An engineering researcher has stepped down from an editorial board at the request of a journal’s leadership following a sleuth’s comment on a Retraction Watch post linking him to paper mill activity.
Masoud Afrand, an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran, was, until recently, on the editorial board of the journal Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements. He also was listed on the website of Scientific Reports as a member of the journal’s editorial board in the subject of mechanical engineering.
He now has neither position. He has not responded to our requests for comment.
An economics study has been retracted after other researchers identified several inconsistencies in the study’s code and submitted a comment to the journal.
Those critics say the flaws drove the paper’s main findings, but an author of the study says they had no major effect and stands by the results.
The original paper, “Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital,” was published in the American Economic Review in September 2022. It examined the impact of a 2013 increase in the tax rate on dividends in France, concluding an increased rate can encourage the accumulation of capital. The study has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction is only the second in the journal’s history. As Retraction Watch has previously reported, research shows that it is less common for economics papers to be retracted than research in other fields.
A journal that didn’t get an impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified unusual citations in several articles will retract the offending papers, according to its editor.
Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports due to citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations, also known as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.”
Specifically, Clarivate identified five papers published in Genetika in 2021 that had been cited by 22 papers published in the journal Bioscience Research in 2022, Snezana Mladenovic Drinic, the editor of Genetika, told Retraction Watch. Clarivate also suppressed Bioscience Research this year, meaning that the journal did not receive a new impact factor either.
A former lecturer in the modern languages department of the University of St Andrews in Scotland committed plagiarism in seven papers published between 2014 and 2022, according to the results of an institutional investigation.
The university posted a statement on its website about the outcome of the investigation that did not name the researcher, who Retraction Watch has learned is Ros Holmes.
Holmes has two retractions in our database, both for plagiarism.
An anesthesiologist who had his funding revoked for fabricating data has earned a fourth retraction for publishing the same data in two Springer Nature journals.
The German anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt has lost 20 more papers since January 2023, earning him the top spot in our leaderboard, with 184 retractions.
Boldt, readers may recall, was once one of the leading international figures in perioperative medicine. His work, particularly studies involving the use of fluid management during surgery, helped inform clinical guidelines that, thanks to his misdeeds, some experts believe may have put patients at risk for serious harm and even death.
Boldt has vaulted over another anesthesiologist, Yoshitaka Fujii, to take the crown (more on that in a moment) – although one might fairly ask: Why did it take so long?
The journal Scientific Reports removed a scientist linked to paper mill activity from its editorial board last year, but didn’t take his name off the web page until last month, after a Retraction Watch-Undark story pointed out his association.
The former editorial board member, Masoud Afrand, is an assistant professor of engineering at the Islamic Azad University in Iran.
In our story, Alexander Magazinov, a scientific sleuth and software engineer based in Kazakhstan, cited Afrand as an example of researchers seemingly associated with paper mills who manage to get editorial positions at reputable journals. Afrand, he said:
A journal for conference proceedings which published a duplicate article has updated the later version, after originally telling the researcher who noticed the duplication that the articles were different enough to warrant publishing both.
The article, titled “Production and storage of polarized H2, D2, and HD molecules,” was published twice in the journal Proceedings of Science, in 2018 and in 2019. The first version represented proceedings from a talk given at the 2017 XVII International Workshop on Polarized Sources, Targets & Polarimetry in Kaist, South Korea; the second was from the 23rd International Spin Physics Symposium in Ferrara, Italy, held in 2018.
The later version has minor differences from the first, including more technical details about the study’s methods.
PoS, which is run by the International School for Advanced Studies based in Trieste, Italy, functions as a repository for various conference proceedings. It is run by a small staff, and each submission is reviewed by an individual conference’s editorial board.
A researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted PoS after coming across the two nearly identical versions of “Production and storage of polarized H2, D2, and HD molecules.” A journal representative first told the researcher that the journal would investigate the situation, then that “the contributions differ sufficiently in order to warrant both their publication,” according to an email seen by Retraction Watch.
