Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Harvard sued over retracted paper; ‘retraction with honor’; critiquing our fake peer review coverage

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions
250th COVID-19 retraction is for faked ethics approval
Papers in Croce case with “blatantly obvious” problems still aren’t retracted after misconduct investigation: sleuth

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 250. There are more than 34,000 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):

Papers in Croce case with “blatantly obvious” problems still aren’t retracted after misconduct investigation: sleuth

This week, Nature reported on two institutional reports that found scientists in Carlo Croce’s cancer research lab at The Ohio State University had committed research misconduct including plagiarism and data falsification.

Another institutional investigation directed at Croce did not find he committed research misconduct but did identify problems with how he managed his lab, according to Nature.

It’s the latest chapter in a years-long saga of mounting numbers of corrections and retractions for Croce, a 2017 article in the New York Times that brought him to widespread attention, a scientist sleuth trying to clean up the literature, and lots and lots of lawyers, some of whom may have a claim on Croce’s house after he didn’t pay his legal bills.

250th COVID-19 retraction is for faked ethics approval

Researchers in Iran have lost a paper on Covid-19 infection in a two-month-old boy after the journal learned that they’d fabricated ethics approval for the article.

It’s the 250th Covid-19 retraction by our count.

“Coronavirus disease 2019 in a 2-month-old male infant: a case report from Iran” appeared in December 2020 in Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics. The senior author of the paper was Sajjad Ahmadpour, of the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Diseases Research Center at Qom University of Medical Sciences.

According to the retraction notice (which doesn’t appear in the expected place but can be found here):

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions

Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.

The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.

One 2021 article, “Numerical investigation of nanofluid flow using CFD and fuzzy-based particle swarm optimization,” drew a significant amount of attention on PubPeer. In January, a commenter pointed out a variety of apparent problems with the paper and noted that questions have been raised about other work by members of the group – including this now-retracted article in … Scientific Reports.

Weekend reads: How to fix peer review; a research ethics oath; papers become less readable

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Author objects to “irrelevant reviewers” as journal retracts four papers
Meet the hijacked journal that keeps rising from the ashes
Engineering researcher who cast blame on co-author will soon have 12 retractions
Lawsuit prompts retraction of book chapter on outdated birth surgery
Exclusive: Former associate dean and ‘highly cited researcher’ was demoted by university
Do you use the Retraction Watch Database? We can really use your help.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 249. There are more than 34,000 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):

Exclusive: Former associate dean and ‘highly cited researcher’ was demoted by university

A former associate dean for research at the University of Wyoming who was named as one of Clarivate’s Highly Cited Researchers for 2021 was sanctioned by the university years ago, Retraction Watch has learned.

Jun Ren, who studies the heart and diabetes, left Wyoming sometime in 2019 or 2020, according to a press release noting his citation achievements, after serving at different times as director of the NIH-funded INBRE program as well as associate dean. But following an investigation of his work between 2013 and 2015 that Ren says found “reckless mistakes” and “no intention to obtain specific results,” he was removed as director of what he says was a multi-million dollar research program and lost “administrative, editorial, grant review and advisor positions.”

Ren now says that he

Lawsuit prompts retraction of book chapter on outdated birth surgery

Springer Nature has retracted a 2020 chapter in a digital book – along with a related introduction – after a judge in Ireland ruled that the paper defamed another researcher and two attorneys.

“Truth or Dare; Women, Politics, and the Symphysiotomy Scandal”, was written by Oonagh Walsh, a professor of gender studies at Glasgow Caledonian University. The text appeared as Chapter 11 in the e-book GeoHumanities and Health, Global Perspectives on Health Geography.

The scandal, according to The Guardian, involved the controversial use of a surgery in which physicians:

Engineering researcher who cast blame on co-author will soon have 12 retractions

A civil engineering researcher will soon have 12 retractions to his name after a data sleuth notified journals of issues with image reuse in the papers.

Jorge de Brito, a professor at the University of Lisbon, has lost four papers in Construction and Building Materials, two in the Journal of Building Engineering, of which he had been editor-in-chief, and another in Engineering Structures since we reported in March on retractions for a pair of researchers in Iran with whom de Brito had coauthored papers.

Editors of the Magazine of Concrete Research have decided to retract another paper, “Improved bending behaviour of steel-fibre-reinforced recycled aggregate concrete beams with a concrete jacket,” we learned from a staffer who copied Retraction Watch on an email to the data sleuth who raised concerns. The paper has been cited eight times, and this retraction would bring de Brito’s total to 12.

Meet the hijacked journal that keeps rising from the ashes

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.

In early 2021, unknown hijackers stole the domain of the Turkish Journal of Rehabilitation and Physiotherapy. According to the journal’s legitimate publishers:

Author objects to “irrelevant reviewers” as journal retracts four papers

Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports has retracted four papers by a researcher in Saudi Arabia who claims “irrelevant reviewers” just couldn’t understand “a new area of statistics.”

Here’s the notice for one of the articles, “Neutrosophic statistical test for counts in climatology,” which appeared in September 2021 and has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: