Enamul Haque, whose master’s thesis was plagiarized by other authors
In June of this year, Enamul Haque, a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, came across an article in the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA).
It looked familiar.
That’s because it was copied, in large part, from Haque’s master’s thesis, which he had completed at Canada’s McMaster University and submitted the previous year. Haque wrote to Kohei Arai, the journal’s editor in chief, on June 30, providing detailed evidence of plagiarism:
According to the society, Saitoh had committed ethics violations in 10 articles, three of which had already been retracted and seven of which remained in the wild. (Saitoh had been a frequent co-author with Yoshitaka Fujii, currently our record holder for most retractions by a single researcher — 183 — but the JSA report found that he’d committed misconduct on his own, too. He has 53 retractions, according to our count, placing him seventh on our leaderboard.)
Four of those 10 articles appeared in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia and two others were published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. (The seventh paper, in the Fukushima Journal of Medical Sciences, has since been retracted.)
A paper claiming that cases of myocarditis spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines that earned a “temporary removal” earlier this month will be permanently removed, according to a publisher at Elsevier.
Sometime between then and October 17, the article was stamped “TEMPORARY REMOVAL” without explanation other than Elsevier’s boilerplate notice in such cases:
In 2016 Genetic Testing and Molecular Biomarkers published a paper on osteoarthritis by a group at Linyi People’s Hospital in China. Five years later, the authors contacted the journal asking for the correction of a pair of figures — but, as the publisher, Mary Ann Liebert, explained, the new files were “not workable.”
In May 2021, the journal issued an expression of concern for the paper (which, we’ll note, unfortunately sits behind a paywall). And earlier this month, it was retracted. For the rest of the story, read the retraction notice (caution, the following text might contain trigger words for unethical researchers):
Last April, the The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicineprovisionally accepted a paper on the role of music therapy in palliative care settings. Unfortunately for authors, the article did not grab the guest editors of the supplementary issue to which it had been designated.
So far, so good. But a production error caused the paper to appear online — necessitating a retraction when the journal learned that the authors, understandably, had already found another home for their work.
The senior author of a book chapter in the 2020 volume that Springer Nature has retracted for plagiarism has blamed a former grad student from Cuba in the affair — a charge she dismisses as “crazy.”
The chapter was retracted nearly 10 months after readers pointed out passages that had appeared to have been churned out by the fake paper generator Mathgen.
Last December, commenters on PubPeer including Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé — who will be familiar to readers of this blog for their exposure of nonsensical papers with “tortured” language showing signs of plagiarism — pointed out at least one problematic passage in the chapter:
The publishing firm Wiley says it is investigating a pivotal paper about a controversial public health tool after Retraction Watch reported on a robust critique of the article which highlighted a number of potentially serious flaws with the research.
We’re talking about the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), whose developer, Donald Morisky, has been hitting researchers with hefty licensing fees — or demands to retract — for nearly two decades.
One of the key papers supporting the validity of the MMAS-8 (the second iteration of the MMAS) was a 2008 article by Morisky and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Hypertension.
The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work.
The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming behaviors they ultimately attributed to a previously undetected neuroendocrine tumor called a pheochromocytoma.
According to the retraction notice, however, the tumor wasn’t the only thing about the paper that was hidden. The authors also misled the Lancet when they said they hadn’t published about the case when they submitted their writeup about the case — a fact unknown to the journal until this summer:
