In 2019, Filippo Berto was hailed as Norway’s most productive researcher, publishing a new study on average every two to three days. Five years on, a committee appointed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where Berto, a mechanical engineer, was based until last year, is recommending that the institution carries out an … Continue reading Norway university committee recommends probe into the country’s most productive researcher
An Elsevier chemistry journal has marked more than 60 papers with expressions of concern amid an investigation involving potential undisclosed conflicts of interest among editors, authorship irregularities and manipulation of peer reviews and citations. One of the notices, published online April 11 in Chemosphere, reads, for example:
An Elsevier journal last week retracted a paper by two senior economists who used questionable methods to replace large chunks of missing observations in their dataset without disclosing the procedure. The move follows a Retraction Watch story published in February that revealed the paper’s corresponding author, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University in Sweden, used Excel’s … Continue reading Journal pulls paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering
Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? The week at Retraction Watch featured: Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 48,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have … Continue reading Weekend reads: Medical residents’ publish or perish problem; Alzheimer’s and predatory journals; brain biopsies set off alarm bells
A study purportedly of scars left by caesarean sections included women yet to undergo the surgery, say sleuths. But an investigation into the research by the author’s employer and the journal that published it found no evidence of research misconduct. The paper, published in Wiley journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, was flagged on PubPeer … Continue reading A study of C-section scars – in women who hadn’t undergone the surgery
Here’s a tale of a paper retracted because other articles published years later seemed to plagiarize it – and its unhappy authors, whose behavior the journal says hints at paper mill activity. On January 16 of this year, Maria Zalm, a senior editor at PLOS ONE and team manager for publication ethics, asked the authors … Continue reading Send lawyers, Einstein and Maugham: Authors object to PLOS ONE retraction
A professor of aerospace engineering in India who developed a scientific theory critics call “absolute nonsense” said he is suing journal editors and publishers for pulling three papers he claims could help protect “millions of lives.” The articles, one in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports and two in Wiley’s Global Challenges, described a highly technical concept … Continue reading Controversial rocket scientist in India threatens legal action after journals pull papers
Sometime last summer, Ben Mol, an obstetrician-gynecology researcher in Australia, and his colleagues were adapting a European guideline on unexplained infertility when they came across a 2006 paper from Maria Luisa Casini, a pharmacologist in Rome, that gave them pause because of results that were not statistically significant. When they looked further, they ended in … Continue reading High-profile ob-gyn accused of duplicating data threatens to sue critic
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2008 paper suggesting artificial sweetener Splenda could disrupt the gut microbiome and cause other havoc with the gastrointestinal system – and which is cited by a paper at the center of a lawsuit against one of its authors by the maker of the sugar substitute. … Continue reading Paper cited by article at center of lawsuit for criticizing Splenda earns an expression of concern
Retraction Watch readers have likely heard about papers showing evidence that they were written by ChatGPT, including one that went viral. We and others have reported on the phenomenon. Here’s a list — relying on a search strategy developed by Guillaume Cabanac, who has been posting the results on PubPeer — of such papers that … Continue reading Papers and peer reviews with evidence of ChatGPT writing