A publisher is retracting five papers from one of its conference series after discovering what it says was “clear evidence” that the articles were generated by a computer.
The five papers were published from 2018 to 2020 in IOP Publishing’s “Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science.” According to an IOP spokesperson, the retraction notices will all read:
Continue reading Publisher retracting five papers because of “clear evidence” that they were “computer generated”
Burned by the offer of a special issue, a journal has retracted four papers after determining that the guest editors of the supplement were not legit.
Neuroscience Letters, an Elsevier title, published the special issue — “Special Issue on Clinical and Imaging Assessment of Cognitive Dysfunction in Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders” — last summer, but it’s no longer on the journal’s website. The guest editors were listed as “Dr. Kalemaki Katerina Kalemaki, Dr. Hailong Li and Prof. Wiesława Grajkowska.”
This case is the third we’ve seen lately involving journals and publishers scorched by rogue guest editors. For an insider’s look at how such scams can run, check out our 2019 Q&A with Jamie Trapp, whose journal, Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine (formerly the Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine), fell victim to one not long ago. A preview:
Continue reading Third journal scammed by rogue editors
Harold “Skip” Garner has worn many hats over the course of his career, including plasma physicist, biologist, and administrator. One of his interests is plagiarism and duplication the scientific literature, and he and colleagues developed a tool called eTBLAST that compares text passages to what has already been published to flag potential overlap.
A new paper in Research Integrity and Peer Review by Garner and colleagues estimates “the prevalence of text overlap in biomedical conference abstracts.” We asked Garner some questions about the paper.
Retraction Watch (RW): You used a “text similarity engine” called eTBLAST. What is eTBLAST, and what does it do?
Continue reading ‘Conference organizers have ignored this:’ How common is plagiarism and duplication in abstracts?
A group of researchers in Canada has retracted their 2018 paper on the gene sequence of the Arctic charr — a particularly hearty member of the Salmonidae family that includes salmon and trout — after discovering that the sample they’d used for their analysis was from a different kind of fish.
The paper, “The Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) genome and transcriptome assembly,” appeared in PLOS ONE, and has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. Per the abstract:
Continue reading The one that got away: Researchers retract fish genome paper after species mix-up
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:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 84.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
Continue reading Weekend reads: “Hot-crazy matrix” paper; “comfort women” controversy; COVID-19 vaccine misinformation
Eight journals have corrected a total of eleven papers after one of the authors failed to list potential financial conflicts of interest. Two additional journals have also told Retraction Watch that they plan to issue corrections, which will bring the total to 13 or more.
Stuart Phillips is a professor and director of the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise, and Health Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The corrected studies — which now reflect Phillips’ links to companies or patents — are all related to his research on nutritional supplements and exercise.
One journal, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, issued a single correction for four studies authored by Phillips:
Continue reading Eleven papers corrected after nutrition prof fails to disclose patent, company ties
Last February, Richard Pollock was reading a review in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews — a prominent resource for evidence-based medicine — when he spotted an error.
In the first figure, which compared the effectiveness of two different treatments for the most common form of liver cancer, a label was switched. The error made it seem like the “worse” treatment was better than the more effective option.
Pollock, a health economist, was concerned enough to send an email to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the corresponding author, on February 20th. Abdel-Rahman, an oncologist at the University of Alberta, wrote back the next day, saying he would review the comments with experts at Cochrane, “and if there is any typos in the publication, it will be corrected immediately.” Emails seen by Retraction Watch show that, when replying to this email, Abdel-Rahman copied one of Cochrane’s editors, Dimitrinka Nikolova.
Months passed. Pollock sent another email to Abdel-Rahman and two Cochrane editors — Nikolova and Christian Gluud — on June 15th. Then, on November 16th, the journal pulled the review with a brief notice:
Continue reading Leading evidence-based group blames pandemic for 9-month delay pulling flawed cancer review
Chemosphere has issued an expression of concern for a 2019 paper on microplastics in the ocean with an uncomfortable degree of similarity to a previously published article in another journal.
However, the editors decided that they could find enough daylight between the two papers that leaving their version unretracted was “barely justified” — a less-than-hearty endorsement of the article and one that’s likely to leave readers with more questions than answers about the integrity of the work.
The article, titled ‘‘Prevalence of microplastic pollution in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean,” came from a group led by Zhong Pan, of the Laboratory of Marine Chemistry and Environmental Monitoring Technology, part of the State Oceanic Administration in Xiamen, China.
According to the notice:
Continue reading Editors decide not to retract microplastics article but “they feel that it is barely justified”
Last year, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology found itself on the receiving end of what its editor Roland Seifert called a “massive attack of fraudulent papers” that were the product of paper mills.
In response Seifert — who says the journal ultimately will have retracted 10 of those articles and stopped another 30 from being published — has produced a 20-point list of red flags that indicate the possibility of a paper mill in action, and features of these papers in general.
We won’t reproduce the list in its entirety, but here are a few highlights, in no particular order.
Continue reading 20 ways to spot the work of paper mills
Researchers in the Netherlands have retracted and replaced a 2015 paper on attention after discovering a coding error that reversed their finding.
Initially titled “Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over Left Dorsolateral pFC on the Attentional Blink Depend on Individual Baseline Performance,” the paper appeared in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience and was written by Heleen A. Slagter, an associate professor of psychology at VU University in Amsterdam, and Raquel E. London, who is currently a post-doc at Ghent University. It has been cited 19 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
But while trying to replicate the findings, Slagter and a then-PhD student of hers, Leon Reteig, found a critical mistake in a statistical method first proposed in a 1986 paper. Slagter told us:
Continue reading Why “good PhD students are worth gold!” A grad student finds an error