Congrats! Your paper was accepted. (Except if the acceptance letter was forged.)

Angela Cochran

You’ve worked hard on your research, spent time writing it up, and finally, the good news comes: The journal you submitted to has accepted your paper. Trouble is, for multiple authors, that good news turns bad — the acceptance was fake. Recently, in Scholarly Kitchen, Angela Cochran,  Associate Publisher, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), revealed a disturbing new trend in predatory publishing: Intermediaries who promise to help researchers get their findings published, but instead pocket the fees. We spoke with Cochran about her experience with this new type of forgery, and how she thinks publishers (and authors) can fight back.

Retraction Watch: It seems like a fairly elaborate ruse to get someone to believe a journal has accepted their paper when it hasn’t. How do you suspect the process works?  

Continue reading Congrats! Your paper was accepted. (Except if the acceptance letter was forged.)

Famous Harvard economist reused parts of 2002 paper multiple times, says journal

Michael Jensen

A former Harvard economist and co-founder of a massive repository of free papers in social sciences has been accused of reusing similar material over multiple papers.

The three papers share the same title. According to an investigation by one of the journals, two papers by Michael Jensen, now an emeritus faculty member at Harvard, are “close-to-identical,” while another includes a “substantial amount of overlapping content.” None of the three papers cite the others.

The journal, Business Ethics Quarterly, has added an editorial notice to a 2002 paper by Jensen, noting its similarity to a 2001 paper and another 2001 paper. The notice states an earlier version of the paper was published by Harvard Business School Press. The editor surmises that all three journals were “more or less simultaneously vetting versions of the Jensen article.”

Jensen is the co-founder of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a repository of more than 800,000 papers that has been named the “Number 1 Open Access Repository in the World.” SSRN was purchased by Elsevier in 2016.

We spoke with Jensen briefly by phone; he denied submitting the same paper to three journals simultaneously:

Continue reading Famous Harvard economist reused parts of 2002 paper multiple times, says journal

See a paper you like? PubPeer wants to help you create a “journal” around it

Not everyone is happy with journals these days — researchers in artificial intelligence have announced they were boycotting a new Nature journal for being subscription-only, and universities are cancelling subscriptions over fees. The founders of PubPeer — a site dedicated to commentary about already published papers — are trying a different approach. Today, the PubPeer Foundation launched a new site called Peeriodicals, on which users can curate published manuscripts they believe are important to the field, creating an online “journal.” Many users go on PubPeer to criticize articles — we spoke with founders Brandon Stell and Boris Barbour about whether they hope the new product will inspire users to leave more positive comments on the site.

Retraction Watch: How does the new site work? How can readers participate?

Continue reading See a paper you like? PubPeer wants to help you create a “journal” around it

Weekend reads: Ghostwritten thesis apps; discriminatory authorship rules; group up to 14 retractions

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction featured a paper by Kim Kardashian, four retractions for an author who lied about his identity, and a story about the “Journals Mafia” that we’re still not sure what to make of. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Ghostwritten thesis apps; discriminatory authorship rules; group up to 14 retractions

How much cancer stems from diabetes, obesity? Lancet journal swaps high-profile paper

Six months ago, the media was ablaze with the findings of a new paper, showing that nearly six percent of cancer cases are caused, at least in part, by obesity and diabetes. But this week, the journal retracted that paper — and replaced it with a revised version.

The new paper doesn’t change the main findings much — the share of all cancers attributable to diabetes and obesity changed from 5.6% to 5.7%, which wouldn’t change any headlines about the original paper. But soon after the paper was published, a group of researchers noticed the authors’ mistake — which was significant enough to prompt the journal to retract the paper entirely, and swap it with a new one.

According to first author Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard at Imperial College London:

Continue reading How much cancer stems from diabetes, obesity? Lancet journal swaps high-profile paper

Dental journal pulls a dozen papers for recycled images and “unreliable data”

A leading orthodontics journal has retracted 12 papers after determining that they contained either reused images, questionable data or both. Several of the articles involved experiments conducted in dogs — and one person familiar with the case told us that the duplication was an attempt to avoid sacrificing more animals than necessary for the research.  

Although the list of authors on the articles varies, the common denominator is Jose Luis Calvo-Guirado, of the UCAM Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, in Spain. Calvo-Guirado’s title at the institution is director de la Cátedra Internacional de Investigación en Odontología, which Google translates as director of the International Research Chair in Dentistry.  Calvo-Guirado also holds (or has held) a research professorship at SUNY Stony Brook in the Department of Prosthodontics and Digital Medicine, according to his CV.

Calvo-Guirado’s name is on at least 187 entries in PubMed. Of those, 40 appeared in Clinical Oral Implants Research, a Wiley title on whose editorial board the researcher served, according to his CV.  

Continue reading Dental journal pulls a dozen papers for recycled images and “unreliable data”

Want to earn $10k per month? Join the “journals mafia”

Is running a journal becoming too much of a drag? Just get help from a new organization that is trying to make an offer that journals can’t refuse.

On a website splashed with pictures that connote classic mob movies (Marlon Brando as The Godfather, Al Pacino, cigars), a new service called “Journals Mafia” tries to convince journals to partner with them, or even sell the publication outright.

The company appears to act as an intermediary between authors and journals — accepting articles, formatting and fixing the language, and submitting it to the journal. Since the authors pay to publish the articles, the company shares the profits with journals that publish the paper — anywhere from $1,000-$10,000 per month:

Continue reading Want to earn $10k per month? Join the “journals mafia”

Hey journals, it is possible to quickly correct the record

Even when a paper is obviously flawed, it can take years for journals to take action. Some never do. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

On April 27, a reader emailed the editors of two journals, noting that each had recently published a paper by the same group of authors that appeared strikingly similar.

Four days later, on May 1, a representative at Medicine, the journal that published the most recent version of the paper, wrote the reader back, saying the paper was going to be retracted.

Continue reading Hey journals, it is possible to quickly correct the record

Kim Kardashian pairs up with an MIT post-doc to publish a scientific paper

Tomáš Pluskal

Kim Kardashian is known for many accomplishments. But now she can add another to her resume: First author of a paper in the Drug Designing & Intellectual Properties International Journal. What can we say? It’s international, and it’s a journal. We talked to Tomáš Pluskal, a post-doc at MIT and the last author of the paper — the middle author is Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive “inventor of Bitcoin” — for the inside scoop.

Retraction Watch (RW): Our guess is that few scientists will have the opportunity to work with Kim Kardashian. How did you end up collaborating? Continue reading Kim Kardashian pairs up with an MIT post-doc to publish a scientific paper

Author who lied to journals about his identity slated to have four articles on vaccines retracted

An author who has published four articles about the alleged risks of vaccines — but who lied about his name and claimed an affiliation with the Karolinska Institutet — has lost one of the papers. He will also lose three more, Retraction Watch has learned.

Earlier this month, a paper in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics claiming that the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine is linked to a higher rate of cervical cancer — the very disease it is intended to prevent — by “Lars Andersson” sparked a bit of a firestorm when a Swedish newspaper reported that Andersson was not who he said he was. The journal responded by adding a line to the paper — first published on April 30 of this year — about the subterfuge, and with an editorial about the issues the incident raised, but leaving the paper intact.

Yesterday, the journal retracted the paper, “Increased incidence of cervical cancer in Sweden: Possible link with HPV vaccination,” writing that Continue reading Author who lied to journals about his identity slated to have four articles on vaccines retracted