Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Claudine Gay and what comes after; China cracking down again; ‘retracted papers and collateral damage’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Exclusive: MDPI journal undergoing reevaluation at Scopus, indexing on hold
‘We should have followed up’: Lancet journal retracts article on hearing aids and dementia after prodding
Elsevier’s Scopus to continue indexing MDPI’s Sustainability after reevaluation

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to over 375. There are nearly 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):

Elsevier’s Scopus to continue indexing MDPI’s Sustainability after reevaluation

Scopus has completed its reevaluation of MDPI’s journal Sustainability and will continue to index the title, according to the publisher.

As Retraction Watch previously reported, Scopus, a product of Elsevier, had paused indexing articles from Sustainability at the end of October while reevaluating whether to include the journal. Removal from the index can lead to a decline in submissions because universities and funders use Scopus to create journal “whitelists.”

The reevaluation process concluded January 4, according to Stefan Tochev, CEO of MDPI.

‘We should have followed up’: Lancet journal retracts article on hearing aids and dementia after prodding

When Jure Mur, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, realized the replication of a published study he was working on as a “sanity check” wasn’t producing matching results, his first reaction was “annoyance,” he said.

He assumed the mistake was his own, and he’d have to thoroughly check his work to find it. “Only after double- and triple-checking my code did I start suspecting an error in the original paper,” Mur told Retraction Watch.

Mur emailed the authors of the article several times, but they never responded to him, he said. He next contacted the editors of The Lancet Public Health, which had published the original paper, “Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort,” in April 2023.

Exclusive: MDPI journal undergoing reevaluation at Scopus, indexing on hold

Elsevier’s Scopus database has paused indexing content from Sustainability, an MDPI journal, while it reevaluates whether to include the title, Retraction Watch has learned.

Please see an update on this post.

Other MDPI titles were reevaluated in 2023, and its mathematics journal Axioms is no longer included in Scopus’ nearly 30,000 titles. Clarivate also delisted two MDPI journals, including the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, from its Web of Science index earlier this year, meaning those journals will no longer receive impact factors.

Universities and funders use Scopus to create “whitelists” of journals in which authors are encouraged to publish, so removal from the index can influence submissions.

In 2022, Norway removed Sustainability from its list of journals that researchers get credit for publishing in, and Finland followed suit at the beginning of 2023. In the announcement of its decision, the Finnish Publication Forum wrote:

Weekend reads: Misconduct by national institute director in Japan; ‘a safe space for paper mills’; authors remove COVID-19 vaccine manuscript

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

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):

Publisher donating author fees from retracted articles to charity

What should happen to the millions of dollars publishers rake in from authors whose work is later retracted?

Guillaume Cabanac, one of the developers of the Problematic Paper Screener, has repeatedly suggested publishers donate such revenue to charity.

And now one is doing just that.

The year at Retraction Watch, 2023: Whew!

Did 2023 feel like a year in which you couldn’t keep up, whether that was your to-do list, the news, or email?

We know the feeling.

Earlier this month, Nature reported that journals retracted more than 10,000 papers this year – so many, in fact, that we have not been able to enter them all into The Retraction Watch Database yet, because each one has to be reviewed by hand. It’s not unusual for us to have to keep working into the following year to catch up, but the volume this year will mean that will all take longer.

The value of that database – 45,000 retractions strong and counting – was the basis for our biggest development this year: Its acquisition by Crossref, in a deal that makes the data fully available for free, and provides us sustainable funding for the database side of our operations. We’re still pinching ourselves about that agreement, and we can’t wait to see just how many scholars, software developers, and others dream up new uses for the data.

Elsevier’s Scopus deletes journal links following revelations of hijacked indexed journals

Scopus has struck all links to the homepages of journals it indexes, Elsevier announced earlier this month. The move follows revelations that content from dozens of hijacked journals had been included in the database.

In a December 18 blog post, Scopus – which many universities and government agencies around the world use to create journal “whitelists” where authors are encouraged or even paid to publish – explains its rationale:

The top ten stories at Retraction Watch in 2023

Each year since 2013, we put together a roundup of the 10 most-read stories we published on the blog over the past 12 months.

This list doesn’t have some of what you might think are the biggest stories of the year—Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation and retractions, allegations of fraud against Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, and the unraveling of the claimed discovery of a room-temperature superconductor. Or more recently, allegations of plagiarism, with associated corrections, by Harvard president Claudine Gay.

When other outlets are paying a lot of attention to a retraction-related story, we think it’s a better use of our limited resources to focus on stories they’re missing. This year, that included a prominent nanoscientist who retracted a paper after PhD students found an error, the delisting of 19 Hindawi journals from a leading index, and a Yale history professor whose first book misrepresents primary sources, according to other scholars. (And if you want to help us cover even more stories in 2024, it’s not too late to make an end-of-year tax-deductible contribution!)

The following list reflects the stories that grabbed our readers’ attention the most in 2023:

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):

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