A public health journal intends to retract an article that estimated how many unintentional pesticide poisonings happen each year worldwide, Retraction Watch has learned.
In response, the authors hired a lawyer to represent them in contesting the retraction, and maintain the journal’s decision “undermines the integrity of the scientific process.” This is the second time within a few months that the journal retracted an article through a process authors said was problematic.
Around Christmas last year, Preston Sowell received an unpleasant delivery.
An archaeologist who knew about Sowell’s work in southeastern Peru sent him a paper about new findings in a particular part of the country Sowell, an independent environmental scientist, was familiar with. The paper, written by several of Sowell’s former colleagues, contained a “shocking” surprise.
“I almost immediately recognized there were errors in the paper,” Sowell said. “I recognised, literally with my first read, some of those artifacts.”
A large U.S. university press has stopped selling two scholarly books about the philosophers Slavoj Žižek and John Venn due to problems with how the authors cited – or didn’t cite – source material.
In both cases, the University of Chicago Press stated on its website that the titles, released in 2023 and 2022, respectively, were “no longer available for sale.” But only “John Venn: A Life in Logic” by Lukas M. Verburgt was “retracted,” according to the publisher.
“The publisher has given me the opportunity to correct the book and resubmit it for review,” said Eliran Bar-El, a sociologist at the University of York, in England. “In light of it being an ongoing process, I cannot provide further details until there is a review outcome, which will be reflected appropriately in my publication list. At this time, I would like to genuinely thank the observant readers who have brought this to my attention.”
A year after the authors of two papers contacted the marketing journal where they had been published requesting retraction, the journal has pulled one, but decided to issue a correction for the other.
The authors had asked to retract the papers in October 2022 after other researchers found inconsistencies in the statistical calculations of the “Super Size Me” paper and could not replicate the results. The article had been cited nearly 200 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. It attracted attention from The New York Times and NPR, among other outlets, which linked the findings to the rise in obesity in the United States. An analyst also found issues in the 2016 paper, which has been cited 71 times.
When we published our previous story, Carolyn Yoon, the chair of the journal’s policy board and a professor of management and marketing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, told us the board was still waiting on a report from the special committee investigating the matter. “We hope to have a decision by the end of this month,” she said in April 2023.
A business school in Pakistan has fired a marketing professor after finding he had “damaged the repute” of the university and its scholarly journal, Retraction Watch has learned.
In a LinkedIn post, Muhammad Mohsin Butt, the now-fired professor, shared a picture of the table of contents of a 2015 issue of Business Review, published by the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), in Karachi. The contents listed seven case studies authored by two other professors at the school:
A radiology professor in France who plagiarized others’ work in a review article has resigned from his role as deputy editor of a medical journal amid new concerns about his publications, Retraction Watch has learned.
The professor, Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne, was first and corresponding author of the offending review, which included large amounts of text from two earlier papers without appropriate citation, as we reported last month.
When confronted with evidence of the plagiarism, Loffroy put the blame on an alleged undisclosed ghostwriter, then proceeded to tone down the offense, saying he wouldn’t mind it if his own work had been plagiarized.
Sampen, also a research professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said that “any errors that occurred involved discrete erroneously-placed figures or images” that “in no way undermine our basic conclusions and findings.”
Calling the episode a “long and hard battle for me,” Sampen sent us these comments:
A researcher who sued the publisher PLOS to prevent it from posting an expression of concern for one of her papers has dropped her suit, and the publisher tells us it will add a correction to the article instead – but may “revisit this case” to deal with “unresolved issues.”
We’ve previously reported on the lawsuit Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., filed against PLOS in April, as well as signs of a pending settlement.
According to an order filed November 2, Singh informed the court that she “voluntarily dismisses” the claims in her complaint, without the possibility of re-filing them, and the judge dismissed the case.
