When you think of valuable items to steal, you might imagine cash, cars, or jewelry. But what about journals?
That’s what my colleagues and I from Disseropedia, the journals project of Dissernet, which was created to fight plagiarism in Russia, recently found.
The story begins when my Dissernet colleague Andrei Rostovtsev discovered several cases of translation plagiarism and gifted co-authorship in the articles submitted to the journal Talent Development and Excellence by Russian scholars. Those cases are available atthesefourlinks.
The authors of a controversial paper on race and police shootings say they are retracting the article, which became a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, and now amid protests following the murder of George Floyd.
The 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.” It has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “hot paper” designation.
Joseph Cesario, a researcher at Michigan State University, told Retraction Watch that he and David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author, have submitted a request for retraction to PNAS. In the request, they write:
Zoologists are up in arms that a leading taxonomy journal is being called out for excessive self-citation and being denied an Impact Factor.
Last week, Clarivate announced that it was suppressing 33 journals from its Journal Citation Report, which would mean no Impact Factor for those journals, because of high levels of self-citation that distorted journal rankings. One of those journals was Zootaxa, which since 2015 has published more than a quarter of all newly described taxa in the literature.
Denying Zootaxa an Impact Factor — which is used, for better or for worse, by universities and other institutions to determine whether a journal is worthy of publishing in — is unfair and damages the field, taxonomists said this past week.
For example, Wayne Maddison, a professor of botany and zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, tweeted:
As promised, Biological Conservation has replaced a controversial paper on feral cats in China whose cringeworthy title — “Where there are girls, there are cats” — prompted an outcry on social media that resulted in a temporary retraction.
The retraction appears to be due to some kind of ethics breach, not the findings of the paper itself. It is unclear, however, what kind of ethics breach took place, and none of the authors has responded to requests for comment. The article’s URL in the journal doesn’t even show the abstract but at the time of this writing the full text is available (labeled as retracted) on PubMed.
Alison Avenell first came across The Yamaguchi Osteoporosis Study (YOPS) when she was working on a 2014 Cochrane Review on bone fractures.
She cited the study but felt something was off about it. “I suppose, together with my collaborators over the years, we developed sort of antennae for rather suspicious looking studies,” Avenell, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told Retraction Watch. “And when you see a relatively large trial with just two authors, you think to yourself, that’s not possible.”
Researchers compared Impaza with sildenafil (Viagra)
Over the objection of all of the authors, a journal has retracted an article on a homeopathic approach to penis enlargement and virility after deciding that the putative remedy wasn’t potent enough for the task at hand.
Among the authors of the article was Oleg Epstein, a Russian scientist whose company, OOO NPF Materia Medica Holding, of Moscow, makes homeopathic products. Epstein’s research has been the subject of multiple retractions, as we’ve reported, embarrassing reputable journals into whose pages he managed to publish papers on homeopathy.
Impaza, a name which sounds more like a Subaru than a sexual aid, purportedly:
For more than a decade, I have been working with colleagues to request retractions from editors and publishers for plagiarizing articles, mostly in my discipline of philosophy and related fields. But almost two years ago I requested a retraction from a seismology journal. Since I have no training in the science of earthquakes, how did I get involved?
In June 2017 I read an article on Retraction Watch, “Plagiarism costs author five papers in five different journals” involving a researcher in civil engineering. The unrelated subject matters represented by each of the journals surprised me, as they involved refugee studies, educational philosophy, disaster medicine, and life quality studies. These are important disciplines, but they are not obviously related to each other, nor to civil engineering.
A year later I wondered whether any more retractions had appeared for that same researcher, and I came across an unretracted 2011 article by that researcher in the journal Earthquake Science. After two minutes of online searching I discovered it was a near-identical copy of a 2002 article by different authors in the Elsevier journal Engineering Structures. My lack of training in seismology was not an impediment to making this determination; the only major differences between the two articles were the titles and the authors of record. (The detailed tables, figures, photos, data visualizations, and paragraphs were identical but for minor elements.)
