At least two more journals are fighting decisions by Clarivate — the company behind the Impact Factor — to suppress them from the 2019 list of journals assigned a metric that many rightly or wrongly consider career-making.
In a letter to the editorial board of Body Image, an Elsevier journal that was one of 33 suppressed by Clarivate for excessive self-citation, editor in chief Tracy Tylka and nine journal colleagues write:
Science represents perhaps the single greatest accomplishment of humankind. Of all human institutions, organisations and establishments, science has proven an effective tool for driving progress. It is inherently self-correcting, and tolerates — and even demands — skepticism, challenge and self-critique. Few human institutions can make a similar claim.
However, there is increasing recognition and concern that current research incentives are perverse, and promote behaviors that undermine the very foundations of science. Under the guise of altruism and independence, the self-serving, self-promoting nature of academic science today is typically neither declared nor acknowledged. The dispassionate, objective analysis and presentation of data is frequently lost, as results are seen as personal (“my data”) and subservient to a personal or political agenda. As a consequence, scientists are losing their authority to speak, genuine experts are often disparaged and ignored, and our society is diminished.
In early June, as controversy swirled over a high-profile study of hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19, Christian Funck-Brentano started receiving aggressive emails, texts and tweets.
Funck-Brentano, professor of medicine and clinical pharmacology at Sorbonne Université and Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris, and a colleague had published an editorial in The Lancet alongside the study — purportedly based on data from a company called Surgisphere — citing the results and sounding an alarm about the cardiac risks of hydroxychloroquine. Within days, that paper was retracted, along with a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine about different medications also allegedly based on Surgisphere data.
“I’m 65 and I have no real concerns,” Funck-Brentano told Retraction Watch, but his co-author was in an earlier stage of his career, and Funck-Brentano wanted to handle the situation in a way that would cause the least collateral damage.
Three researchers who study consumers’ relationships with brands have lost their second paper, this one a study which sought to explain why some people buy things to relieve inner conflicts, because of “data and analysis anomalies.”
The study was authored by Nicole Coleman of the University of Pittsburgh, Patti Williams, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrea Morales of Arizona State University.
At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:
An anesthesia journal has retracted a 2020 paper by a group from China, Turkey and the United States after a post-publication review discovered issues with the analysis.
According to the notice, in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology:
The researchers who earlier this week called for the retraction of their hotly debated paper on police shootings and race say the reasons for their decision to pull the article have been misinterpreted.
Crime researchers David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and Joe Cesario, of Michigan State University, initially referred in a retraction statement to citations to the work of Heather Mac Donald, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, who wrote about the PNAS article for the City Journal and the Wall Street Journal.
Journals have issued expressions of concern for seven more papers by Hans Eysenck, including one for a paper the now-deceased psychologist published in the middle of World War II.
