Publishing a research paper is usually cause for celebration, after what is typically years of effort. Our recent paper in which we found that unexpectedly high proportions of papers in two journals described at least one wrongly identified reagent should have been no exception.
But alas. Any of our celebrations have been tempered by Springer Nature’s bizarre introduction of an unrelated figure into the paper. Here’s what has happened so far.
Ten days after retracting nine papers from several journals because they were “lacking scientific base,” a publisher says it has “parted company” with the editor of five of the titles – who had authored or co-authored the papers in question.
As Retraction Watch reported last week, Thieme International retracted the papers, by Hüseyin Çaksen of Necmettin Erbakan University in Turkey, following criticism on social media and at least one story in the Turkish press. Yesterday, a Thieme account on X (formerly Twitter) posted:
Scientific Reports has retracted a 2023 paper that tried to do just that by imposing a numerical model onto an ancient Persian love story that may have influenced Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
The paper, “A fractional order nonlinear model of the love story of Layla and Majnun,” was written by Zulqurnain Sabir and Salem Ben Said, both mathematicians at United Arab Emirates University. The article has been cited three times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The researcher, who has become embroiled in plagiarism accusations following her billionaire husband’s push to depose the president of Harvard for plagiarizing in her thesis, appears to have lifted about 100 words in her thesis from an article that has been plagiarized before.
Last week, Business Insider reported that Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation…including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” Oxman, who earned her PhD at MIT and was later a professor there until 2020, has since acknowledged some citation errors.
The new allegation is that Oxman’s thesis also lifted about 100 words from a 2000 article in Physics World without quoting or citing the piece. (See a comparison here using the Vroniplag similarity detector set at a minimum of six consecutive words of overlap. The 2000 article text is on the left, and part of the thesis is on the right.) That article was plagiarized in 2005 by a then-leading sports medicine expert, Paul McCrory, who resigned from a key post in 2022 following revelations of that and other pilfering. McCrory has now had more than ten papers retracted.
An Elsevier journal has retracted seven articles by a prolific data fabricator – three and a half years after the publisher said it would retract 10 of his papers, and five months after the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) threatened the journal with sanctions for the delay.
As we previously reported, the Journal of the Neurological Sciences had decided by June 2020 to retract 10 articles by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who are currently in positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions. But the papers remained intact until December 2023, when seven were retracted. The remaining three are still unmarked.
“We have no idea why it took so long,” said Andrew Grey, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, who with colleagues Alison Avenell and Mark Bolland has scrutinized the work of Sato and Iwamoto. The group’s efforts have led to more than 100 retractions, but publishers have yet to assess a significant number of papers about which they have raised concerns.
A researcher in Turkey has lost seven papers about Islamic practices that he managed to publish in journals typically dedicated to childhood diseases.
Hüseyin Çaksen, of Necmettin Erbakan University, published the articles in the Journal of Pediatric Neurology, the Journal of Child Science, and the Journal of Pediatric Epilepsy, all Thieme titles. Feyza Çaksen is co-author of two.
Two journals of a leading microbiology society have retracted six articles by Didier Raoult after a university investigation found breaches of research ethics in his work.
A seventh article by authors affiliated with the research institute Raoult formerly led was also retracted for ethical issues.
In comments to Retraction Watch, Raoult, who has filed a criminal complaint against a scientist who found issues in his publications, called the retractions “just another form of science censorship” based on “complete ignorance” of France’s research ethics laws.
New editorial policies at an MDPI title accused of publishing “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary” animal studies are missing the mark, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a U.S-based advocacy group.
A former reviewer for the journal, and one of the more than 1,100 signatories of a recent PCRM boycott letter, said she resigned from the post after realizing Nutrients published research that was “sadistic, cruel, and unnecessary,” according to a press release from November.
Email correspondence made public here for the first time shows Nutrients continues to reject the group’s concerns. In one message from 2022, it told PCRM that 21 papers flagged as problematic “contained ethics statements that are in accordance with the journal policies.”
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