Kale may be a superfood, but for one paper on the vegetable, Twitter proved to be its Kryptonite. We’ll explain.
Last November, Food Science & Nutrition published an article titled “Kale (Brassica oleracea var. sabellica) as miracle food with special reference to therapeutic and nutraceuticals perspective.”
How miraculous? As the authors, from Government College University in Faisalabad, Pakistan, wrote:
Sincere scholars work to expand society’s knowledge and understanding. They cite all the relevant research, even that produced by those they disagree with or personally dislike. They encourage debate. For the sincere scholar, a citation is a responsibility, and proper and thorough citations demonstrate research quality.
For the strategic scholar, a citation is an asset to be used career-advantageously. As a certain former governor of the State of Illinois once said about his responsibility to fill an open US senate position, “I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden. I’m not just giving it up for (expletive) nothing.”
Strategic scholars cite the work of their friends, working colleagues, those they agree with, and those who reference them. Indeed, the most successful career-strategic scholars operate in groups of like-minded colleagues in which they promote each other’s careers together—citation cartels. They draw attention to that other work which supports their own and their careers.
An Elsevier journal has retracted a paper that was listed by a firm claiming to sell authorships months after we reported on the site.
On Sept. 7, 2021, we published a story about the company, Teziran. On Sept. 14, pseudonymous sleuth Artemisia Stricta wrote to Ioannis Ieropoulos, the editor of Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments, which had published one of eight papers listed by Teziran as “ready for acceptance”:
It took about five months, but a virology journal has retracted a paper on the microbe that causes COVID-19 after tagging it with an expression of concern back in December.
As we reported then, the paper, “SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,” was a hit with vaccine skeptics who used the article to buttress their claims that Covid vaccines are unsafe.
Alexander Templeton works at the math library of Glen Liberty Community College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
At least that’s what a paper, “A bibliometric analysis of Atangana-Baleanu operators in fractional calculus,” Templeton appears to have published in the Alexandria Engineering Journal claims. But no Glen Liberty Community College appears to exist in Scottsbluff – or anywhere – and the Gmail address Templeton used as contact information no longer works. (There is a Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, but no Glen Liberty.)
A paper on the potential use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19 has been retracted for a litany of flaws, joining at least 10 other articles on the therapy some liked to promote without evidence to fall.
Mitch Brown was preparing last August to launch a follow-up study to a 2021 paper on coalitions when he found something in his computer coding that sent his stomach to his shoes.
As Brown, an experimental psychologist at the University of Arkansas, recalled for us:
An ob-gyn journal has retracted a clinically influential 2016 paper on the use of steroids in women undergoing cesarean delivery, citing questions about the data.
The study purported to involve nearly 1,300 women – making it the largest analysis of women receiving steroids for the indication in the trial. But Ben Mol, an ob-gyn researcher and data sleuth at Monash Medical Centre in Australia, noted that the paper – which has been cited 32 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science – was based on a thesis by the second author, M.M. Shafeek. Something in the two articles caught Mol’s eye, he told Retraction Watch: