Elsevier has subjected an entire special issue of a journal — including a paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save — to an expression of concern.
Co-author James Steele, one of the sleuths who brought the issues to attention
Retractions are slowly stacking up for an exercise researcher in Brazil whose work has come under scrutiny by data sleuths, including a couple of his erstwhile co-authors. The concerns prompted an investigation by his former institution into one of his academic supervisors, who may be facing sanctions, Retraction Watch has learned.
In June 2020, the sleuths posted a preprint calling for the retraction of seven papers by the researcher, Matheus Barbalho, a PhD student at the Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, part of the Universidade da Amazônia, in Belém. The reason, according to the sleuths – who included James Steele and James Fisher, of Solent University in the United Kingdom, both of whom were co-authors on papers with Barbalho: the data were, in their view “atypical, improbable, and to put it bluntly, pretty weird.”
Ettore Majorana, after whom the “Majorana” particle is named By unknown author / Mondadori Collection, public domain
You might say that the third time is not the charm for a paper on some elusive fermions.
For the third time this year, a leading science journal has raised concerns about a paper on the “Majorana” particle, which, if it exists, would hold promise for building a quantum computer.
include but are not limited to submission patterns consistent with the use of paper mills, collusion between authors and reviewers during the review process, inappropriate subject matter as compared to the Journal’s Aims and Scope, poor quality peer review and requests for inappropriate citation.
A look at the first three titles suggests that they were, indeed, far out of scope:
A physics journal has retracted a 2017 paper after learning that the authors had tried to pass off the ideas of others as their own.
Normally, we’d just call that a case of plagiarism and move on. But in this case, the charge goes a bit deeper – less cribbing a few lines of the Principia and more claiming to have discovered gravity.
This is an evolving story, and we will update as we learn more.
A paper in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports claiming there was essentially no evidence that lockdowns prevented COVID-19 deaths has been retracted.
As of late Monday US Eastern time, while the PDF of the paper was marked “RETRACTED ARTICLE,” a link to the retraction notice’s DOI that had appeared on the page — but did not resolve to anything — had disappeared. The notice appeared at approximately 7 a.m. US Eastern on Tuesday.
Here’s the retraction notice, provided to us by Springer Nature Tuesday morning before it went live:
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a paper sourced from a paper mill – not an uncommon occurrence nowadays. What adds a bit of intrigue is that the manuscript was submitted with a fake email address to keep the alleged corresponding author from knowing about it.
A veterinary journal has retracted — in a big way — a 2021 paper about bowel disease in dogs by a group of authors who failed to disclose key conflicts of interest and then appear to have lied about the omission when pressed.
The first author was Juan Estruch, of Vetica Labs, a rather opaque company based in San Diego and of which Estruch is listed in securities documents as having been the CEO back in 2015.
