Retraction Watch

Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting

Last week, an environmental journal published a paper on the use of renewable energy in cleaning up contaminated land. To read it, you would have to pay 40 euros. But you still wouldn’t know for sure who wrote it.

Ostensibly authored by researchers in China, “Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in soil remediation for a sustainable future” includes the extraneous phrase “Regenerate response” at the end of a methods section. For those unfamiliar, “Regenerate response” is a button in OpenAI’s ChatGPT that prompts the chatbot to rework an unsatisfactory answer.

“Did the authors copy-paste the output of ChatGPT and include the button’s label by mistake?” wondered Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse, in France, in a comment on PubPeer.

And, he added, “How come this meaningless wording survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”

Authors file complaint with publisher as journal retracts vaping paper

A paper that found smoking rates in the United States fell faster than expected as more people started using e-cigarettes has been retracted over the objections of its authors, who have filed a complaint with the journal’s publisher.

As we reported in July, BMC Public Health informed the authors of “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults” that the editors had decided to retract the article after receiving a critical letter. We reported:

The letter did not request retraction of the paper, but argued that its analyses “were flawed and therefore potentially produced misleading findings that would benefit tobacco industry profits and interests.”

The authors of the retracted paper are employees of Pinney Associates, a consulting firm that they disclosed “provide[s] consulting services on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc.” The article also disclosed that Juul Labs funded the research and reviewed and provided comments on a draft manuscript.

After we published our story about the pending retraction, 23 researchers wrote a letter to the journal expressing concern about the decision. They wrote:

To guard against fraud, medical research should be a profession: A book excerpt

We are pleased to present an excerpt from Trust in Medical Research, a freely available new book by Warwick P. Anderson, emeritus professor of physiology and biomedical sciences at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

It has always been difficult for me to admit that we have a genuine and substantial problem of fraud and rubbish science in medical research. I suspect this is true for most scientists. We want to think of science as being free from half-truths and fake news. We hope that the high moral purpose of medical research will guard against wrongdoing, that it will weigh on our minds so heavily that we all take care to work and publish honestly and competently.

We know that scientists sometimes make unintentional mistakes due to ignorance, but we also know in our hearts that some people are so ambitious that they push the envelope, stretch the truth and take shortcuts. We know, too, that a few others go further and get carried away by the prospects of scientific and financial rewards and so cheat, commit fraud and lie in publications. This is what some humans do in all walks of life.

We know all this, but it is fair to say that we generally do not want to face up to it. Jennifer Byrne at the University of Sydney put it well when she wrote that we tend to overlook the research fraud issue “because the scientific community has been unwilling to have frank and open discussions about it”:

Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction

It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.

A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images.

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”

The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020.

One year later, bioinformatics journal with unclear leadership yet to retract plagiarized article

Nicki Tiffin

On Aug. 17, 2022, Nicki Tiffin received a notification that she had published a new study. The problem? She had never submitted an article to the journal in which the paper appeared.

A year later, despite efforts by Tiffin and others, the journal has not responded to retraction requests, and the article remains online. Further investigation by Retraction Watch has revealed other dysfunction at the journal, including falsely representing its editors and a schism from its founders and original sponsor.

The article, “Triumphs and improvement of Computational Bioinformatics in South Africa,” was published in June 2022 in the European Journal of Biomedical Informatics (EJBI).

Tiffin, a professor at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape, discovered that the new paper was a plagiarized version of an article she had published in 2016. That paper, “The Development of Computational Biology in South Africa: Successes Achieved and Lessons Learnt,” appeared in the journal PLOS Computational Biology and has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In 2016, Tiffin was a professor at the University of Cape Town. Although she had no role in publishing the EJBI article, it lists her name as the sole author of the paper, as well as her University of Cape Town affiliation.

How a canceled panel on sex plays into censorship by the right: A guest post

Alice Dreger *Credit: Dylan Lees Photography*

In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already.

Or at least they want anthropologists to stop.

Weekend reads: ‘The band of debunkers’; a superconductor retraction request; ‘the banality of bad-faith science’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

We also added The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are more than 43,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 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?

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

After resigning en masse, math journal editors launch new publication

The editor in chief, managing editors, and entire editorial board of a mathematics journal all resigned earlier this year following a dispute with their publisher over special issues and article volume.

Changes the publisher wanted to make to the journal “would have the effect of jeopardizing scientific integrity for the sake of financial gain,” the editors wrote in their announcement of their resignations, which took place on January 11.

The mass resignation at the Journal of Geometric Mechanics, previously published by the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), is one of at least five such collective actions journal editors took in 2023, according to a list Retraction Watch has compiled.

The former editors have started a new journal named Geometric Mechanics with World Scientific.

Anthropology groups cancel conference panel on why biological sex is “necessary” for research

Two anthropology organizations co-hosting a conference this fall have removed from the program a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.”

The panel had been slated for the joint annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), to be held in Toronto in November.

In a letter informing the panelists of the decision, Ramona Pérez and Monica Heller, presidents of the AAA and CASCA, respectively, wrote that the executive boards of the two groups had reviewed the submission “at the request of numerous members” and decided to remove it from the conference program. They wrote:

Nature flags doubts over Google AI study, pulls commentary

A new editor’s note in Nature highlights concerns about a paper by Google researchers who claimed computer chips designed in just a few hours using artificial intelligence beat chip plans that human experts took months to develop.

In the note, published September 20, the journal stated:

Readers are alerted that the performance claims in this article have been called into question. The Editors are investigating these concerns, and, if appropriate, editorial action will be taken once this investigation is complete.

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