Retraction Watch

Meet the author who has published more than 500 letters to the editor in a year

Hyperprolific authors have been drawing attention for some time. In 2018, for example, a Nature article reported that “thousands of scientists have published a paper every five days.” And earlier this year El Pais noted that a now-suspended scientist was publishing a paper every 37 hours.

What about an author who publishes more than once a day, on average?

Viroj Wiwanitkit has published 543 items indexed in PubMed in the last 12 months, the vast majority of them letters to the editor. Most of Wiwanitkit’s letters with colleagues appear to be only a single paragraph. Many concern COVID-19 and vaccinations, but the catalog includes letters about monkeypox, knee replacement surgery, bipolar disorder, even ChatGPT.

Weekend reads: Stanford president to resign; untrustworthy clinical trials; ‘cruel and fake’ animal experiments

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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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300.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 41,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in Edifix, 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):

Sage retracting three dozen articles for ‘compromised’ peer review

Sage Publishing is retracting 37 articles from an engineering journal after finding “indicators of third party involvement” in the peer review process.

The publisher’s investigation continues, and more papers may be retracted, a spokesperson for the company told Retraction Watch.

A single retraction notice lists the links of the 37 papers to be retracted from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering. The notice states:

Florida university fires criminology professor blemished by retractions

Florida State University last week terminated a criminology professor accused of research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned, capping a years-long, highly publicized saga the school says has caused almost “catastrophic” damage to its standing.

In a termination letter obtained by Retraction Watch, the university accused the former professor, Eric A. Stewart, of “extreme negligence and incompetence.” It also asserted that, due to Stewart’s actions, “decades of research” once believed “to be at the forefront of” criminology has “been shown to contain numerous erroneous and false narratives.”

“The details of problematic data management, false results, and the numerous publication retractions have negatively affected the discipline on a national level,” FSU Provost James J. Clark wrote in the letter, dated July 13.

Clark added that the debacle had also affected recruitment of faculty and students and caused the university’s researchers to worry about their chances of getting papers into top journals.

Journal editors resign, strike in dispute with Wiley over ‘business model that maximises profit’

The editor in chief of a Wiley journal has resigned, saying the publisher recently has “seemed to emphasize cost-cutting and margins over good editorial practice.”

Most of the journal’s associate editors are in the midst of a work stoppage protesting the same issues. After Wiley responded to the associate editors in a way they found “troubling,” the editors replied with a list of 12 demands, and a deputy editor in chief tendered her resignation.

Editorial boards of at least three other journals have recently resigned en masse, or threatened to resign, amid similar disputes.

Michael Dawson, editor in chief of the Journal of Biogeography, published a blog post announcing his resignation on June 21. In it, he wrote:

Journal asks scientist to step down from editorial board after sleuth’s comments linked him to paper mill

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.

Econ study retracted after researchers find ‘undocumented alterations in the code’

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.

Journal to retract papers that cost its impact factor and spot in leading index

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.

Weekend reads: 17 retractions from a closed clinic; J&J sues researchers; Retraction Watch in Le Monde

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

University finds former lecturer with two retractions plagiarized in seven publications

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.

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