An Indian paper mill featuring prominently in our recent investigation in Science and a companion piece on our website shut down its WhatsApp community six days after the stories ran, Retraction Watch has learned.
The company, called iTrilon, used the messaging platform to hawk authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals.” It claimed to have connections at journals that allowed the mill to guarantee acceptance of most of its papers.
But on January 24, Sarath Ranganathan, iTrilon’s scientific director, deactivated the WhatsApp community he had been curating.
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 was published in the journal Webology, which has been delisted from Scopus, Elsevier’s abstract and citation database. My first impulse was to ignore the transgression, but I asked the question what to do on a closed mailing list read by former colleagues:
I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I’m sufficiently flattered, and I know that even a Harvard President was let go for lesser forms of plagiarism, but Integral University of Lucknow is not exactly Harvard. We may already live in a post-truth world (if Trump gets reelected it’s proof positive that we do) and I don’t quite have it in me to destroy the futures of some random students (or perhaps faculty?) in India. The online journal where it appeared is published in Teheran, and does not appear on Beall’s list of predatory journals. What to do?
The responses ran 10-0 in favor of doing something. Here is a typical one:
A journal and publisher have retracted three papers about abortion, including one that has been used in court cases to support the suspension of FDA approval for mifepristone, aka an “abortion pill.”
For one of those articles, initially flagged by a reader, “an independent reviewer with expertise in statistical analyses evaluated the concerns and opined that the article’s presentation of the data in Figures 2 and 3 leads to an inaccurate conclusion and that the composition of the cohort studied has problems that could affect the article’s conclusions,” according to the notice.
Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place.
The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.
“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of harming his career. (His identity is known to Retraction Watch.)
In a recent Science editorial, Barbara Redman and our Ivan Oransky called for a boost to the budget and authority of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). In this letter, a nephrologist and researcher suggests one potential way to fight fraud.
Bravo on your editorial, which pointed out the pathetic funding level for an agency that is supposed to put a check on self-interested fabrication and distortion in scientific research. Perhaps universities and influential individuals who feel the threat of censure have collaborated to minimize that risk by throttling the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Regardless, billions of dollars each year are probably lost in misdirected efforts based on false information. That is a national tragedy.
During the time I was an undergraduate at Caltech we had an honor code that was very clear: You cheat, lie or fabricate and you are at best heavily censured, and likely out. We learned that one’s research notes were our reputation, and that our supervising senior researchers would often and unpredictably ask to review them. It was daunting and occasionally very stressful, but led to a lifelong ethic that stood me in good stead when I went into medicine, where peoples’ lives were at stake based on what we wrote and did.
In October, a South African political scientist published a book on how scholars in Africa can improve their standing in the larger academic world. Three months later, after heated emails from several sources alleging ethics breaches, the publisher retracted the book.
The retraction notice, posted Jan. 12, 2024, states that UJ Press retracted and removed the book from its catalog “due to concerns arising from the publication.” Publisher Wilkus van Zyl told us the press had asked the peer reviewers of the manuscript to re-examine the volume with an additional set of questions after they received emails questioning the work’s legitimacy. The reviewers determined the book lacked scholarly rigor and contained “inappropriate criticisms that appear to be based on personal grievances rather than legitimate scholarly discourse.”
The retraction is the latest bout in a years-long quarrel between two feuding academics. Kgothatso Shai is a professor at the University of Limpopo, who writes about African politics and international relations. Several chapters of his book, “An Afrocentric Idea on Contested Knowledge: Selected Cases,” critiqued Facebook posts from Shepherd Mpofu, a media studies professor at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Over the last few years, Mpofu has routinely criticized Shai’s works as “pathetic scholarship” in Facebook posts seen by Retraction Watch.
A year after writing an article about a movement in South Korea to hold clergymembers accountable for sexual abuse, a theology professor has asked for the paper to be retracted after acknowledging “citation irregularities” in the work. The specific problems remain unclear.
The paper’s retraction notice, dated December 21, 2023, states that the editors of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics supported the request to pull the article. Asked for more details about which “irregularities” or other factors might have contributed to the retraction, Maria Teresa Dávila, one of the journal’s editors and an associate professor of religious studies at Merrimack College, in North Andover, Massachusetts, confirmed the retraction and referenced the society’s publishing guidelines and ethics statement, but did not highlight specific passages that would pertain to this specific case. She also refused to answer further questions about the retraction.
Nearly two years after being warned one of its journals appeared to be the target of a paper mill operation, Taylor & Francis has retracted 80 articles that appeared in that journal.
Last June, Undark and Retraction Watch reported on the efforts of a sleuth using the name Aishwarya Swaminathan to alert Taylor & Francis and other publishers starting in April 2022 that a data scientist named Gunasekaran Manogaran allegedly runs “a research paper publishing scam” that targets special issues. Such issues appear to be particularly vulnerable to paper mills.
Another sleuth, Nick Wise, also worked to suss out the problems, and El Pais reported on the links between Manogaran and a professor in Spain in October.
Now, Acta Agriculturae Scandinavica, Section B — Soil & Plant Science has retracted 80 papers, all with a notice that specifies the name of the relevant special issue:
Nearly three years after a university investigation committee recommended retracting several papers by a cancer researcher found guilty of research misconduct, the journal Cancer Research has pulled three of the offending articles.
The journal also retracted a fourth paper by the researcher, Samson Jacob, a former emeritus professor at The Ohio State University, which had been flagged on PubPeer.
In 2021, the OSU committee reviewed dozens of allegations against Jacob’s work, and found 14 of them met at least one of two evidence standards for research misconduct, as we reported in 2022. The allegations mainly centered on figures that appeared to be spliced together from different experimental runs, which was not acknowledged in the studies – a concern the new retraction notices also mention.
