Retraction Watch

Ob-gyn loses PhD after committee finds he made up research

It was déjà vu last month when a university in Belgium stripped Egyptian physician Hatem Abu Hashim of his doctorate after he was found to have fabricated data in his thesis.

Just weeks earlier, another Egyptian doctor, Ahmed Badawy, lost the PhD degree he had earned at a Dutch university in 2008. Abu Hashim and Badawy are both professors in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Mansoura University in Egypt.

According to an investigation by the Vrije Universeit Brussel (VUB), which awarded Abu Hashim his PhD in 2013, the researcher was in “serious violation of scientific integrity” based on “overwhelming evidence of fabrication of statistical outcomes” and “clear lack of statistical proficiency.”

Journals dismiss claims that Harvard researcher’s work on race is ‘pseudoscience’

Two journals have dismissed allegations of research misconduct leveled against a political scientist at Harvard in an anonymous memo that labeled his work “pseudoscience.”

The 2018 memo signed by “Social Scientists for Research Integrity” – which does not have an internet presence that we could find – makes claims of academic misconduct against Ryan Enos, who denies any wrongdoing. The journals that published two of Enos’ papers singled out in the memo decided to let the articles stand after investigating the charges. A committee at Harvard University, where Enos is a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies, also reviewed the claims and dismissed them.

The allegations primarily concerned purported manipulation of data in Enos’ 2015 article, “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). The paper has been cited 120 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Weekend reads: A whistleblower speaks; an ecologist’s suspension is questioned; ‘massive plagiarism’ allegations

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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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300.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 nearly 39,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. 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):

Two years ago, an author asked a journal to withdraw a paper. It still hasn’t.

In November of 2020, an economics professor wrote to the editor-in-chief of a journal with two requests: remove his name from an online paper on which he was the corresponding author, and retract the article.

More than two years later, neither of those things has happened.

Instead, the article, “Outward foreign direct investment and economic growth in Romania: Evidence from non-linear ARDL approach,” which appeared in August 2020 in the International Journal of Finance and Economics, was included in the January 2022 issue of the journal. It has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

A scholar who was involved in the work but left off the paper has provided evidence, seen by Retraction Watch, that the published article contains falsified data. Two of the paper’s authors also have had another article they co-authored together retracted.

Chemist who cooked data claims PhD years after it was revoked

By the time Shiladitya Sen was officially declared guilty of research misconduct in 2018 by U.S. federal officials, The Ohio State University had long since stripped him of his doctorate in chemistry.

Years later, however, Sen is still billing himself as a PhD in the signature of his work email at a company that provides lab mice and other animals to many scientists, Retraction Watch has learned.

Sen, now a director of analytical chemistry at Charles River Laboratories, with headquarters in Wilmington, Mass., confirmed to us by phone that he has not earned another doctoral degree. He hung up when asked why his email signature claims he has a PhD.

Legal scholar who claimed false affiliations moves on to creating dubious legal yearbooks

In April 2022, Ioannis Kalpouzos, a professor at Harvard Law, received an invitation to join the editorial board of the newly-launched American Yearbook of International Law. But something gave him pause.

“The title sounded a bit dodgy – it sounded like something I should have heard of,” Kalpouzos told Retraction Watch, adding that with some Googling he “found that it wasn’t really a thing.”

“If somebody’s not in the know, it’s easier for them to be duped, I suppose,” Kalpouzos said, but his instincts told him that such a yearbook would most likely be published by an established law review.

So he declined.

Weekend reads: ‘A worrying amount of fraud in medical research;’ a society backpedals on sanctions; a plagiarism case becomes even more bizarre

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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):

How many times can a journal be hijacked?

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

Certain legitimate journal types are particularly susceptible to hijacking, including niche or trade journals published in English or local languages, print-only journals, and journals indexed in international databases like Web of Science or Scopus. Hijackers typically avoid journals from big, reputable publishers such as Springer, Wiley, and Elsevier.

As a result, multiple networks of hijacked journals created by different cybercriminals target the same legitimate journals, potentially causing the same legitimate journals to have multiple clone websites.

The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker contains a few examples of journals that have been hijacked twice, such as the journal Gorteria (ISSN 0017-2294)

But hijackers have created at least five clone websites for the Seybold Report, a trade publication focused on graphic arts technology. The first clone website was created in 2020 by an Indian network and continued to deceive scholars until 2021. The content of the hijacked journal ended up in Scopus, similar to many other cases of hijacked journals. That clone website has since been deactivated and Scopus has deleted the unauthorized content.

Journal investigating Sodom comet paper for data problems

Fig. 53 from the paper: A simulation of an airburst by physicist Mark Boslough, to which he says incorrect labels were added

A paper that caught flak for its claims that an ancient city in the Middle East was destroyed by an exploding celestial body – and the authors’ suggestion that the event could have inspired the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah – now has an editor’s note acknowledging the journal is looking into concerns about its data and conclusions.

The note follows a litany of criticism on Twitter, PubPeer, and in a “Matters Arising” response, as well as an extensive correction published last year. It appeared just days after Retraction Watch asked the publisher for an update on the case.

The article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” was published in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, in September 2021. It has been cited six times in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and Altmetric shows it has gotten more online attention than most other papers of a similar age.

Soon after the article’s publication, its claims attracted scrutiny on Twitter, as we reported at the time. Mark Boslough, a ~~retired~~ physicist at the University of New Mexico and expert in planetary impacts and airbursts (when celestial bodies explode above the earth’s surface) kicked off the criticism, and other scientists quickly joined in.

Weekend reads: More allegations about Stanford president; a plagiarizing rabbi; costly spreadsheet mistakes

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 more than 300. There are more than 38,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. 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):

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