Retraction Watch

Was leading sports medicine researcher’s plagiarism ‘an isolated and unfortunate incident?’

Earlier this week, we wrote about a case of plagiarism in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) involving a highly credentialed researcher and Australian Football League consultant who’d cribbed roughly half of an article from another scholar.

The researcher, Paul McCrory, has still not responded to our requests for comment. But in an email to Steve Haake, whose work McCrory lifted while editor of the BJSM, Paul McCrory said that the offense was:

an isolated and unfortunate incident …
That resulted from the uploading to the journals’ website of a “working draft” that “failed to appropriately cite your original and excellent work as the source of the manuscript.”

Unfortunate, yes. Isolated? That’s a bit less clear.

Author asks ‘Why? Why? And why?’ as his paper is retracted

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2020 paper on exposure among cement workers to a potentially harmful chemical for a litany of errors that one might have expected peer reviewers to catch before publication – and the corresponding author is not happy.

Titled “Citrate stabilized Fe3O4/DMG modified carbon paste electrode for determination of octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane in blood plasma and urine samples of cement factory workers,” the article, which appeared in BMC Chemistry, was written by Rashid Heidarimoghadam and Abbas Farmany, of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

Farmany, of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, also happens to be a member of the journal’s editorial board, although he joined after the paper was accepted.

According to the retraction notice:

‘This is frankly insulting’: An author plagiarized by a journal editor speaks

The British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted an editorial late last week by Paul McCrory, a former editor of the journal.

The publisher has joined the never-ending plagiarism euphemism parade. The retraction notice, which the journal embargoed until today despite having watermarked the editorial’s PDF “retracted” sometime Thursday or Friday, reads:

“This article has been retracted due to unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright. There was significant overlap with a previous publication, Physics, technology and the Olympics by Dr Steve Haake.”

Weekend reads: ‘Published crap;’ randomized grant awards; ‘Problems in Science Publishing’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments
Journal retracts a paper it published with a missing table after author fails to provide it
Which takes longer to produce: An infant who can sit on his own, or a retraction?
Publisher retracts 350 papers at once
Authors whose Springer Nature book was retracted for plagiarism solicit chapters for another
A U.S. federal science watchdog made just three findings of misconduct in 2021. We asked them why.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 213. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now 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):

A U.S. federal science watchdog made just three findings of misconduct in 2021. We asked them why.

Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the agency that oversees institutional investigations into misconduct in research funded by the NIH, as well as focusing on education programs.

Earlier this month, ORI released data on its case closures dating back to 2006. We’ve charted those data in the graphics below. In 2021, ORI made just 3 findings of misconduct, a drop from 10 — roughly the average over the past 15 years — in 2020. Such cases can take years.

As the first chart makes clear, a similar dip in ORI findings of misconduct occurred in 2016. That was then-director Kathy Partin’s first year in the role, and a time of some turmoil at the agency. In an interview with us then, Partin referred multiple times to the agency being short-staffed. Partin was removed from the post in 2017 and became intramural research integrity officer at the NIH in 2018.

ORI — as has often been the case over the past two decades — is once again without a permanent director. The most recent permanent director, Elisabeth (Lis) Handley, became Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health in July 2021.

We asked ORI to explain what’s behind the figures. A spokesperson responded on their behalf.

Authors whose Springer Nature book was retracted for plagiarism solicit chapters for another

If you had a book retracted for plagiarism, would you submit a book proposal to the same publisher? And if you were that publisher, would you entertain said pitch?

These, dear reader, are not idle questions.

Publisher retracts 350 papers at once

IOP Publishing has retracted a total of 350 papers from two different 2021 conference proceedings because an “investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

The case is just the latest involving the discovery of papers full of gibberish – aka “tortured phrases” – thanks to the work of Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, Cyril Labbé, of University Grenoble-Alpes and Alexander Magazinov, of Skoltech, in Moscow. The tool detects papers that contain phrases that appear to have been translated from English into another language, and then back into English, likely with the involvement of paper-generating software.

The papers were in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series (232 articles), and IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (118 articles), plus four editorials.

According to IOP’s Rachael Harper, head of marketing communications, 20 of the papers were listed in the Problematic Paper Screener:

Which takes longer to produce: An infant who can sit on his own, or a retraction?

Joe Hilgard’s son wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s sharp eye for bad data when an Elsevier journal notified the social psychologist that it intended to retract a 2015 article he’d flagged on the link between exposure to violent media and aggression in adolescents.

Well, the journal has finally retracted the paper – but not before Hilgard’s son was born and started speaking (more on that in a moment).

Hilgard’s ability to spot bad data, and his tenacity at holding journals accountable for their publications, has now led to five retractions. Four of those papers belong to a researcher in China named Qian Zhang, of Southwest University in Chongqin. As readers of this blog might recall, Zhang lost a pair of papers in 2019 after Hilgard and others raised questions about the integrity of the data.

As Hilgard, who also notified Southwest University about his findings, told us back in 2019 about Zhang’s previously retracted papers:

Journal retracts a paper it published with a missing table after author fails to provide it

Mark Oniffrey, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Can you retract something that never existed in the first place? At least one journal thinks the answer to that conundrum is yes.

That journal would be Medicine. In September 2020, the Wolters Kluwer journal published a paper titled “Tranexamic acid reduces blood cost in long-segment spinal fusion surgery: A randomized controlled study protocol” by a group in China led by Linyu Yang, of the Department of Orthopedics at the Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, in Sichuan.

The article promised – but failed to deliver – a “Table 1”, an omission the peer reviewers and journal staff missed during the production process. Five months later, said table still had not materialized, prompting the following notice:

How to find evidence of paper mills using peer review comments

Finding papers produced by paper mills has become a major headache for many of the world’s largest publishers over the past year, and they’re largely playing catch-up since sleuths began identifying them a few years ago. But there may be a new way: Earlier this month, Adam Day, a data scientist at SAGE Publishing, posted a preprint on arXiv that used a variety of methods to search for duplication in peer review comments, based on the likelihood that paper mills “create fake referee accounts and use them to submit fake peer-review reports.” We asked Day several questions about the approach.

Retraction Watch (RW): Tell us a bit about the methods you used.

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