When we broke the story last week about a juicy retraction notice in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology (AJOG) — known by its readers as “the Gray Journal” — we wrote that there was more to it than we suspected. That’s an understatement. As we reported, the AJOG retracted an article that it had published … Continue reading Elsevier ob-gyn journal retracted paper after legal threat
Elsevier, the publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters, which retracted a paper questioning the second law of thermodynamics earlier this year, will issue an apology and pay $10,000 in legal fees. According to John West at the Discovery Institute’s blog, which broke the story:
Yesterday, we reported on 11 retractions in various Elsevier chemistry journals of papers from a group of Brazilian scientists who are alleged to have fabricated nuclear magnetic resonance images used in their articles. We’d spoken with the senior author on those papers, Claudio Airoldi, who defended himself and his colleagues and denied that the NMR … Continue reading Elsevier weighs in on Brazilian fraud case
The publisher Elsevier has announced that it is retracting 11 papers from a team of Brazilian researchers over concerns that the scientists committed fraud in the studies. The notice is pegged to an October 2009 article in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science titled “Immobilization of 5-amino-1,3,4-thiadiazole-thiol onto kanemite for thorium(IV) removal: Thermodynamics and … Continue reading Hazardous materials: Elsevier retracts 11 chemistry papers from Brazilian group, citing fraud
About two months ago, we posted an item on a curious retraction as the first installment in our Best of Retractions series. In the notice of the retraction in Agricultural Water Management, the editor wrote: Reason: During the second revision of the manuscript, the authors modified Figure 1 (changing the label from “Israel” to “Historical … Continue reading Update on a Best Of retraction: Elsevier edits notice suggesting renaming Israel “historical Palestine” was political
A newly appointed dean at the University of Guelph in Canada has had two papers retracted for “evidence of authorship manipulation.” Another article by the researcher, Moncef Nehdi, formerly of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, seems to match a paper that had its authorship advertised for sale, according to a post on PubPeer. Nehdi told … Continue reading New engineering dean has two retractions for authorship manipulation
Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles. Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications … Continue reading Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold
A scientific sleuth and a mother who nearly lost her daughter to a hormonal condition teamed up in January to flag a series of papers that misnamed a medication for pregnant women. They have recently started to see the fruits of their labors: one retraction and three corrections. In 2014, Tara Skopelitis, a lab manager … Continue reading First paper retracted in string of studies using the wrong medication name
In 2021, the provost of the University of Maryland, Baltimore sounded the alarm about a troubling batch of papers from the lab of Richard Eckert, the former chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the institution. The provost sent letters to the editors of seven journals calling out a string of serious … Continue reading Exclusive: One university’s three-year battle to retract papers with fake data
Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. So he took to PubPeer, an online site where scientists often discuss papers, to raise his concerns. An author of the study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure … Continue reading ‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers