Last month, a millipede expert in Denmark received an email notifying him that one of his publications had been mentioned in a new manuscript on Preprints.org. But when the researcher, Henrik Enghoff, downloaded the paper, he learned that it cited his work for something off-topic.
Stranger still, the authors of the now-withdrawn preprint, a group of researchers in China and Africa, also referenced two papers by Enghoff that he knew he hadn’t written. It turned out they didn’t exist.
“I’ve never had anything like this happen before,” Enghoff, a professor at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, told Retraction Watch.
The co-editors in chief and most editorial board members of the journal Critical Public Health have resigned their roles to start a new, independent journal, citing differences with their publisher, Taylor & Francis.
“While there are inevitable tensions for a critically oriented scholarly journal that is also a commodity marketed by a commercial publisher, over the last year or so it has become increasingly difficult to hold together these two different versions of the journal,” co-editors Judith Green of the University of Exeter in the UK and Lindsay McLaren of the University of Calgary in Canada said in a press release announcing the mass resignation.
“It is simply a relationship that hasn’t worked out and we need to find other ways to continue the spirit of the community,” McLaren told us.
We previously reported that the corresponding author of the paper, Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Edwards School and chair of its department of clinical and translational science, told us he had contacted PLOS to request a correction to the article.
A pharmacy researcher who left the University of Pennsylvania sometime last year has been found guilty of research misconduct in multiple federal grant applications and five published papers, four of which have already been retracted.
As we have reported, William Armstead, who is retired from Penn, was working among other things on the effects of brain injury on piglets – experiments in which the animals were slaughtered. He has had seven papers retracted, and The Philadelphia Inquirerreported in September that he had left the university. Penn did not respond to several requests for comment when we attempted to reach officials there about Armstead’s work.
BMJ Open has retracted a paper describing a study in which people with diabetes will be switched from cigarettes to vaping after the journal learned – late in the process of publication – that the authors were indirectly funded by the tobacco company, Philip Morris International.
A paper published in Science two years ago has been flagged with an expression of concern while the editors give the authors a chance to correct a data issue identified by two different readers.
When it comes to delays in correcting the scientific record — and less-than-helpful retraction notices — it’s not uncommon to see journals blaming universities for being slow and less than forthcoming, and universities blaming journals for being impatient and not respecting the confidentiality of their processes. So in 2021 and 2022, a group of university research integrity officers, journal editors and others gathered to discuss those issues.
In a new paper in JAMA Network Open, the group recommends specific changes to the status quo to enable effective communication between institutions and journals:”
(1) reconsideration and broadening of the interpretation by institutions of the need-to-know criteria in federal regulations (ie, confidential or sensitive information and data are not disclosed unless there is a need for an individual to know the facts to perform specific jobs or functions), (2) uncoupling the evaluation of the accuracy and validity of research data from the determination of culpability and intent of the individuals involved, and (3) initiating a widespread change for the policies of journals and publishers regarding the timing and appropriateness for contacting institutions, either before or concurrently under certain conditions, when contacting the authors.
We asked Susan Garfinkel, the associate vice president for research compliance at The Ohio State and the corresponding author of the article, some questions.
Clarivate, the company that assigns journals Impact Factors, this year will not give four journals updated versions of the controversial metric used by many institutions and publications as a shorthand for quality.
The journals will remain indexed in Web of Science, but won’t have an Impact Factor for this year in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports.
According to Clarivate, Marketing Theory, a SAGE title, has been suppressed for self-citation. Three other journals have been suppressed for citation stacking, sometimes referred to as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.” The other journals are as follows:
A neurology researcher in Australia is no longer employed at his former university in the midst of a research misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned. And the work of a co-author at another institution also is being assessed for possible research misconduct after sleuths alerted the university to comments on PubPeer about potential data issues in his papers.
The journal’s editor-in-chief, Gregory Konat, retracted the paper because several of the western blots appeared to be duplicated and he no longer had confidence in the results, according to the retraction notice. The six authors are researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Macquarie University and St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
