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:
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.
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.)
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 …”
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.”
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.
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 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.”
Retraction Watch readers may recall the names Jun Iwamoto and Yoshihiro Sato, who now sit in positions 3 and 4 of our leaderboard of retractions, Sato with more than 100. Readers may also recall the names Andrew Grey, Alison Avenell and Mark Bolland, whose sleuthing was responsible for those retractions. In a recent paper in in Accountability in Research, the trio looked at the timeliness and content of the notices journals attached to those papers. We asked them some questions about their findings.
Retraction Watch (RW): Your paper focuses on the work of Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto. Tell us a bit about this case.
The authors of a 2020 paper in Science Advances on how human sperm propel themselves in a corkscrew fashion like “playful otters” have retracted their article after concluding that their analysis didn’t support their conclusions.
The article, by Hermes Gadêlha, of the University of Bristol, in England, and several colleagues in Mexico, spawned significant coverage in the lay and science press — including this segment on NPR’s Science Friday and an article in Science (the work behind it was the subject of this YouTube video titled “The great sperm race”).
At the heart of the paper, “Human sperm uses asymmetric and anisotropic flagellar controls to regulate swimming symmetry and cell steering,” was the use of a technology called high-speed 3D microscopy to analyze sperm in motion. Per the abstract:
