Retraction Watch

A closer look at the ‘chocolate with high cocoa content’ hoax

We are pleased to present an excerpt from The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing by Amy Koerber, Jesse C. Starkey, Karin Ardon-Dryer, R. Glenn Cummins, Lyombe Eko, and Kerk F. Kee, published by Open Book Publishers, October 2023.

In 2015, Johannes Bohannon, along with three coauthors, published an article titled ‘Chocolate with High Cocoa Content as a Weight Loss Accelerator’ in the International Archives of Medicine. The article reported results from a study that divided participants into three groups, with a different diet assigned to each group, and concluded that ‘Subjects of the chocolate intervention group experienced the easiest and most successful weight loss’ (p. 1).

In a personal account published later, journalist John Bohannon described the article as an intentional hoax that he and his coauthors had carried out in response to a request from a German film crew who was making a documentary on the ‘junk-science diet industry.’ To implement the hoax, Bohannon and his coauthors created an ‘Institute of Diet and Health’ that existed only as a website, and he assumed the name ‘Johannes Bohannon’ as lead author of the study. As he explained, the research reported in the article was actually conducted, but it was “terrible science,” including major flaws that would have been detected if the article had undergone a legitimate peer-review process.

Bohannon and his colleagues’ ‘Chocolate with High Cocoa Content’ article was retracted shortly after it was published, and the editors of International Archives of Medicine published a retraction notice dated 10 June 2015 (Editorial Office 2015). The editors’ decision to retract this article ostensibly served to correct the scientific record and prevent the erroneous data reported in the published study from being circulated in subsequent literature. This manner of correcting the scientific record is an important purpose of retractions, as defined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):

Publisher error claims joke paper, April Fools’ tradition – three years later

A journal says a content management mishap led to the publication, and subsequent retraction, of a gag essay not intended for wide distribution.

Why the retraction happened three and a half years after the paper’s publication remains murky.

This story belongs to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, back when Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics, a Wiley title, used to gather spoof papers for its annual April Fools edition.

As Kristofer Barr, an assistant research integrity auditor at Wiley, told us:

Weekend reads: More ‘duplicative language’ in Harvard president’s work; Peru cracks down on misconduct; prison for Macchiarini

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to over 375. There are more than 45,000 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):

Journals going rogue, authors beware

Pleading emails requesting papers are regular visitors to one’s inbox. These unsolicited and flattering requests promise rapid publication and tempt authors to part with their work. Even master’s and doctoral students, after graduation, receive sweet-talking requests to publish their dissertations as a book, a book chapter, or as a paper. Predatory journals and publishers are easy to spot and ignore at these low ends.

The danger lies with well-established and efficient predatory publishers. These ‘efficient’ publishers hide in the open on allowlists, such as South Africa’s Department of Higher Education and Training (DHETs) list of approved journals, and reputable indices such as Scopus and the WoS. They embellish their websites with claims of peer review and even state that they comply with requirements set by the Committee on Publication Ethics. Their websites tick all the boxes, providing a strong veneer of an authentic scholarly journal.

One of my colleagues alerted me to a suspected predatory publisher. I looked into the case and thought it sensible to share my results, with the hope of sensitising postgraduate students and fellow authors.

Exclusive: Researcher outs Indian university’s publishing scam after it fails to pay him

On March 12, a senior administrator at a university in India sent a business proposal to a prolific economist in Ethiopia. If he joined the school’s stable of adjunct professors, the administrator promised, easy money could be made.

All the economist had to do was “add our affiliation for incentives in your papers,” explained Lakshmi Thangavelu, dean of international affairs at Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences (SIMATS), in Chennai, in a written exchange.

“Surely I will do that. Not a big deal,” replied Mohd Asif Shah, an associate professor at Kebri Dehar University, in eastern Ethiopia.

But the deal turned sour. Although Shah listed SIMATS as an affiliation on at least two research papers he published this fall, in December he still hadn’t received any payments from the school, he complained. Then he turned to LinkedIn to share his frustration in a post that included screenshots of his conversation with Thangavelu, who is also a professor at Saveetha Dental College, part of SIMATS.

What analyzing 30 years of US federal research misconduct sanctions revealed

A U.S. federal agency that oversees research misconduct investigations and issues sanctions appears to be doling out punishments fairly, according to researchers who analyzed summaries of the agency’s cases from the last three decades.

But the authors of the study also found more than 30 papers the ORI said should be retracted have yet to be.

The researchers looked for associations between the severity of penalties the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) imposed on scientists it found responsible for research misconduct and their race and ethnicity, gender, academic rank, and other qualities. The researchers published their findings in late November in Accountability in Research, as the agency is in the process of revising its key regulations,

According to the new analysis, ORI’s sanctions correlated with factors indicating the seriousness of the misconduct, such as being required to retract or correct publications, but not with demographics.

“We did not find evidence of bias,” Ferric Fang, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of the study’s authors, said.

Fang, also member of the board of directors of The Center For Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent nonprofit organization, told us:

Guest post: Why I commented on the proposed changes to U.S. federal research-misconduct policies – and why you should, too

Retraction Watch readers may know that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which has oversight of misconduct investigations of work funded by the National Institutes of Health, has proposed changes to its regulations. It’s the first such proposal since 2005, and has generated discussion in various quarters. We’re pleased to present this guest post by James Kennedy, a longtime observer of these issues.

One of the most controversial points about the federal policies for research misconduct is the extent to which a laboratory director, principal investigator, or lead author is held responsible for misconduct by others on their research team.

It is surprisingly common in cases of extensive research fraud that the person who committed the offense cannot be identified. Data management in such cases is usually uncontrolled, with no tracking of changes to the data or preservation of the original data. The principal investigator is often at the center of the pattern of misconduct, but should they also be held accountable for it when the only provable fact is that they allowed a work environment that was vulnerable to bad behavior?

The regulations for handling misconduct in research funded by the U.S. Public Health Service are currently being modified, and the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which implements the rules, is asking for public comment. This opportunity to influence the handling of misconduct is all the more important given that the regulations are often used as a model for misconduct policies at universities and research institutions. The comment period was recently extended until Jan. 4, 2024.

Are you responsible for misconduct by others?

Hindawi reveals process for retracting more than 8,000 paper mill articles

Over the past year, amid announcements of thousands of retractions, journal closures and a major index delisting several titles, executives at the troubled publisher Hindawi have at various times mentioned a “new retraction process” for investigating and pulling papers “at scale.” The publisher has declined to provide details – until now.

So far in 2023, Hindawi has retracted over 8,000 articles – more than we’ve ever seen in a single year from all publishers combined. And Hindawi is not done cleaning up from paper mills’ infiltration of its special issues, according to a new report from its parent company, Wiley.

Reckoning with Hindawi’s paper mill problem has cost Wiley, which bought the open-access publisher in 2021, an estimated $35-40 million in lost revenue in the current fiscal year, Matthew Kissner, Wiley’s interim president and CEO, said on the company’s most recent earnings call. Wiley will stop using the “Hindawi” name next year, Kissner told investors.

The publisher has issued a whitepaper, “Tackling publication manipulation at scale: Hindawi’s journey and lessons for academic publishing,” which explains “what happened at Hindawi” and the process the company developed to investigate and retract thousands of articles from special issues.

Former Stanford president retracts Nature paper as another gets expression of concern

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned earlier this year after an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a paper from Nature. The journal’s editorial office marked another of Tessier-Lavigne’s articles with an expression of concern.

The two Nature papers – which have together been cited more than 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – were among five the university investigation examined on which Tessier-Lavigne was the principal author. The other three have been retracted – two from Science and one from Cell. In a statement posted to his lab website July 19, Tessier-Lavigne wrote that he planned to correct the two papers in Nature.

The retracted article, “APP binds DR6 to trigger axon pruning and neuron death via distinct caspases,” appeared in 2009. It has been cited 816 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The retraction notice stated:

Psychology professor earns retractions after publishing with ‘repeat offenders’

A psychologist in Australia has earned a pair of retractions after publishing several papers with international coauthors suspected of authorship fraud, Retraction Watch has learned.

Kelly-Ann Allen, an associate professor at Monash University, in Clayton, and editor-in-chief of two psychology journals, declined to comment for this article.

The retraction notices, both in Frontiers journals, cite an investigation by the publisher confirming “a serious breach of our authorship policies and of publication ethics.”

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