If you’re looking for more evidence that researchers are flooding the zone with COVID-19 papers that do little to advance the state of the science, we present Psychology, Health & Medicine.
Evidently, that wasn’t enough time to run a plagiarism check — or, as you’ll see, other due diligence — because now the journal has retracted the article for being a duplicate of two other papers in different journals. The move came after a staffer at Elsevier — a competing publisher — alerted a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis about the issue.
In part, PHM can be considered the victim of what looks to be a scheme that took advantage of gaps in the ability to check manuscripts prior to publication.
allowed a group of researchers in Italy to correct a 2016 paper with questionable images after a faculty member in their institution — and a frequent co-author of the group’s — said his investigation found no reason to doubt their integrity.
At the time, the journal told us they were unaware that Fulvio Magni — to whom they were directed “as the person who oversees ethics issues for the institute” — was a frequent co-author with the researchers who had authored the corrected paper.
The same day we posted on the case — Oct. 29, 2019 — a PubPeer commenter pointed out new issues in Figure 4 of the paper. And now, the journal has retracted the paper:
You probably read a story or heard a news report over the past few days saying that if nearly all Americans wore masks to prevent COVID-19 spread, 130,000 lives could be saved by the end of February. That’s what a paper published on Friday says.
But it turns out that figure sounds twice as good as reality. Here’s the story:
On October 6, a group at the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IHME) — a frequently cited source of COVID-19 data — submitted a manuscript to Nature Medicine. The paper was accepted on October 13, and published on October 23. It concluded:
PLOS ONE has issued an expression of concern for a paper it published last month suggesting that vitamin D might protect against severe COVID-19.
Central to the concerns is that the authors seem to have been too far out over their skis in asserting a link between the vitamin and the response to the infection. But as the EoC reveals, many of the potential problems can fairly be attributed to porous peer review as much as over-ambitious authors.
The article, “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection,” came from a group at Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran and Boston University in the United States. According to the authors:
A psychology journal has expressed concern about a 46-year-old paper which described attempts to correct “deviant” gender identity in a 5-year-old boy using physical violence — the latest example of journals purging (or semi-purging) their pages of offensive studies.
A physicist who in 2016 threatened to sue Elsevier after the publisher retracted one of his papers has lost another article over concerns about the “integrity of the mathematics” in the paper.
The article, “Eight-dimensional octonion-like but associative normed division algebra,” by Joy Christian, of the Einstein Centre for Local-Realistic Physics in Oxford, UK, appeared in Communications in Algebra in July 2020. According to the notice:
A BMJ journal has retracted and replaced a paper on chronic fatigue in children after admitting that it misrepresented the nature of the research in the editing process. But the article has drawn scrutiny beyond merely the characterization of the analysis.
If accompanied by other symptoms, such as exertion intolerance, chronic pain and cognitive impairments, the patient might fulfil one of the diagnostic criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS).
