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The embattled mega journal Cureus has closed six of its so-called “academic channels,” which it bills as low-cost publication platforms that “will turn your organization into a publishing powerhouse,” Retraction Watch has learned.

The move follows a joint investigation in May by Science and Retraction Watch that found several organizations critics described as dressed-up paper mills had their own channels at the medical journal. 

As we reported in September, indexing for Cureus, which is published by Springer Nature, was recently put on hold by Clarivate’s Web of Science, apparently due to quality concerns. 

Continue reading Mega journal Cureus kicks out organizations critics called paper mills

Wiley will cease using the beleaguered Hindawi brand name, the publisher announced on an earnings call Wednesday morning. Wiley plans to integrate Hindawi’s approximately 200 journals into the rest of its portfolio by the middle of next year. 

Problems with Hindawi, the open access publisher that Wiley acquired in 2021, have cost the company $18 million in revenue in its latest financial quarter compared to the same quarter of last year, Wiley also disclosed. Hindawi’s journals have been overrun by paper mills and published “meaningless gobbledegook,” in the words of one sleuth, leading to thousands of retractions, journal closures and a major index delisting several titles. 

In the current fiscal year, Wiley expects $35-40 million in lost revenue from Hindawi as it works to turn around journals with issues and retract articles, Matthew Kissner, Wiley’s interim president and CEO, said on the earnings call. The company expects revenue to begin to recover in its next fiscal year, he said. 

Continue reading Wiley to stop using “Hindawi” name amid $18 million revenue decline

The overseers of the preprint server SocArXiv have withdrawn a paper which claims that treating Covid patients with ivermectin dramatically reduces their odds of hospitalization, calling the work “misleading” and “part of an unethical program by the government of Mexico City to dispense hundreds of thousands of doses of an inappropriate medication to people who were sick with COVID-19.”  

“Ivermectin and the odds of hospitalization due to COVID-19: evidence from a quasi-experimental analysis based on a public intervention in Mexico City,” has been a source of controversy for SocArXiv since it was accepted for the site in May 2021. 

The paper was written by José Merino, head of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), along with co-authors DAPI, the Mexican Social Security Institute and the Mexico City Ministry of Health. They claimed to find that: 

Continue reading Paper used to support claims that ivermectin reduces COVID-19 hospitalizations is withdrawn by preprint server

Elsevier has subjected an entire special issue of a journal — including a paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save — to an expression of concern.

The special issue of Toxicology Reports contained eight articles, including the vaccines paper co-authored by Ronald Kostoff.

Here’s the expression of concern, which is only linked from Kostoff et al’s vaccine paper:

Continue reading Elsevier subjects entire special issue of journal on COVID-19 to an expression of concern

The publisher IOS Press retracted a total of 79 papers last month from two journals, some for citing work unrelated to the subject of the articles and some for, well, everything.

The retraction notice in one of the titles, the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems reads:

Continue reading Publisher retracts nearly 80 articles over three days

A paper that tried to estimate the cost of invasive species to farming in Africa has been corrected because the researchers made a pair of errors that dramatically inflated their calculations. 

One mistake led the group, from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ghana and Kenya, to overstate the cost to African agricultural of invasive vegetation by roughly $3 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a T. The second error pared their estimate for crop losses due to a single plant species from $11.4 billion to $4.1 billion. 

Now, we’re not suggesting that the corrections negate the overall importance of the research. But we do wonder how errors of this magnitude weren’t immediately obvious to not only the peer reviewers and editors of the article, but to the researchers themselves. After all, the gross domestic product of the entire continent of Africa was an estimated $2.6 trillion in 2019.  

The journal, CABI Agriculture and Bioscience — the official journal of CABI, a global nonprofit group focused on agriculture and the environment — has both a brief correction and a more detailed notice for the May 2021 paper, “Towards estimating the economic cost of invasive alien species to African crop and livestock production”. The short version reads: 

Continue reading Authors crop estimate that was off by a factor of 60 — or $3 trillion

The findings were, to say the least, shocking: A researcher in New Zealand claimed that Google searches about violence against women soared during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic — raising the prospect that quarantines were leading to a surge in intimate partner violence and similar crimes. 

Shocking, yes, but now retracted because the methodology of the study was “catastrophically wrong,” in words of some critics. 

The paper, “COVID-19, suicide, and femicide: Rapid Research using Google search phrases,” was written by Katerina Standish, of the University of Otago’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and appeared online in January 2021 in the Journal of General Psychology.  

As the author’s institution claimed in its headline for a press release about the article:

Continue reading Paper linking frequency of Google search terms to violence against women retracted

The authors of a paper in Science Advances on methanogens — archaea that produce methane — have retracted the work a week after its publication because they included genetic data that violated an embargo. 

The article, published on February 10, was titled “A methylotrophic origin of methanogenesis and early divergence of anaerobic multicarbon alkane metabolism,” and included authors from China, Germany and the United Kingdom. The first author was Yinzhao Wang, of the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Metabolism at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 

On February 11, Roland Hatzenpichler, of Montana State University in Bozeman, sounded the alarm:

Continue reading ‘No malicious intent’: Authors retract week-old Science Advances paper based on embargoed data

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a paper it published in July after learning that the authors manipulated and plagiarized images galore. 

The paper, “Novel green synthesis and antioxidant, cytotoxicity, antimicrobial, antidiabetic, anticholinergics, and wound healing properties of cobalt nanoparticles containing Ziziphora clinopodioides Lam leaves extract,” appeared in Scientific Reports. Its authors were affiliated with institutions in China, Iran and Turkey. 

According to the retraction notice: 

Continue reading Journal retracts plant paper because authors plagiarized from a garden site — and several papers

A publisher that retracted nearly two dozen papers earlier this month for plagiarism and other problems has retracted one of the retractions, apologizing to the authors for its error.

All of the 23 — now 22 — retracted papers had either Jesus Silva or Amelec Viloria as one of the authors, but Silva and Viloria turn out to be the same person, according to the publisher, IOP Publishing. Viloria is last author of the now unretracted paper, “Energy potential of vinasse derived from rum manufacturing,” from IOP Conf. Series: Materials Science and Engineering.

The first author of that paper, Carmen Vásquez, of Universidad Nacional Experimental Politécnica Antonio José de Sucre in Venezuela, told Retraction Watch by email (we used Google Translate to translate from Spanish to English) that she had contacted the publisher when the retractions appeared to let them know that her paper did not plagiarize:

Continue reading 23 becomes 22: Publisher retracts retraction, apologizes for the error