Retraction Watch

Meet the first two Retraction Watch Sleuths in Residence

We are thrilled to announce that David Robert Grimes and Mariana Ribeiro will join the Retraction Watch team as Sleuths in Residence starting June 1.

Earlier this year we announced the Sleuth in Residence Program, an opportunity for active sleuths to have a secure and paid position while working closely with our research team on specific projects, and with our journalism team to publish their findings. Our goal is to build capacity in this space to emphasize the value of compensating and protecting the critical work of sleuths.

We’re pleased to be able to bring on two Sleuths in Residence as part of this effort.

‘More of the same’: Journals, trade website refuse to correct critiques of book on Alzheimer’s fraud

Amyloid-beta plaques (brown) and tau protein tangles (blue). Credit: National Institute on Aging/NIH

Investigative journalist Charles Piller’s latest book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, came out in February. It details the work of Matthew Schrag, a neurologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and other sleuths who uncovered evidence of problems in hundreds of research papers about the neurologic condition.

Most reviews and coverage have been positive, Piller said. But some Alzheimer’s researchers have criticized the book in reviews published in JAMA, The Lancet Neurology, and the website Alzforum, which hosts news and commentary on Alzheimer’s research.

Piller and Schrag say they respect that others are entitled to their opinions, but expressed concern that some of these reviews contain inaccuracies that downplay their findings. And the journals and Alzforum have refused to publish responses they submitted or make corrections they requested.

Weekend reads: French agency’s research director sanctioned; AI data woes at MIT; is disruptive science over?

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive. When we asked them about it, they removed it.
Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so.
Correction finally issued seven years after authors promise fix ‘as soon as possible.’
Researchers to pull duplicate submission after reviewer concerns and Retraction Watch inquiry.
Genentech authors flip PNAS study from corrected to retracted following Retraction Watch coverage.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 59,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 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):

Genentech authors flip PNAS study from corrected to retracted following Retraction Watch coverage

The authors of a 2006 paper have retracted their article following an extensive correction in January – and a Retraction Watch story noting the correction missed at least one additional issue with the work.

“Death-receptor activation halts clathrin-dependent endocytosis,” published in July 2006 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been cited 99 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Most of the authors were affiliated with the biotech company Genentech.

As we previously reported, commenters on PubPeer raised issues about possible image duplications, spurring the authors to review the work. The January correction addressed about two dozen instances of image splicing and duplication in five of the paper’s figures. The notice stated the authors repeated the experiments for a manuscript posted on bioRxiv in October 2024. “The new data confirms the original results, reaffirming the experimental conclusions,” the authors wrote in the correction notice.

Researchers to pull duplicate submission after reviewer concerns and Retraction Watch inquiry

While doing a literature review earlier this spring, a human factors researcher came across a paper he had peer-reviewed. One problem: He had reviewed it – and recommended against publishing – for a different journal not long before the publication date of the paper he was now looking at.

Based on the published paper and documents shared with us, it appears the authors submitted the same manuscript to the journals Applied Sciences and Virtual Reality within 11 days of each other, and withdrew one version when the other was published.

And after we reached out to the authors, the lead author told us they plan to withdraw the published version next week – which the editor of the journal had called for in April but its publisher, MDPI, had not yet decided to do.

Correction finally issued seven years after authors promise fix ‘as soon as possible’

A journal has finally issued a correction following a seven-year-old exchange on PubPeer in which the authors promised to fix issues “as soon as possible.” But after following up with the authors and the journal, it’s still not clear where the delay occurred.

Neuron published the paper, “Common DISC1 Polymorphisms Disrupt Wnt/GSK3β Signaling and Brain Development,” in 2011. It has been cited 101 times, 28 of which came after concerns were first raised, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

It first appeared on PubPeer in April 2018, when commenter Epipactis voethii first pointed out figures 2 and 3 of the paper had potential image duplication.

Can a better ID system for authors, reviewers and editors reduce fraud? STM thinks so

Unverifiable researchers are a harbinger of paper mill activity. While journals have clues to identifying fake personas — lack of professional affiliation, no profile on ORCID or strings of random numbers in email addresses, to name a few — there isn’t a standard template for doing so.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical, & Medical Publishers (STM) has taken a stab at developing a framework for journals and institutions to validate researcher identity, with its Research Identity Verification Framework, released in March. The proposal suggests identifying “good” and “bad” actors based on what validated information they can provide, using passport validation when all else fails, and creating a common language in publishing circles to address authorship.

But how this will be implemented and standardized remains to be seen. We spoke with Hylke Koers, the chief information officer for STM and one of the architects of the proposal. The questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Weekend reads: MIT rescinds support of AI paper; should AI write science papers, anyway?; another pub steps in for paused NIH journal

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

How do retractions impact researchers’ career paths and collaborations? A Q&A with the study’s authors
Clarivate to stop counting citations to retracted articles in journals’ impact factors
Dozens of Elsevier papers retracted over fake companies and suspicious authorship changes
Paper with duplicated images retracted four months after concerns were raised
Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive. When we asked them about it, they removed it

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

Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive

Editor’s note: We asked Elsevier to respond to some of the findings in this post. In response, a spokesperson told us they will now remove the journal from Scopus. See Elsevier’s response in this story.

I received a letter recently pointing me to a questionable journal indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database. Scopus indexes many problematic and even hijacked journals, but this case is the most outrageous I have seen to date.

Scopus indexed Science of Law in July 2024. According to its profile in the database, the journal is published by the “Editorial Team of SoL.” However, “the editorial team” and many members of the editorial board are fake names and that such individuals do not actually exist. For example, the three editors listed — Alessio Miceli from the University of Alabama School of Law, Anita Steinberg from Wichita State University, and Jeffrey Robinson from McGeorge School of Law — do not have author profiles in Scopus. The universities themselves do not have anyone with these names in their directories.

Elsevier removes journal from Scopus after Retraction Watch inquiry

Elsevier has removed a journal from its Scopus database after Retraction Watch inquired about its review process for the journal, whose editorial board lists fake names and digital fingerprint shows other red flags.

Scientific sleuth Anna Abalkina uncovered several issues with Science of Law, which she details in a post published today. Besides editors and editorial board members who cannot be verified and don’t seem to exist, the journal’s history doesn’t match its publication record, early articles show signs of fabrication, and its publisher data in Scopus doesn’t match that in Crossref. Despite this, Scopus added the journal to its index last year.

To understand how these problems could have evaded reviewers at Scopus, we asked Elsevier if Scopus staff verifies editorial board members when vetting journals, and if they assess the quality and validity of articles in journals before adding them to the index.

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