Retraction Watch

ICYMI: Science editor encourages addressing integrity questions publicly

When scientists face critique of their published work, they should be proactive in responding to the issues and to questions about it from the public and the media, says Science editor-in-chief Holden Thorp in an editorial in the Feb. 14 Science.

“In an age of growing, intense attacks on science, silence can be detrimental to both public trust and the careers of scientists who are under scrutiny,” writes Thorp and coauthor Meagan Phelan, communications director for Science. “For better or worse, journalists, social media professionals, and the public may take a response of ‘no comment’ as a concession that the critics are correct, so forthright communication about research questions is more urgent than ever.”

Announcing the Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund

We’re thrilled to be partnering with foremost scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik on a new way to support scientific integrity: The Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund.

Bik is a renowned science integrity advocate and microbiologist who investigates and exposes research misconduct, including image duplication and data manipulation, to uphold transparency and ethical standards in scientific publishing.

The Fund, launched with the proceeds of Bik’s Einstein Award, will provide financial resources to Bik and other sleuths and collaborators, as well as provide funding for training programs, grants, or awards for science integrity advocates. Plans also include funding educational or outreach initiatives promoting transparency and accountability in scientific research. Based on a fiscal sponsorship model, and leveraging our experience in nonprofit development and administration, Bik will have full direction over the Fund’s resources.

Two papers coauthored by a dean retracted, with a third in question

Two papers on a novel approach for flood prediction have been retracted for “substantial overlap” between the works. The authors, including Debopam Acharya, dean of the School of Computing at DIT University in Uttarakhand, India, are contesting both retractions.

The articles, published in 2023, are “FLOODALERT: an internet of things based real-time flash flood tracking and prediction system,” which appeared in Multimedia Tools and Applications, and “An IoT-based system for monitoring and forecasting flash floods in real-time,” from Journal of Earth System Science. They have been cited seven and five times, respectively.

The articles were retracted after a concerned researcher, who also reached out to Retraction Watch, emailed each journal about problems with the papers.

ICYMI: Science is considering retracting ‘arsenic life’ paper

Felisa Wolfe-Simon at Mono Lake in 2010 (photo by Henry Bortman)

Science is finally considering retracting a 2010 paper claiming the discovery of a bacterium that could substitute arsenic for phosphorus in its chemical makeup. “We feel the best thing to do would be to retract the paper,” the journal’s editor-in-chief Holden Thorp told the New York Times in an article published Tuesday.

The article follows up with Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the lead author of the work who withdrew from science and public life after the intense spotlight from the work’s initial splash led to damaging criticism. She has recently gone back to the lab and in 2024 received a NASA exobiology grant.

Retraction Watch readers may recall that Science published numerous technical comments and two studies refuting the original work. In 2012, David Sanders — who would later become well-known as a sleuth — said in our pages that the “only responsible action on the part of Science would be to retract the original article.” He called again for the retraction in 2021.

As Springer Nature journal clears AI papers, one university’s retractions rise drastically

Neurosurgical Review has begun retracting scores of commentaries and letters to the editor after getting inundated by AI-generated manuscripts. At the top of the affiliations list: Saveetha University in Chennai, India, an institution that, as we reported with Science in 2023, engages in aggressive self-citation.

At publication time, Neurosurgical Review had retracted 129 papers so far this year. The journal, a Springer Nature publication, paused acceptance of letters to the editor and commentaries last fall.

In December we reported in another collaboration with Science that Neurosurgical Review paused accepting commentaries and letters to the editor last year after getting overwhelmed by submissions that appeared to be generated using large language models (LLMs).

As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use

The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a “fingerprint”: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement. Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.

Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigation published last month in The Conversation. And the tale of “vegetative electron microscopy” shows how nonsense phrases can enter the vocabulary of researchers and proliferate in the literature.

Weekend reads: Alzheimer’s researcher resigns; bad stats in biology; ethical reasoning in open science

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Mass resignations hit psychotherapy journal after publisher replaced editors.
Undisclosed conflicts, lightning-fast peer review: One Alzheimer’s journal’s role in a failed drug.
‘The fraud was not subtle’: Chemist blames students after ten papers retracted.
Editors resign from Springer immunology journal to launch nonprofit title.
Researcher removed from journal masthead, loses three more papers.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 55,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 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? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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

Editors resign from Springer immunology journal to launch nonprofit title

Several top editors of the Journal of Clinical Immunology, a Springer Nature title, have jumped ship to start a new, nonprofit journal with Rockefeller University Press.

Jean-Laurent Casanova, the resigning coeditor-in-chief, told Retraction Watch the move followed pressure from Springer to publish more papers as the journal prepared to become fully open access.

Editors from more than 20 other journals have taken similar actions in the past couple of years, as Retraction Watch has logged. Reasons for the walkouts vary, but editors often cite publishers’ perceived focus on paper quantity over quality.

Researcher removed from journal masthead, loses three more papers

A management journal has removed from its masthead an editor who was the subject of a Retraction Watch post last month.

Shalini Srivastava, a professor at the Jaipuria Institute of Management in India, was an associate editor at Employee Relations, an Emerald Publishing title. We reported last month that two articles she coauthored — one in Employee Relations and another in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, also an Emerald journal — were retracted because “a large portion of this article’s models, samples, and results are taken, without full and proper attribution, from” earlier work, both retraction notices read.

Following our report, Srivastava’s name disappeared from the editorial team page of Employee Relations. Asked to comment on the change, a spokesperson from Emerald’s research integrity department replied:

‘The fraud was not subtle’: Chemist blames students after ten papers retracted

While reviewing a manuscript for the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Caroline Kervarc-Genre and her colleague, Thibault Cantat, researchers at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, noticed something unusual.

The nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra buried in the supplementary information had striking irregularities: The baseline was interrupted in some parts, and the noise was the same from one spectrum to the next. “Noise being inherently random, repeating noise is only possible if the spectra are altered [or] fake,” Kervarc-Genre told Retraction Watch.

Starting to suspect something was wrong, she and Cantat, examined other papers by the lead author. They discovered data appeared to have been edited in several of the author’s latest publications. “The fraud was not subtle,” Kervarc-Genre said.

She had never come across such blatant fraud, she said, and was unsure about what to do, so turned to PubPeer to report the findings. Others soon joined, uncovering more troubling patterns in the work.

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