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.
Svein Åge K. Johnsen and Ingeborg Olsdatter Busterud Flagstad, of the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, have been trying to publish a manuscript on the psychology of green entrepreneurship.
In January 2021, they submitted it to the International Small Business Journal, a SAGE publication. The editors rejected it without sending it to peer review. So did The Journal of Entrepreneurship, another SAGE title. So Johnsen and Flagstad submitted it to Cogent Business & Management, a Taylor & Francis title.
And then, on December 25, as perhaps the worst Christmas present ever, they saw the paper published – by someone else.
Science has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on the harmful effects of ocean acidification on fish and coral after the first author of the article was accused of fabricating data in the study and other research.
The work – cited 171 times so far, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science – received immediate challenge from other researchers, who questioned the validity of the findings.
MDPI was about to publish a special issue in one of its journals to fete the career of a retired dean. But after Retraction Watch informed the co-editors of the issue that the researcher, Kishor Wasan, had abruptly retired after being found to have plagiarized a 2019 book review for The Lancet, the publisher evidently decided to cancel the planned celebration.
The special issue of Pharmaceutics – here’s a Wayback Machine link – was to be “in honour of Professor Kishor M Wasan’s remarkable contributions to the pharmaceutics field.”
But now it is gone, and prompts a 404 error rather than any explanation.
A leading repository of social science which is owned by Elsevier has reposted an article it removed on New Year’s Day after the author was accused of defamation and the site was threatened with legal action if it didn’t remove the paper.
The article in question was written by Ann Lipton, the associate dean for faculty research at Tulane University Law School and appeared on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
Titled “Capital Discrimination,” the paper – which has been accepted by the Houston Law Review – explores:
The article as it appears at the time of this writing
Yes, you read that headline right.
In January 2021, we reported that The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (JSCR) would soon be retracting two papers because a graduate student had committed misconduct in the work.
The journal – the official research publication of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NCSA) – did retract the papers, according to a notice posted to PubMed and on the title’s site, both dated March 2021.
A journal has issued expressions of concern for a pair of 2021 meta-analyses purporting to find that ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid-19 after data sleuths raised questions about some of the research in the studies.
As we reported last fall, one of the two papers – “Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines” – began to wobble when data central to its conclusion were retracted from the journal Viruses. That article has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, making it a highly-cited, “hot” paper.
The other article was titled “Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19” and was written by a group led by Pierre Kory. Kory is a controversial Wisconsin physician whose ideas about how to treat the infection, and particularly ivermectin, have made him a darling of ivermectin proponents like Joe Rogan.
The two meta-analyses were the subject of an editorial in the November/December 2021 issue of the journal by its editor, Peter Manu, who cautioned that:
There’s a new entry on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. And this one is also the fourth member of the Retraction Watch Century Club.
An anesthesiology researcher in Japan is now up to 117 retractions – putting him third on our list of most-retracted authors.
Hironobu Ueshima, formerly of Showa University Hospital in Tokyo, was found to have committed misconduct in 142 papers, according to a pair of investigations, one by his erstwhile institution and another by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists (JSA). We first reported on the existence of the investigation in June 2020, some three months after Australian anesthesiologist and journal editor John Loadsman raised concerns with journals involved in the case.
