechanisms were robust. And for some time, that’s just what it was. Our traffic and visibility grew quite quickly, but the team didn’t. It was years before we even had an intern.

Things changed in 2014 and 2015. Three philanthropies – the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), and the Helmsley Trust – approached us with some version of “We think what you’re doing is important. How can we help?”

Continue reading The Retraction Watch Database becomes completely open – and RW becomes far more sustainable

The journal Scientific Reports removed a scientist linked to paper mill activity from its editorial board last year, but didn’t take his name off the web page until last month, after a Retraction Watch-Undark story pointed out his association. 

The former editorial board member, Masoud Afrand, is an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran. 

In our story, Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan, cited Afrand as an example of researchers seemingly associated with paper mills who manage to get editorial positions at reputable journals. Afrand, he said: 

Continue reading Editorial board member dropped from journal site after Retraction Watch-Undark report links him to paper mill

On paper, data scientist Gunasekaran Manogaran has had a stellar scientific career. He earned an award as a young researcher from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and landed a series of postdoctoral and visiting researcher positions at universities in the U.S, including the University of California, Davis; Gannon University in Pennsylvania; and Howard University in Washington, D.C. His h-index — a measure of a researcher’s impact and productivity — is 60, a number that by one model would mark him as “truly unique” if achieved within 20 years. He did it in fewer than 10.

Emails obtained by Undark, however, suggest some researchers have doubts about his publishing record. The correspondence includes an initial message from someone claiming to have previously worked with Manogaran. It was sent to some 40 editors of scientific journals, many owned by major scientific publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Taylor & Francis among them.

The sender alleges that Manogaran and others run a research paper publishing scam — one that both generates revenues and artificially burnishes the scientific bona fides of individual and institutional participants. In particular, the alleged scheme targets what are known in the scientific publishing industry as “special issues” — self-contained special editions that are not part of a journal’s regular publishing schedule, typically focused on a single topic or theme.

The email, dated April 12, 2022, informs the journal editors that they may have partnered with members of this alleged scheme and urges them to take action. “If you don’t do that there would be a next group doing the same scam in name of different persons,” the email states.

Continue reading In a Tipster’s Note, a View of Science Publishing’s Achilles Heel

The scientific paper inspired international headlines with its bold claim that the combination of brain scans and machine learning algorithms could identify people at risk for suicide with 91% accuracy.

The promise of the work garnered lead author Marcel Adam Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and co-author David Brent of the University of Pittsburgh a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a larger follow-up study.

But the 2017 paper attracted immediate and sustained scrutiny from other experts, one of whom attempted to replicate it and found a key problem. Nothing happened until this April, when the authors admitted the work was flawed and retracted their article. By then, it had been cited 134 times in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science — a large amount for a young paper — and received so much attention online that the article ranks in the top 5% of all the research tracked by Altmetric, a data company focused on scientific publishing.

All this could have been avoided if the journal had followed the advice of its own reviewers, according to records of the peer-review process obtained by Retraction Watch. The experts who scrutinized the submitted manuscript for the journal before it was published identified many issues in the initial draft and a revised resubmission. One asked for the authors to replicate the work in a new group of study participants, and overall, they recommended rejecting the manuscript.

Continue reading How a now-retracted study got published in the first place, leading to a $3.8 million NIH grant

The news of Zahra Jalilian’s death seemed to change as quickly as it spread.

On Dec. 4, 2022, the University of Tehran announced that the nanotechnology graduate student had died following “a tragic self-harm incident.” Political opposition groups quickly countered that darker forces were likely at work, attributing the 31-year-old Ph.D. student’s death to Islamic mercenaries, government functionaries, and other plots. Jalilian’s family, meanwhile, has accused her adviser of getting rid of his student in order to take credit for her work — charges that he steadfastly denies.

What is clear amid the varying and sometimes overheated accounts is that Jalilian was struggling under the pressures of her research. Interviews with her former colleagues, alongside voice memos that appeared on a university messaging platform shortly after her death, provide a rare glimpse into the culture of a scientific lab in a country that is often opaque to the outside world — and where mental illness is often ignored, denied, and deeply freighted with stigma.

Continue reading In the Death of an Iranian Scientist, Hints of Unchecked Strife

In 2002, journals retracted 119 papers from the scientific literature. 

What a difference two decades make. 

On several occasions this year, publishers announced they were retracting several times that number, all at once. (For some of the stories among 2022’s retractions that captured the most attention, see our 10th annual roundup for The Scientist.)

This year’s 4,600-plus retractions bring the total in the Retraction Watch Database to more than 37,000 at the time of this writing. 

Continue reading Nearing 5,000 retractions: A review of 2022

Dear Retraction Watch readers, we have some exciting news to share.

The WoodNext Foundation has awarded The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent 501(c)3 nonprofit, a two-year $250,000 grant that will allow us to add another editor. 

The WoodNext Foundation is the philanthropy of tech innovator and Roku CEO/founder Anthony Wood and his wife Susan, and its mission is “to advance human progress and remove obstacles to a fulfilling life.”

With the grant, we have hired Frederik Joelving, an experienced investigative reporter focused on health and science, and added to our freelance budget. Joelving, who is based in Copenhagen, will start on January 3. His award-winning work has had a big impact, including a ban by the Indian government on lucrative but troubling sales practices by drugmakers.

Continue reading Retraction Watch grows again, thanks to a $250,000 grant from the WoodNext Foundation

What retractions grabbed the most attention in 2022?

As we’ve now done for a decade, we took a look through the year’s stories about retractions for our friends at The Scientist and gathered the ten that seemed to most capture the limelight. As we write there, the cases ranged from “typo-laden code in psychedelics research to paper mills and plagiarism.”

Continue reading The top 10 retraction stories of 2022

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

Sometime this week or early next week, we will publish our 6,000th post. That means we’ve averaged nearly 500 per year since we launched a bit more than 12 years ago.

Wow.

And yet that’s not nearly all we do here at Retraction Watch. We — and by that I mean our researcher Alison Abritis and a small but very merry band of freelancers — maintain the most comprehensive database of retractions available. That database, which at last count contains more than 37,000 retractions, is now used by three leading reference managers — EndNote, Papers, and Zotero — to power their retraction alerts, and has been the basis of scores of scholarly papers.

Continue reading This Giving Tuesday, please consider supporting Retraction Watch