Retraction Watch

Exclusive: Mayo, Florida profs among authors of article tied to Indian paper mill

Two assistant professors at universities in the United States are coauthors of a review that appears to have been advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon, a Retraction Watch investigation has found.

One of the professors, Yuguang Liu of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., is also guest editor of the MDPI special issue in the journal Biosensors in which the review was published last year. The other professor, Ajeet Kaushik of Florida Polytechnic University, in Lakeland, sits on the editorial boards of Biosensors and several other titles from MDPI, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature and other publishers.

An MDPI representative said Liu, who declined an interview request, had not been involved in editorial decisions regarding the paper. Meanwhile, Kaushik acknowledged his work on the article had sprung from a LinkedIn message from a researcher in India who, as we reported last week, has been offering co-authorship in return for help getting his articles published.

“This is sad,” Kaushik told us by email, adding that he had not seen “any red flags” when he agreed to collaborate on the review.

Sociology journal’s entire editorial board resigns after Springer Nature appointed new leadership

The entire editorial board of a sociology journal has resigned after they say that the publisher, Springer Nature, installed new editors-in-chief without consulting the board — but Springer Nature says they tried unsuccessfully to engage the board on planning going back at least five years.

In December 2023, senior editors of the journal, Theory and Society, learned Springer Nature “had opted for a ‘completely different view’ of the journal going forward,” according to a message shared on a listserv for the American Sociological Association and published on the blog Scatterplot. The 10 senior editors subsequently resigned, they told their colleagues, but didn’t offer additional details.

On January 4, the journal’s corresponding editors also resigned, according to a resignation letter shared with the sociology listserv. The corresponding editors cited Springer Nature’s decision to replace Janet Gouldner, the former executive editor (and widow of the journal’s founding editor, Alvin Gouldner), without consulting the rest of the editorial board. They wrote:

Wiley reopens plagiarism case about dead researcher’s work

Zulfiqar Habib, dean of computer science at COMSATS University Islamabad, in Pakistan, was appalled when he discovered part of a former PhD student’s dissertation had been published in a scientific journal.

After all, the former student, Kurshid Asghar, had been dead for more than a year by the time the manuscript was submitted to Security and Communication Networks, a Hindawi title. And Habib knew none of Asghar’s coauthors had contributed to the research, which Habib had supervised.

“It was both shocking and unbelievable,” he told Retraction Watch.

Weekend reads: Paper mills bribe editors; Dana-Farber researchers to retract paper; ‘The Next Battle in Higher Ed’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to nearly 400. There are more than 46,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Gift authorship common in psychology, survey suggests

New findings from a survey of psychology researchers show nearly half of the respondents have encountered unethical authorship practices in studies they have been involved in.

Researchers in Belgium surveyed more than 800 people involved in psychological research about their experiences with gift and ghost authorship, as well as the use of explicit authorship guidelines at their institutions.

Almost half said they had witnessed gift authorship on more than one occasion – in other words, the respondents saw someone listed as an author when they had made little or no contribution to a paper. Ghost authorship – excluding someone from a paper when they have made a significant contribution – was far less common, with fewer than one in five of the respondents reporting that they had dealt with the phenomenon. Since the authors used a convenience sample, the data show signs of authorship misconduct in psychology, but don’t tell the whole story.

Exclusive: Paper-mill articles buoyed Spanish dean’s research output

Last year, a professor and dean at a university in Spain suddenly began publishing papers with a multitude of far-flung researchers. His coauthors, until then exclusively national, now came from places like India, China, Nepal, South Korea, Georgia, Austria, and the United States.

How these unlikely collaborations began is not entirely clear. But a six-month Retraction Watch investigation, part of which is published here as a companion piece to a longer article appearing today in Science, suggests an unsavory possibility: The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of the faculty of health sciences at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, bought his way onto the papers – something he partly admits.

At least six of the seven journal articles Lorenzo published last year had been previously advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon. Based in Chennai, this underhand operation sells authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals,” according to a WhatsApp message its scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, sent to prospective clients last summer. Ranganathan also claimed to have connections at journals that allowed him, in many cases, to guarantee acceptance of the manuscripts he would send their way.

The Singapore Sting: Why an activist published a fake paper on ‘LGBTQ+ child acceptance’

Last spring, the Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science published a provocative paper stating that left-handed mothers in Singapore treat their LGBTQ+ children better than do right-handed moms.

Except the paper, “Left-Handed Mothers and LGBTQ+ Child Acceptance in Singapore: Exploring the Link through Early Life Rejection,” was fake, a sting, designed to cast shade on anti-gay science proliferating in Singapore.

The data were fabricated, and so were the authors, Jin Rabak and Hen Guai Lan. Their purported employer, Simisai University? A bogus institution with a name concocted for laughs: in Singaporean English, “simisai” means “what the shit.”

A publisher makes an error in a publication about errors

Jennifer Byrne

Publishing a research paper is usually cause for celebration, after what is typically years of effort. Our recent paper in which we found that unexpectedly high proportions of papers in two journals described at least one wrongly identified reagent should have been no exception.

But alas. Any of our celebrations have been tempered by Springer Nature’s bizarre introduction of an unrelated figure into the paper. Here’s what has happened so far.

Publisher parts ways with editor of five journals who published his own studies on Islamic practices

Ten days after retracting nine papers from several journals because they were “lacking scientific base,” a publisher says it has “parted company” with the editor of five of the titles – who had authored or co-authored the papers in question.

As Retraction Watch reported last week, Thieme International retracted the papers, by Hüseyin Çaksen of Necmettin Erbakan University in Turkey, following criticism on social media and at least one story in the Turkish press. Yesterday, a Thieme account on X (formerly Twitter) posted:

‘Nonsensical content’: Springer Nature journal breaks up with a paper on a love story

You can love math, but can you math love?

Scientific Reports has retracted a 2023 paper that tried to do just that by imposing a numerical model onto an ancient Persian love story that may have influenced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The paper, “A fractional order nonlinear model of the love story of Layla and Majnun,” was written by Zulqurnain Sabir and Salem Ben Said, both mathematicians at United Arab Emirates University. The article has been cited three times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the abstract:

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