A journal has republished an edited version of a paper it retracted after a distributor of a chiropractic product the paper criticized wrote in to complain.
The distributor accused the publication of making “very serious, incorrect and libelous statements” and threatened legal action, Retraction Watch has learned.
Continue reading Journal republishes chiropractic paper it had retracted after legal threats
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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 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 you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
Continue reading Weekend reads: Happy birthday, Retraction Watch!; a mysterious conference; extreme publishing; research parasites revisited
We know we say this every year, but the last 12 months have been big ones for Retraction Watch as we celebrate our 14th birthday on August 3. We’ve continued breaking big stories and maintaining The Retraction Watch Database – while also taking big steps toward financial sustainability.
In September, we announced that the Database – which as of today contains more than 50,000 retractions – became completely open with its acquisition by Crossref. The move also allowed us to hire Gordon Sullivan, another staff member who works on the Database, and covers the costs of maintaining the Database 100% for at least five years.
We hope regular readers by now have noticed the site runs faster, with no downtime. That’s thanks to the volunteer efforts of Michael Dayah and Karl Lehenbauer, who over the past year or so have pitched in to help us with back-end platform and software issues. We can’t thank them enough for their ongoing support.
Some other highlights:
Continue reading Happy 14th birthday, Retraction Watch – and what a year it wasAn article about the overuse of spinal imaging has been retracted after the distributor of a chiropractic product it criticized in passing complained to the journal.
The paper, “An investigation into the chiropractic practice and communication of routine repetitive radiographic imaging for the location of postural misalignments,” was retracted in June from the Journal of Clinical Imaging Science after the editor-in-chief learned it contained “controversial statements regarding the commercial product Denneroll,” according to the statement.
Denneroll is a line of support products that purports to help with “spinal remodeling” for people whose spines aren’t curved in the normal way, according to a company brochure. The company’s website states that the Denneroll products are “second to none in spinal orthotics.”
The retraction notice said Deed Harrison, a chiropractor whose family distributes the Denneroll product line, “claimed that the data presented against this product lacks scientific backing.” Harrison’s father, Donald Harrison, originated a technique called Chiropractic BioPhysics (CBP) which is the basis of the Denneroll product line, according to the CBP website.
Continue reading Journal retracts paper on chiropractic product after distributor complains
In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief.
Eleven years later, one of the bunch, “Inflammatory Bowel Disease as a Risk Factor for Colorectal Cancer,” has been retracted.
The decision took “a ridiculously long time,” Bik said. “Perhaps they forgot to act, perhaps they lost my email, perhaps they thought it was too much trouble to check, or perhaps they were not sure what to do back in 2013, when I contacted them.”
Continue reading Cancer paper retracted 11 years after reported plagiarism
What do fairytales and scientific papers have in common? Consider the story of Rumpelstiltskin.
A poor miller tries to impress the king by claiming his daughter can spin straw into gold. The avaricious king locks up the girl and tells her to spin out the gold. She fails, until a goblin, Rumpelstiltskin, comes to her rescue.
In science, publishers and editors of academic journals prefer to publish demonstrably new findings – gold – rather than replications or refutations of findings which have been published already. This “novelty pressure” requires presentation of results that are “significant” – usually that includes being “statistically significant.”
Continue reading Science and the significant trend towards spin and fairytalesWould 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 50,000 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 you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
Continue reading Weekend reads: Attending a predatory conference; zombie theories; difficult authors
A group of researchers in Iran now have had more than 60 papers retracted for concerns about peer review and plagiarism as a publisher investigates its back catalog. One of the researchers, A. Salar Elahi, now ranks 7th on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.
Previously, Elsevier said they would retract 26 papers from the research group at Islamic Azad University in Tehran for fake reviews in 2017 and 2018. The latest batch of 33 retracted papers originally appeared in Springer Nature’s Journal of Fusion Energy as far back as 2009.
Tim Kersjes, head of research integrity at Springer Nature told us in addition to investigating specific concerns as they arise, his unit also is running “ongoing deep-dive investigations to assess published content that has connections with content that has already been retracted for integrity concerns by ourselves or other publishers.” The recent retractions came from such an investigation that is ongoing, he said.
Continue reading Authors up past 60 retractions amid ongoing investigation
In June, a scientist researching sarcopenia came across a relevant paper about treatment for elderly patients with complications from the disease as well as type 2 diabetes. The paper was “very bad,” he told us. “It looked like someone just copied two or three times the same text.”
The scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, became even more concerned when he realized the paper, which had the word “elderly” in its title, had been published in a pediatric journal.
“I started reading other issues of the same journal and noticed that this is a widespread problem: Chinese papers about older adults being published in pediatric journals!” he said.
Continue reading ‘A proper editor would be horrified’: Why did a pediatric journal publish articles on the elderly?
A political scientist in Canada copied his postdoc’s work without credit in a paper, according to the retraction notice and a university inquiry report.
The paper by Charles Conteh, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, appeared in Sage’s Outlook on Agriculture in October 2023. It has one citation, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
An inquiry by Brock identified plagiarism and uncredited authorship in the article, according to the report finalized this March and seen by Retraction Watch. Failure to give post-doctoral fellows the “opportunity to publish in peer-reviewed journals negatively impacts [them] both reputationally and financially,” the report states.
Continue reading Exclusive: Prof plagiarized postdoc’s work in now-retracted paper, university found