Retraction Watch

Professor, former dean earns nearly 100 expressions of concern for citation manipulation

A professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia who once served as a dean at the Stevens Institute of Technology in the United States, has received expressions of concern on 93 of his conference proceedings for what a publisher said were irrelevant self-citations and “artificially inflating the number of citations.”

The notes by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on the work of Yehia Massoud, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, take two forms. One reads:

Publisher slaps 60 papers in chemistry journal with expressions of concern

An Elsevier chemistry journal has marked more than 60 papers with expressions of concern amid an investigation involving potential undisclosed conflicts of interest among editors, authorship irregularities and manipulation of peer reviews and citations.

One of the notices, published online April 11 in Chemosphere, reads, for example:

Weekend reads: Editor under scrutiny resigns; bullshitting scientists; questionable practices in expanding disciplines

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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 48,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 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):

Journal pulls paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering

An Elsevier journal last week retracted a paper by two senior economists who used questionable methods to replace large chunks of missing observations in their dataset without disclosing the procedure.

The move follows a Retraction Watch story published in February that revealed the paper’s corresponding author, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University in Sweden, used Excel’s autofill function and other undisclosed operations to populate thousands of empty cells, or well over 10% of the dataset.

In a guest post on our blog, economist Gary Smith argued Heshmati and his coauthor had “no justification” for not describing what they had done. Smith also commented in an article for Mind Matters that “the solution to an absence of data is not to fabricate data.”

Less than three weeks after our report, Elsevier told us it would pull the study, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries,” which appeared last year in the Journal of Cleaner Production. On May 4, the publisher issued a retraction notice stating:

Concussion researcher McCrory up to 17 retractions

More than two years after retracting an article by one of its former editors in chief for plagiarism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has retracted six more pieces by the editor, Paul McCrory, a noted concussion researcher in Australia.

The retractions join 11 more of McCrory’s works, including 10 from BJSM and one from Current Sports Medicine Reports.The BJSM, published by The BMJ, is also correcting two additional articles by McCrory.

Troubles for McCrory – for decades “the world’s foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally,” according to the New York Times – began in 2021 when Steve Haake, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, told the BJSM McCrory had plagiarized a 2000 article by Haake in Physics World. (It would not be the only time the work was plagiarized.)

Give or take a year or two: Case reveals publishers’ vastly different retraction times

On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.”

“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.

Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:

Weekend reads: Medical residents’ publish or perish problem; Alzheimer’s and predatory journals; brain biopsies set off alarm bells

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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

A study of C-section scars – in women who hadn’t undergone the surgery

A study purportedly of scars left by caesarean sections included women yet to undergo the surgery, say sleuths. But an investigation into the research by the author’s employer and the journal that published it found no evidence of research misconduct.

The paper, published in Wiley journal Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, was flagged on PubPeer in February by Ben Mol, an ob-gyn researcher at Monash University in Australia whose efforts have led to scores of retractions and corrections, and Jim Thornton, emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Nottingham, in the UK. The study looks at how the scar left behind on a woman’s uterus after a c-section is affected by the dilation of her cervix at the time of the procedure.

Cureus retracts paper for plagiarism following Retraction Watch inquiries

The journal Cureus has retracted a 2022 paper on cancer and the environment just weeks after Retraction Watch raised questions about apparent plagiarism in the article.

As we reported in early April, the paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors”, had a bit of a twinsies thing going with a 2005 article in The Lancet – sharing a title, figures, and wording that “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” according to the anonymous tipster who informed us of the issue.

The April 19 retraction notice states:

Publisher retracts more than a dozen papers at once for likely paper mill activity

The Scottish Medical Journal has retracted more than a dozen papers dating back to 2020 after concluding the articles were likely produced by one or more paper mills.

The articles, all by researchers in China, covered a range of topics including back pain, pancreatic cancer, hand hygiene and sepsis. Most were meta-analyses.

Here’s the blanket notice for the 13 papers, which the publisher, Sage, lists by url but not title:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: