Retraction Watch

Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct

One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.

The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.

Researchers found only 8,515 articles published the figure captions and the image’s metadata banners, both of which are needed to determine whether the correct microscope is listed in papers. Metadata banners usually contain important information about the experiments conducted, including the operating voltage of the microscope and the instrument’s model and parameters.

Of these papers, 2,400 (28%) listed the wrong microscope manufacturer or model, raising questions about the integrity of the conducted research.

A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.

In June of last year, Salvador Pineda received an email from a researcher at Zhejiang University in China informing him one of his articles had been plagiarized.

The researcher pointed Pineda to a paper, “A robust optimization method for optimizing day-ahead operation of the electric vehicles aggregator,” which appeared in Elsevier’s International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in November 2021. The article, by researchers at the University of Lahore, Pakistan, contained several figures copied from Pineda’s 2020 paper “An efficient robust approach to the day-ahead operation of an aggregator of electric vehicles,” as well as similar text.

Pineda, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Málaga in Spain, immediately wrote to the journal’s editor-in-chief, who said he’d retract the article, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

Yet the article remains intact, more than a year later, with the publisher blaming the delay on staffing changes at the journal.

Weekend reads: Why scientist rankings should be ignored; misconduct claims in court; mining company demands retraction

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Exclusive: Publisher retracts more than 450 papers from journal it acquired last year

Sage has retracted 467 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, a title it took on when it acquired IOS Press last November for an undisclosed sum.

The publisher “launched a thorough investigation” into the journal in April, according to a spokesperson, after the indexing company Clarivate “informed us about concerns relating to the quality of some of the journal’s content.”

“The investigation found that the peer review process for some articles was inadequate, leading to the retraction of these articles,” the spokesperson said.

The journal’s editor in chief, Reza Langari of Texas A&M University in College Station, resigned on June 16 “due to differences of opinion on how to proceed” with Sage’s investigation, he told Retraction Watch.

Journal retracts article for plagiarized images after trying to gag researcher who complained

The journal Cureus retracted an article for plagiarized images after questioning the motives of the researcher who said her images were taken.

The researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, first emailed Cureus, an open-access journal Springer Nature acquired in 2022, on August 1. She said she noticed images in the October 2023 paper, “Pediatric Acute Dacryocystitis and Orbital Cellulitis With Concurrent COVID-19 Infection: A Case Report,” came from a lecture she posted online and later removed.

“The images used in this article were edited and presented under a fabricated clinical scenario” and had been used without her permission, the researcher wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch. She requested the journal retract the article. She also provided what she said were her original images, which were replicated in Figure 1 of the paper, and copied the corresponding author of the article.

Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting

A journal that lost its impact factor in June is in the midst of a cleanup operation, issuing nearly 140 retractions so far this year.

The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles.

Cabanac and Magazinov have now flagged 1,850 articles from the journal, Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR), with the Problematic Paper Screener, which looks for evidence of bad practices in academic papers.

Exclusive: Biochemistry journal retracts 25 papers for ‘systematic manipulation’ of peer review

A journal of the UK-based Biochemical Society is retracting 25 papers after finding “systematic manipulation of our peer-review and publication processes by multiple individuals,” according to a statement provided to Retraction Watch.

The batch of retractions for Bioscience Reports is “the first time that we have issued this many retractions in one go for articles that we believe to be connected,” managing editor Zara Manwaring said in an email.

As academic publishing grapples with its papermill problem, many firms are retracting articles by the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands after discovering foul play.

Bioscience Reports already had retracted 20 papers this year, by our count. The latest batch means the journal’s yearly total will surpass 2023, when it pulled 32 papers, and the year before, when it pulled 26.

‘Coding’ errors prompt retraction of paper on long COVID in kids

JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a controversial 2023 paper on the incidence of long COVID in children after the authors discovered a raft of “coding” errors in their analysis that greatly underestimated the risk of the condition.

The article – a research letter titled “Post–COVID-19 Condition in Children” – was written by a group of researchers in Canada led by Lyndsey Hahn, of the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and garnered significant attention on mainstream and social media sites, including by critics who said the authors fatally botched the definition of long COVID.

According to the authors, the incidence of long covid in kids was “strikingly low”, occurring in just 0.4% of young patients. Symptoms of infection in kids typically resolve within two weeks, they added.

But those reassuring findings hinged on several errors in the analysis that made the incidence of long COVID in children look less than a third of what the researchers should have reported.

“Deceit, delusion, and a classic medical fraud”: An excerpt from a new book about a cancer treatment hoax

There once was a drug named Krebiozen;

It came from below the horizon.

It used to be said, by patients now dead,

Now what do we put our reliance on?

–Limerick attributed to University of Illinois president George Stoddard and University of Illinois provost Coleman Griffith, both of whom would lose their jobs over Krebiozen

It is a story that resonates with the present: A 1950s cancer treatment hoax that showed “charges of conspiracy, elitism, and un-Americanism directed against the educational, scientific, and medical establishment are nothing new; neither is uncritical news coverage of what turns out to be quackery.” We’re pleased to share an adapted excerpt from Matthew Ehrlich’s The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine, out today.

On March 26, 1951, one of America’s most respected scientists called a meeting at Chicago’s Drake Hotel to make a dramatic announcement: he and a Yugoslavian refugee doctor had found a drug that showed great promise in treating cancer. The scientist was Andrew Ivy, vice president of the University of Illinois (U of I) and designated spokesperson for medical ethics at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. Time magazine had gone as far as to pronounce him “the conscience of U.S. science.” Ivy’s Yugoslavian collaborator was Stevan Durovic, said to have discovered the new drug in Argentina after the Nazis forced him to flee his homeland. The drug itself was called Krebiozen, a name that was supposed to connote “cancer suppressor” or “regulator of growth.”

Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation

A physiology journal has retracted two papers after an institutional investigation found a heart researcher falsified data and figures in the articles.

A committee at the Ohio State University found Govindasamy Ilangovan, an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the school, falsified figures and reused data, according to the retraction notices published in Heart and Circulatory Physiology, a journal of the American Physiological Society.

The two papers, “Heat shock protects cardiac cells from doxorubicin-induced toxicity by activating p38 MAPK and phosphorylation of small heat shock protein 27,” and “HSP27 regulates p53 transcriptional activity in doxorubicin-treated fibroblasts and cardiac H9c2 cells: p21 upregulation and G2/M phase cell cycle arrest,” first appeared nearly 20 years ago. They have received 132 citations in total, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notices detail how Ilangovan repurposed and relabelled Western blots from both published and unpublished works. One of the figures also was “inaccurate” due to “addition of false bands” in a Western blot, but the notice did not explicitly attribute the problems with the figure to Ilangovan.

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