It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year: Figure 5: There is an overlap between two … Continue reading Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction
Finding papers produced by paper mills has become a major headache for many of the world’s largest publishers over the past year, and they’re largely playing catch-up since sleuths began identifying them a few years ago. But there may be a new way: Earlier this month, Adam Day, a data scientist at SAGE Publishing, posted … Continue reading How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments
The head of a Japanese university has been found guilty of research misconduct for self-plagiarism – technically, duplication – and has agreed to pay a one-time cash penalty for his transgressions. According to the University of Aizu, a computer science and engineering school in Aizuwakamatsu, Toshiaki Miyazaki, the president and CEO, failed to appropriately cite … Continue reading University president in Japan self-plagiarized and will forfeit some pay
The editor of a Science family journal waited three years before beginning the process of retracting a paper after learning that the University of Wisconsin at Madison had found duplication and mislabeling but no misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned. As we reported last November, the paper, “The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL mediates nuclear translocation of … Continue reading ‘My egregious delay’: Science journal takes more than three years to retract paper after university investigation
The ‘publish or perish’ culture is no longer reserved for academic faculty and post-doctoral fellows. The paradigm has spilled over (or bled into) medical training, aided by the digital revolution. The widespread availability of online library catalogs and referencing software has enabled the mass production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. In short, medical research no … Continue reading Should residents and fellows be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses?
Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style. Last May, the journal Cureus published a paper titled “Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia Due to Homozygous Loss of the CD4 Start Codon.” The paper caught the notice of Andrea … Continue reading ‘A clusterf**K’: Authors plagiarize material from NIH and elsewhere, make legal threats — then see their paper retracted
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year. We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American … Continue reading IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries
The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work. The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming … Continue reading Lancet retracts 10-year-old case report
An Elsevier journal has corrected a retraction notice after we asked questions about what exactly it was saying — but not before the journal’s editor tried to defend what turned out to be a mistaken passage. The article, “Measurement of performance parameters and improvement in optimized solution of WEDM on a novel titanium hybrid composite,” … Continue reading Elsevier corrects a retraction notice following questions from Retraction Watch
The publisher SAGE is in the process of retracting more than 30 papers across three of its journals after determining that they were churned out by paper mills — prompting the company to take a closer look at its policies and procedures. The suspect papers were initially flagged by Elisabeth Bik and others as part … Continue reading Publisher retracting more than 30 articles from paper mills