Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Paper mills bribe editors; Dana-Farber researchers to retract paper; ‘The Next Battle in Higher Ed’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to nearly 400. There are more than 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):

Gift authorship common in psychology, survey suggests

New findings from a survey of psychology researchers show nearly half of the respondents have encountered unethical authorship practices in studies they have been involved in.

Researchers in Belgium surveyed more than 800 people involved in psychological research about their experiences with gift and ghost authorship, as well as the use of explicit authorship guidelines at their institutions.

Almost half said they had witnessed gift authorship on more than one occasion – in other words, the respondents saw someone listed as an author when they had made little or no contribution to a paper. Ghost authorship – excluding someone from a paper when they have made a significant contribution – was far less common, with fewer than one in five of the respondents reporting that they had dealt with the phenomenon. Since the authors used a convenience sample, the data show signs of authorship misconduct in psychology, but don’t tell the whole story.

Exclusive: Paper-mill articles buoyed Spanish dean’s research output

Last year, a professor and dean at a university in Spain suddenly began publishing papers with a multitude of far-flung researchers. His coauthors, until then exclusively national, now came from places like India, China, Nepal, South Korea, Georgia, Austria, and the United States.

How these unlikely collaborations began is not entirely clear. But a six-month Retraction Watch investigation, part of which is published here as a companion piece to a longer article appearing today in Science, suggests an unsavory possibility: The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of the faculty of health sciences at Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, bought his way onto the papers – something he partly admits.

At least six of the seven journal articles Lorenzo published last year had been previously advertised for sale by the Indian paper mill iTrilon. Based in Chennai, this underhand operation sells authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals,” according to a WhatsApp message its scientific director, Sarath Ranganathan, sent to prospective clients last summer. Ranganathan also claimed to have connections at journals that allowed him, in many cases, to guarantee acceptance of the manuscripts he would send their way.

The Singapore Sting: Why an activist published a fake paper on ‘LGBTQ+ child acceptance’

Last spring, the Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science published a provocative paper stating that left-handed mothers in Singapore treat their LGBTQ+ children better than do right-handed moms.

Except the paper, “Left-Handed Mothers and LGBTQ+ Child Acceptance in Singapore: Exploring the Link through Early Life Rejection,” was fake, a sting, designed to cast shade on anti-gay science proliferating in Singapore.

The data were fabricated, and so were the authors, Jin Rabak and Hen Guai Lan. Their purported employer, Simisai University? A bogus institution with a name concocted for laughs: in Singaporean English, “simisai” means “what the shit.”

A publisher makes an error in a publication about errors

Jennifer Byrne

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.

Publisher parts ways with editor of five journals who published his own studies on Islamic practices

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:

‘Nonsensical content’: Springer Nature journal breaks up with a paper on a love story

You can love math, but can you math love?

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.

According to the abstract:

Weekend reads: The future of a federal US watchdog; a publisher plans massive layoffs; the plagiarism arms race

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 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):

Neri Oxman accused of lifting from article whose plagiarism led to downfall of concussion expert

Neri Oxman’s problems may be getting worse.

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.

Exclusive: COPE threatens Elsevier journal with sanctions for ‘clear breakdown’ before seven retractions

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.

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