A trio of speech researchers in India has lost a 2020 paper for a trifecta of malpractice: plagiarism, self-plagiarism (of a previously retracted article, no less!) and falsification of data.
The article, “Speech enhancement method using deep learning approach for hearing-impaired listeners,” appeared in January in Health Informatics Journal, a Sage title.
According to the abstract:
Continue reading Here’s why you shouldn’t try to republish a paper you had retracted for plagiarism
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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 32.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: Editors who publish in their own journals; a crackdown on paper mills; oncologist violates university policies in developing treatment
A group of researchers in China may be asking for a refund after, they claim, they got bad advice from a course in writing meta-analyses that led to a retraction for plagiarism and other problems.
They may not be alone. We’re aware of at least nine articles with similar issues that have been retracted so far, part of a batch of eye-catching meta-analyses.
Suspicions about the now-retracted 2014 paper — and dozens of others — emerged in October of that year, when Guillaume Filion, now at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, wrote a blog post about the articles. Filion and a colleague, Lucas Carey, of Peking University, had noticed a flurry of meta-analyses by researchers in China that had appeared in CISCOM, the articles repository for the Research Council for Complementary Medicine. As Filion wrote:
Continue reading ‘Beggers’ can’t be choosers as another meta-analysis is retracted
The case of Jonathan Pruitt, a spider researcher suspected of fabricating data in potentially dozens of studies, keeps getting weirder.
Pruitt, according to our count, now has six retractions. Currently associate professor and Canada 150 Research Chair at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he made a name for himself by providing other scientists with field data — much of which now appears to be unreliable.
Among the latest developments in the case is a correction in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for a 2016 article titled “Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment.” That followed this April expression of concern, which read:
Continue reading Spider researcher uses legal threats, public records requests to prevent retractions
A heart journal has issued an expression of concern about a 2017 paper which looks suspiciously like a 2016 article by some of the same researchers that appeared in an anesthesiology publication.
The 2017 paper, “Efficacy of prophylactic dexmedetomidine in preventing postoperative junctional ectopic tachycardia after pediatric cardiac surgery,” was written by a group led by Doaa Mohamed El Amrousy, of Tanta University Hospital in Egypt.
Several months earlier, El Amrousy and two of his co-authors, Nagat S. El-Shmaa and Wael El Feky, published a similar article in the Annals of Cardiac Anesthesia, titled “The efficacy of pre-emptive dexmedetomidine versus amiodarone in preventing postoperative junctional ectopic tachycardia in pediatric cardiac surgery.”
How similar? Apparently too much.
Continue reading Apparent duplication from anesthesiology journal puts heart paper into intensive care
A leading chemistry journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a pair of researchers in Switzerland after determining that it contained fabricated data.
The article, “The manganese(I)‐catalyzed asymmetric transfer hydrogenation of ketones: disclosing the macrocylic privilege,” was written by Alessandro Passera and Antonio Mezzetti, of the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. It appeared in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Readers might remember Angewandte Chemie from this post in June about a controversial article it published — and then removed — in the wake of a mass outcry that prompted much of its editorial board to resign and led to the suspension of two of its editors. Fallout from the scandal — in the form of “the journal’s interim Editor-in-Chief Committee” — is evident in the retraction notice, which reads:
Continue reading Top chemistry journal retracts paper for faked data
A homeopathy journal that Elsevier dropped in the wake of concerns about excessive self-citation appears to have carved out a new niche for itself: self-pity.
In 2016, Homeopathy lost its slot on Thomson Reuters’s (now Clarivate’s) influential journal rankings list after an analysis found that more than 70% of citations in the papers it published were of papers it published. That led Elsevier to cut the journal loose — although it remains in business under the umbrella of Thieme, and has since earned its impact factor back. (For more on why that’s important to journals, see this story.)
Part of Homeopathy’s mission under new ownership, it seems, is to criticize journals that have spurned its contributors. Well, one journal, anyway.
Continue reading Did a journal retract your paper on homeopathy? Meet the journal that will publish your complaint
This may be the scientific publishing version of “the operation was a success, but the patient died.”
The retraction of a Trojan horse paper on the novel coronavirus has called into question the validity of another article in the same journal which found that hydroxychloroquine is effective against Covid-19.
The sting article, “SARS-CoV-2 was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?” — was the brainchild of graduate student Mathieu Rebeaud, aka “Willard Oodendijk” and Florian Cova, of “The Institute for Quick and Dirty Science” (no, not really) in Switzerland. Their goal: to highlight a concerning paper in the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health, which they and others suspect of being a predatory publication — one that is happy to take money to publish anything, while pretending to perform peer review.
Continue reading Hydroxychloroquine, push-scooters, and COVID-19: A journal gets stung, and swiftly retractsBefore 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 31.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: The fate of fraudsters; TV doctors sting a predatory journal; best paper title ever?
At least seven years after questions were first raised about work by a researcher at the University of Maryland Baltimore, School of Medicine, he has agreed to a three-year ban on Federal funding.
Anil Jaiswal, whose first retraction appeared in 2013, faked data in eight NIH grant applications and six papers supported by Federal grants, according to a new finding by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Jaiswal, the ORI said,
Continue reading Former Maryland researcher banned from Federal funding for misconductintentionally, knowingly, or recklessly: (a) used random blank background sections of film or empty boxes to falsely represent or fabricate western blot analyses; (b) used manipulated images to generate and report falsified data in figures; and (c) used mislabeled images to falsely report data in figures.