Retraction Watch

Police investigating after Polish journal accuses authors of ‘crime of plagiarism’

Polish police are investigating alleged plagiarism in a series of articles by a group of researchers at the University of Life Sciences in Lublin, Retraction Watch has learned.

A university commission also is looking into the allegations, which one of the authors told Retraction Watch had “greatly damaged” his career. While plagiarism is not usually considered a crime, it can be prosecuted under national copyright laws in Poland and elsewhere.

The alleged plagiarism was first discovered by a reviewer for Postępy Mikrobiologii – Advancements of Microbiology, a quarterly of the Polish Society of Microbiologists, said Radosław Stachowiak, who worked as the journal’s deputy editor-in-chief until the end of last year.

Weekend reads: China cracks down; unearned authorship rife; new jargon for a new year

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Elsevier journal temporarily removes article by prolific psychologist – with a typo at “frist”
President of Iranian university in ‘serious breach of ethical standards’
Paper on writing centers as ‘neocolonial tools’ is retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 283. 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):

Paper on writing centers as ‘neocolonial tools’ is retracted

Are academic writing centers agents of US hegemony, spreading the evils of colonialism as they work to topple rogue syntax and rehabilitate failing grammatical states?

So argued a pair of authors in Canada in a now-retracted 2022 article which claimed that such centers have been used as “neocolonial tools” to push American foreign policy goals.

But according to critics, that claim – which seems like it might have emerged from a cross between Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” and Graham Greene’s, well, lots of his books – suffered from a fatal flaw or two, as we’ll shortly see.

President of Iranian university in ‘serious breach of ethical standards’

The president of an Iranian university and a colleague appear to have published the same microelectronics paper twice, according to allegations seen by Retraction Watch.

The articles, by Bahram Azizollah Ganji and Kamran Delfan Hemmati of Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, deal with the design of a new capacitive accelerometer with a high dynamic range and sensitivity. Both appeared online in 2020, first in the Slovenia-based Journal of Microelectronics, Electronic Components and Materials and later in the higher-impact Springer journal Microsystem Technologies. The former version has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, while the latter has been cited twice.

The editors of Microsystem Technologies were made aware of the allegations on November 16 in an email that cited “significantly identical content” in the two papers. “Pretty much the entire introduction section and almost all figures are an exact copy from” the authors’ previous article, the email stated.

Elsevier journal temporarily removes article by prolific psychologist – with a typo at “frist”

An Elsevier psychology journal took down an article in early December with a notice that appeared to be an internal memo, including a typo.

The article, a letter titled “First COVID-19 suicide case in Bangladesh due to fear of COVID-19 and xenophobia: Possible suicide prevention strategies,” was published in June of 2020 in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry by Mark D. Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in the UK and Mohammed A. Mamun of Jahangirnagar University and the Undergraduate Research Organization in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It has been cited more than 300 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Griffiths’ high publishing rate – according to his university’s index he published nearly 200 journal articles in 2022 – came under scrutiny from Oxford University psychologist Dorothy Bishop in 2020, including his many collaborations with Mamun. Griffiths told the Times Higher Education that he “made an intellectual contribution to every refereed paper I’ve published.”

Weekend reads: A professor plagiarizes a student; Chat-GPT makes it into the literature; a newspaper archive vanishes

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Last chance for a tax-deductible contribution in 2022! Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 282. There are more than 37,000 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) during a relatively quiet week:

University to investigate adjunct professor after allegations of plagiarism – and legal threats

The University of Zurich in Switzerland has announced that it will open an investigation into an adjunct professor alleged to have taken images and other material from a popular blog on medieval manuscripts and published them in her book without attribution.

The news, first reported by kath.ch, follows an eyebrow-raising exchange between the researcher who discovered his work had been used without citation and someone claiming to be the professor’s secretary, who told him, “nobody cares about your blog!”

The professor, Carla Rossi, is also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition, abbreviated as RECEPTIO. The center operates an academic press that published Rossi’s 2022 work, The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy: a.k.a. The Courtanvaux-Elmhirst Hours, Digitally Restored Through the Wayback Recovery Method.

The book describes a manuscript that Rossi purported to have digitally reconstructed.

Article that critiqued high-profile abortion study retracted

An article that critiqued a study on what happened after women did not get abortions that they sought has been retracted after observers raised concerns that the peer review process had not been objective.

The article, “The Turnaway Study: A Case of Self-Correction in Science Upended by Political Motivation and Unvetted Findings,” was originally published in Frontiers in Psychology in June of 2022.

The Turnaway Study itself was an effort of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed women who had received abortions and women who sought abortions but did not get them because they were too far along in their pregnancies “to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term,” according to its website.

Meet the publisher making the science of Brontë, Faulkner, and Whitman available for the first time

Waves have a higher energy thickness contrasted with other sustainable power sources, so it requires less space to create a similar measure of energy. The upside of these waves is that they convey measures of dynamic energy and keep them all through the excursion from the focal point of the ocean to the ocean side. The dynamic energy of the ocean waves is tackled to mechanical works like power age …

Few scholars of the work of William Faulkner know that the winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature toyed with the above passage in early drafts of his 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!

He went instead with the more memorable:

Researchers lost five papers soon after scientists critiqued another of their papers in Retraction Watch

A microbiology research group at the University of Hong Kong lost five papers for image duplication in late October, weeks after other scientists published a critique in Retraction Watch of one of the group’s COVID-19 articles.

The paper on COVID-19 was published in Cell in 2021 and was led by Patrick Chiu Yat Woo and Kwok-Yung Yuen, chair of infectious diseases in the university’s Department of Microbiology.

Writing in Retraction Watch in early October, Robert Speth of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Michael Bader of the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, described their experience notifying Cell of numerous errors in the paper, and the journal’s editor refusing to publish a correction.

Weeks later, five of Yuen and Woo’s papers were retracted from two journals published by the American Society for Microbiology:

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