The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research. The ludicrous phrase … Continue reading As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use
Sage has retracted 416 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems (JIFS), which had a mass retraction of over 450 papers last August. Before the mass retraction last year, which we covered, Sage paused publication of new articles from the journal, which it acquired when it bought IOS Press in 2023. The journal … Continue reading Sage journal retracts another 400 papers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers retracted 57 articles on October 1 for inadequate peer review, according to the publisher. The papers appeared in the journal IEEE Access between July and September of 2020. The journal is open-access, with a current article processing charge of $1,995. It appears to have published more than 10,000 … Continue reading Engineering publisher pulled 57 papers in a day for peer review ‘irregularities’
Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, has retracted an article a group of sleuths described as “a kind of case study of all the red flags for fraud that we look for” in an open letter to the publisher’s head of research integrity. The article, “Hybrid CNN-LSTM model with efficient hyperparameter tuning for prediction of … Continue reading ‘All the red flags’: Scientific Reports retracts paper sleuths called out in open letter
Optical and Quantum Electronics, a Springer Nature journal, has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse. According to the notices, which have similar wording, the retractions come after the publisher identified problems with the articles including compromised peer review, inappropriate or irrelevant references, and nonsensical … Continue reading Springer Nature journal has retracted over 200 papers since September
Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. So he took to PubPeer, an online site where scientists often discuss papers, to raise his concerns. An author of the study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure … Continue reading ‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers
Sage has retracted 467 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, a title it took on when it acquired IOS Press last November for an undisclosed sum. The publisher “launched a thorough investigation” into the journal in April, according to a spokesperson, after the indexing company Clarivate “informed us about concerns relating to … Continue reading Exclusive: Publisher retracts more than 450 papers from journal it acquired last year
A journal that lost its impact factor in June is in the midst of a cleanup operation, issuing nearly 140 retractions so far this year. The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI … Continue reading Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting
The dean of science at the University of Sydney is reassessing a series of review papers after commenters on PubPeer pointed out each cited several retracted articles, Retraction Watch has learned. Marcel Dinger and his coauthors will submit addendums to the journals noting the retracted references, he told Retraction Watch, and work with editors to … Continue reading University of Sydney dean working to amend review papers that cited papermill articles
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