Retraction Watch

Elsevier retracts entire book that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia

The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia.

The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. But in December, Tom Rauchfuss, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “tipped off by an Finnish editor on Wikipedia,” alerted the authors and Elsevier about the apparent plagiarism from the online encyclopedia.

On January 6, an Elsevier representative told Rauchfuss:

Reporter prompts corrections in Nature, New York Times after researcher fails to disclose ties to Cargill

A journalist in Washington, D.C. prompted a correction in both Nature and the New York Times after finding that the lead author of a paper on fish farming failed to disclose financial ties to one of the world’s largest aquaculture companies.

The article, “A 20-year retrospective review of global aquaculture,” found that the practice of fish farming has become significantly more friendly to the environment than it was two decades ago.

The paper caught the attention of the New York Times, which wrote about the findings. It also grabbed the attention of Tim Schwab, who noticed something a bit, well, fishy, about the study.

Two Japanese universities revoke PhDs, one for plagiarism and one because of cell line contamination

A scientist in Japan has lost her doctoral degree from Kyoto University after an investigation determined that she had plagiarized in her thesis.

According to the university, Jin Jing, who received her degree in September 2012 in human and environmental studies, has become the first person at the institution to have a doctorate revoked. In a statement about the move, Kyoto University president Nagahiro Minato said:

How hijacked journals keep fooling one of the world’s leading databases

It keeps happening.

There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the world’s leading databases for scholarly literature. The Transylvanian Review did the same thing, and so did Test Engineering and Management.

These journals — which can make millions of dollars for their illegitimate publishers — exploit vulnerabilities in Scopus, owned by Elsevier, by making themselves look close enough to real journals, often exploiting the real ISSN and other metadata of those titles. That, in turn, entices potentially unknowing authors whose careers may depend on publishing in journals in major indexes.

Now into the mix comes Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology. This time, the tip-off, discovered by Russian scholar Dmitry Dubrovsky, was almost unbelievable: an article about the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet resistance to Germany’s 1941 invasion — in a journal specializing in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology.

Antiviral: ‘TikTok Doc’ loses paper on faculty development over concerns about harassment suit

The now-infamous “TikTok Doc” who was embroiled in a recently settled sexual harassment suit has lost a 2020 paper on, wait for it, faculty development after his co-authors decided that the collaboration risked “reputational damage” to themselves and dismissal of the work.

Jason Campbell was an anesthesiology resident at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland, when he became a social media darling. Clips of him dancing in the hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic went viral on TikTok — before Campell was accused of sexually harassing a social worker at the Portland VA hospital, where the anesthesiologist sometimes worked. (Campbell left the institution and reportedly now lives and works in Florida.)

According to The Oregonian, the suit against Cambell and OHSU alleges that:

Congratulations! Your already-published article has just been rejected

All rejection is hard to take. But, as one psychology researcher has found out, “having a paper rejected half a year after publication is something new …”

We’ll explain.

In January 2021, Eiko Fried, of the Department of Clinical Psychology at Leiden University, in The Netherlands, published an article in Psychological Inquiry titled “Lack of Theory Building and Testing Impedes Progress in The Factor and Network Literature.”

Since then, the paper has been viewed more than 2,400 times and cited a handful of times.

But on May 17, Fried received an email from the journal, which is published by Taylor & Francis, with unfortunate news: His article, according to the support administrator, was “unsuitable for publication.”

‘Regrettably it took too long to investigate and retract this paper.’

A journal has expressed regret over its sluggish response to image hijinx in a 2017 paper on the antimalarial properties of a kind of pea plant.

The article, “Antimalarial efficacy of Pongamia pinnata (L) Pierre against Plasmodium falciparum (3D7 strain) and Plasmodium berghei (ANKA),” was written by P. V. V. Satish and K. Sunita, of the Department of Zoology and Aquaculture at Acharya Nagarjuna University.

The paper drew scrutiny on PubPeer four years ago, where commenters noted issues with the figures.

Time passed, and the paper was cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. Now, according to the retraction notice:

Weekend reads: Legal threats, lawsuits, a professor loses emeritus status, and ‘the 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill’

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Paper linking frequency of Google search terms to violence against women retracted
Oh, the gall(stones): A journal should retract a paper on reiki and pain, says a critic
‘The notices are utterly unhelpful’: A look at how journals have handled allegations about hundreds of papers
Paper likening human sperm to “playful otters” retracted
Researcher loses medical degree for using paper mill to write his dissertation
How can universities and journals work together better on misconduct allegations?
‘Preprints are works in progress’: The tale of a disappearing COVID-19 paper

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 126.

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

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

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:

Oh, the gall(stones): A journal should retract a paper on reiki and pain, says a critic

Talk about missing the trees for the, ahem, forest plots. A researcher is accusing an Elsevier journal of refusing to retract a study that depends in large part on a flawed reference.

The paper, “The effect of Acupressure and Reiki application on Patient’s pain and comfort level after laparoscopic cholecystectomy: A randomized controlled trial,” appeared in early April in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice and was written by a pair of authors from universities in Turkey.

The article caught the attention of José María Morán García, of the Nursing and Occupational Therapy College at the University of Extremadura in Caceres, Spain. Morán noticed that what he considered a critical underpinning of the paper was a 2018 meta-analysis (also by authors from Turkey) with a major flaw: According to Morán and a group of his colleagues, the meta-analysis — also in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice — showed the opposite of what its author stated. Indeed, they’d made the case to the journal back in 2018, when the meta-analysis first appeared in a paper titled “Misinterpretation of the results from meta-analysis about the effects of reiki on pain.”

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