A former research center director and professor emeritus of urology has lost a fourth paper after a joint investigation by the University of California San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center found faked data in several of his articles.
The retraction note, like some of the other editorial notes for Dahiya’s papers, cites the findings of a joint investigation by UCSF and the VA Medical Center:
The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted more than 400 papers “due to violations of IEEE’s peer-review process policies” after “a comprehensive internal investigation.”
The papers formed the proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Cities and Systems Engineering from 2016 through 2018. All of the meetings were reported as being held in cities in China.
Mere days after tweets went viral pointing out that the purported error bars in one figure of a paper were really just the capital letter T, the publisher has marked it with an expression of concern. [12/22/22: The paper has now been retracted; see an update on this post.]
And that’s not all that’s strange about the paper.
Academics affiliated with a journal that retracted a paper on predatory publishing last year — after one of the publishers mentioned in the analysis complained — have put out a letter critiquing the decision, saying the retraction “lacks justification.”
The authors of the retracted article appealed the decision to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), but lost. They republished their work in another journal last month.
As we reported last September, the Springer Nature journal Scientometrics retracted “Predatory publishing in Scopus: evidence on cross-country differences,” after receiving a letter from Fred Fenter, chief executive editor of Frontiers, one of the publishers included in the analysis, demanding the paper’s “swift retraction.” His key complaint: the article’s reliance on librarian Jeffrey Beall’s now-defunct list of allegedly predatory publishers.
A psychologist whose controversial publications on human behavior have attracted scrutiny for their implausible workload and impossible statistics has lost a third paper – seven years after sleuths first began questioning it.
Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France is listed as the paper’s sole author. We’ll let him describe the article, as he did in its abstract:
An early and influential paper on long COVID that appeared in The Lancet has been flagged with an expression of concern while the journal investigates “data errors” brought to light by a reader.
An editorial that accompanied the paper when it was published in January of last year described it as “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19. The article has received plenty of attention since then.
Over the past year, a professional society for cognitive therapists has been pondering what to do with dozens of decades-old articles about conversion therapy – the practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – in the archives of the journals it publishes.
The society, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), was considering a variety of options, including retraction.
But in a statement the group published earlier this month, ABCT said Elsevier, the journals’ publisher, would not allow retraction of the articles.
