Not long ago, it came to my attention that a 2016 paper by my students and me, “Measuring Semantic Similarity Of Words Using Concept Networks,” had been plagiarized, verbatim. The offenders had added two words to the title, which now read: “A Novel Methodology For Measuring Semantic Similarity Of Words Using Concept Networks.” Their article … Continue reading ‘The sincerest form of flattery’: How a math professor discovered his work had been plagiarized
You can love math, but can you math love? Scientific Reports has retracted a 2023 paper that tried to do just that by imposing a numerical model onto an ancient Persian love story that may have influenced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The paper, “A fractional order nonlinear model of the love story of Layla and … Continue reading ‘Nonsensical content’: Springer Nature journal breaks up with a paper on a love story
Elsevier’s Scopus database has paused indexing content from Sustainability, an MDPI journal, while it reevaluates whether to include the title, Retraction Watch has learned. Please see an update on this post. Other MDPI titles were reevaluated in 2023, and its mathematics journal Axioms is no longer included in Scopus’ nearly 30,000 titles. Clarivate also delisted … Continue reading Exclusive: MDPI journal undergoing reevaluation at Scopus, indexing on hold
The editor in chief, managing editors, and entire editorial board of a mathematics journal all resigned earlier this year following a dispute with their publisher over special issues and article volume. Changes the publisher wanted to make to the journal “would have the effect of jeopardizing scientific integrity for the sake of financial gain,” the … Continue reading After resigning en masse, math journal editors launch new publication
In 2023 alone, editors of eight journals on topics ranging from mathematics to biogeography all quit at once because of disputes with their publishing companies. Mass resignations of editors from scholarly journals aren’t new – the Open Access Directory has a list of some such actions going back to 1989. But the frequency appears to … Continue reading The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List
In June 2021, Espen Flo Bødal began to believe that a paper he’d co-authored had been stolen. The news came via a ResearchGate alert that the Norwegian researcher’s work had been cited, according to the publication Universitets (article in Norwegian). When Bødal checked the alert, he saw that part of his doctoral thesis had been … Continue reading Norway demotes Hindawi journal after claims one published a stolen paper
Twenty-four years after submitting a manuscript on quantum algebra to the preprint server arXiv, a mathematician has now withdrawn it. Boris Shoikhet, then of the Independent University of Moscow, posted “Lifting formulas, Moyal product, and Feigin spectral sequence,” to arXiv on Oct. 28, 1998, proposing new conjectures in the field of quantum algebra. Last month, … Continue reading Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission
A mathematician has requested the retraction of two recently published articles “claiming proofs of big results in number theory,” as one observer put it. After publication, the author said he “found some subtle inaccuracies” in the work. The editor-in-chief of the mathematics journal Studia Logica, where the papers were published, posted a notice to the … Continue reading Mathematician requests two retractions for “subtle inaccuracies”
Following a Retraction Watch story about a 2004 paper that had been copied twice since its publication, one of the journals involved has taken down its version of the article. Last month, we reported that an undergraduate student researching her thesis had found two papers that copied material from “Models of the medical consultation: opportunities … Continue reading “A huge relief”: Journal takes down plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch reporting
An Elsevier journal has retracted 47 papers that an accomplished sleuth says appear to have been generated by a paper mill. The articles, by researchers from countries including China, Kazakhstan and Russia appeared in Thinking Skills and Creativity. Here’s a sample notice, for a paper titled “Steal like an artist: Connection between critical thinking and … Continue reading Elsevier journal retracts nearly 50 papers because they were each accepted on the “positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report”