Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Paying cash to boost rankings; billions lost from reformatting manuscripts; ‘the truth police’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 40,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 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):

Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted nearly two years after Retraction Watch report

An engineering journal has retracted an article that was posted on a website claiming to sell author positions. The retraction comes nearly two years after we reported on the website and a whistleblower informed the journal.

The study, “On the dynamics of an ultra-fast-rotating-induced piezoelectric cantilevered nanodisk surrounded by viscoelastic foundation,” appeared in Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines in December 2020. It listed researchers at Sichuan University of Science and Engineering in China as authors. The article has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The study was retracted on March 16, 2023. The retraction notice stated:

Spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt faked data in multiple papers, university finds

An investigation at McMaster University found that Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist by training who has had 15 papers retracted in the last three years, “engaged in fabrication and falsification” including duplicating data, according to summarized findings sent to coauthors.

Kate Laskowski, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, shared on Twitter the summary McMaster had sent her about three papers she had coauthored with Pruitt.

Retractions should not take longer than two months, says UK Parliament committee

Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee chair Greg Clark

A new report from a UK Parliament committee calls for scientific publishers to correct and retract papers much quicker than they currently do, for the sake of research integrity and reproducibility.

The Science, Innovation and Technology Select Committee of the House of Commons issued its report today, following an inquiry to which Retraction Watch and one of our cofounders, Ivan Oransky, provided evidence. Many others also gave evidence, including sleuth Dorothy Bishop.

The report is an extensive look at current issues of reproducibility and research integrity, and includes many recommendations. About the role of scientific publishers, the report says:

Prominent nanoscientist retracts paper after PhD students flagged error

The authors of a 2018 nanoscience paper have retracted the article after three doctoral students highlighted a problem with its methods.

The 2018 study attracted media attention for suggesting that nanospears, microscopic structures similar to splinters, may be useful in delivering gene therapies.

Paul Weiss, a nanoscientist and a corresponding author of the paper, announced the retraction on Twitter April 5, the same day the retraction notice appeared. Weiss holds several academic positions, including Presidential Chair of Chemistry and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Article that assessed MDPI journals as “predatory” retracted and replaced

A 2021 article that found journals from the open-access publisher MDPI had characteristics of predatory journals has been retracted and replaced with a version that softens its conclusions about the company. MDPI is still not satisfied, however.

The article, “Journal citation reports and the definition of a predatory journal: The case of the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI),” was published in Research Evaluation. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

María de los Ángeles Oviedo García, a professor of business administration and marketing at the University of Seville in Spain, and the paper’s sole author, analyzed 53 MDPI journals that were included in Clarivate’s 2018 Journal Citation Reports.

Weekend reads: Men vs. women in fraud; how to improve peer review; homeopathy data manipulation

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 more than 300. There are nearly 40,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 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):

Australian study supporting mask mandates earns expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for an Australian study that supported mask mandates after researchers raised several potential problems with the design and methodology of the study.

The article, “The introduction of a mandatory mask policy was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 cases in a major metropolitan city,” was published in the journal PLOS ONE in July 2021. It has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In comments to Retraction Watch, the authors of the paper stood by their work, but a key critic said he still thought the work should have been retracted.

Leading primate researcher demoted after admitting he faked data

The former director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio has been removed from the post after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found he had faked data.

Last August, ORI found that Deepak Kaushal, who remains a professor at Texas Biomed, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, and/or recklessly falsifying and fabricating the experimental methodology to demonstrate results obtained under different experimental conditions.”

Citing Kaushal’s admission, ORI said that he had engaged in research misconduct in work supported by 8 grants from the National Institutes of Health, and faked data in two grant applications and one published paper that has since been retracted.

Hindawi shuttering four journals overrun by paper mills

Hindawi will cease publishing four journals that it identified as “heavily compromised by paper mills.”

The open access publisher announced today in a blog post that it will continue to retract articles from the closed titles, which are Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, the Journal of Healthcare Engineering, and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

The closures follow reporting by Retraction Watch in February that a professor used the identity and email account of a former student to edit special issues of two of the journals, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

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