Posted by: Ellie Kincaid

24Jan / 2024

Exclusive: Elsevier journal COPE threatened with sanctions will retract four more articles

Andrew Grey

The journal a publication ethics watchdog threatened with sanctions for taking years to retract articles will pull four more related papers, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Last July, the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) sent a warning letter to Elsevier regarding 10 papers by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who hold positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions, that the publisher had said it would retract three and a half years ago. 

As we reported previously, seven of the papers were retracted from Journal of the Neurological Sciences in December 2023. 

Following our reporting on COPE’s letter to Elsevier, the publisher has decided to retract the remaining three articles, plus a letter regarding one of the retracted papers, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch. 

Andrew Grey, a professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who first contacted the Journal of Neurological Sciences about concerns with Sato’s papers in 2017, told us the move is “a good outcome for publication integrity, albeit long overdue. I am sure we will never know what happened to cause the absurd delay.”

Elsevier has not responded to repeated requests since January 12 for comment about these four upcoming retractions.

The work of Grey and colleagues Alison Avenell and Mark Bolland to expose problems in Sato’s research has led to more than 120 retractions, but in a recent analysis they found publishers have yet to assess nearly a third of the papers about which they have raised concerns. Yesterday, Science published a detailed report on the saga to date. “Retractions come slowly—often years after complaints arise, if at all—in part because journals may defer to institutional investigations, which can be slow, unreliable, or absent,” Science noted. “Journals’ decisions also lack transparency.”

In June 2020, after Elsevier hadn’t acted on his concerns and Grey sought help from COPE, the publisher said it would retract the 10 papers he had flagged. When it still hadn’t years later, and had apparently stopped responding to COPE’s inquiries, the organization sent Elsevier a warning letter stating that the journal’s behavior was “inconsistent with the standards that we expect from COPE members.”  

The publisher subsequently retracted seven of the articles, but in a January 12, 2024 email seen by Retraction Watch, Mihail Grecea, a senior expert in publishing ethics at Elsevier, wrote that COPE’s letter hadn’t included “a detailed enough ‘Summary of concern’ which would grant for retraction” of three of the papers. 

Grey informed Grecea that Kurume University had recommended retracting one of them for authorship misconduct, and the other two articles shared coauthors with that paper. 

“More broadly, 119 of Dr Sato’s publications have now been retracted,” Grey wrote. “Why should readers have any confidence that any of his remaining publications are reliable? In the absence of robust evidence of reliability, they should all be retracted.” 

He requested Elsevier also retract a letter, “Reply to Davie and Sharp: different mechanisms of bone metabolism between patients with stroke and with spinal cord injury,” that Sato and his coauthors had written in 1999. Grey wrote: 

It refers to the now-retracted paper J Neurol Sci 1998;156:205–10, and cites 7 other retracted papers (refs 5-11) by the Sato research group.

It is rather clearly not reliable.

Grecea responded: 

Given the rather scarce evidence regarding the three papers in the document provided by COPE, I tried to contact myself the Kurume University and the Futase Social Insurance Hospital (both listed by the three papers as the affiliations of the authors of the three papers).

Kurume University has responded at the end of December and I am currently working on the three retractions. I would estimate the 3+1 retractions to appear online around the end of this month.

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22Jan / 2024

Sociology journal’s entire editorial board resigns after Springer Nature appointed new leadership

The entire editorial board of a sociology journal has resigned after they say that the publisher, Springer Nature, installed new editors-in-chief without consulting the board — but Springer Nature says they tried unsuccessfully to engage the board on planning going back at least five years.

In December 2023, senior editors of the journal, Theory and Society, learned Springer Nature “had opted for a ‘completely different view’ of the journal going forward,” according to a message shared on a listserv for the American Sociological Association and published on the blog Scatterplot. The 10 senior editors subsequently resigned, they told their colleagues, but didn’t offer additional details. 

On January 4, the journal’s corresponding editors also resigned, according to a resignation letter shared with the sociology listserv. The corresponding editors cited Springer Nature’s decision to replace Janet Gouldner, the former executive editor (and widow of the journal’s founding editor, Alvin Gouldner), without consulting the rest of the editorial board. They wrote: 

Springer Nature’s unyielding position on this was a clear violation of our profession’s academic norms and standards and was fundamentally at odds with the spirit of the journal. Given our long service and dedication to the journal, we were extremely disappointed that at no point in the publisher’s effort to install a new Executive Editor was a single one of the Senior Editors (nor, to our knowledge, any of the Corresponding Editors) consulted regarding their vision for the future of the journal. Additionally, their attempts to have input into the process of selecting new leadership for the journal were repeatedly rebuffed. We are unaware of any other publisher handling its relationship with an editorial board in such a dismissive fashion.

For us, this is not only about Theory and Society, but more broadly, the precedent of for-profit owners of academic journals unilaterally installing their selected editors. At stake here is how much control we academics are willing to give to for-profit publishers who have so much influence over our professional trajectories on the one hand and rely on our uncompensated labor on the other.

The mass resignation is the latest in a growing list, as academic researchers increasingly see themselves at odds with for-profit journal publishing companies. 

Teresa Krauss, Publishing Director for Humanities, Social, Behavioural and Health Sciences at Springer Nature, told us: 

We have spent a number of years assessing the journal, including the authors’ experience of the journal, and considering whether its scope reflects changes in the discipline.  Feedback from researchers suggested that the field was becoming more interdisciplinary, although the scope of the journal remained unchanged.  We also received a sustained volume of correspondence from submitting authors over this time which expressed deep concerns regarding turnaround times for their submissions. We concluded that it was necessary to reduce turnaround times and to develop the journal to better serve our authors and the wider research community.

The decision to appoint a new Editor in Chief was not made lightly or without consultation. We recognise and are grateful for the many years of distinguished leadership of the journal by Dr Janet Gouldner, who had held the post since 1981. Discussions with Dr Gouldner regarding the need to find a successor, including whether one could be found from within the then Senior Editors, took place over several years but were unsuccessful. We also raised the issue of succession planning with five of the senior editors in 2019 in person, but they were unwilling to enter into discussions on the subject. Regretfully, eventually a decision had to be made to press ahead with appointing a successor with an editorial vision that reflected our shared goals for the journal.

We began working with the new Editors-in-Chief to recruit a new Editorial team after we received a letter of resignation from the previous Corresponding Editors. We are looking to internationalise and diversify the editorial board pool over the coming months.

The two new editors in chief, Kevin McCaffree, an associate professor of sociology at the University of North Texas in Denton, and Jonathan Turner of the University of California, Riverside, have published a “Statement of Goals for Theory and Society,” subtitled “The Troubled State of Sociology.” 

In it, they wrote that “a monoculture of critical approaches utterly dominate” their discipline, “and, though often well-intentioned, this monoculture is undermining sociology’s professional legitimacy.” They continued: 

This is an unacceptable state of affairs and calls for a theory journal devoted to scientific sociological theorizing. Theorizing in sociology has always been eclectic, and we will continue this tradition, but what’s needed is a platform to unify these perspectives into a broad but disciplined scientific perspective. Theory and Society is now one of these platforms.

The new editors also promised “drastically shorter turnaround times for submitted papers,” special issues, and new article formats. 

Many sociologists criticized the statement on X (formerly named Twitter):

One called the change in leadership a “coup”:

“Everyone knows that the review times were a bit crazy,” wrote another sociologist, “but that is surely no justification for this attack on intellectual independence by a for-profit publisher. This is a major loss.” 

In a blog post, a sociologist at the University of Maryland described a recent paper by Turner as “a White-male-grievance monument to laziness and entitlement.”

“For both the way Springer handled it, and because of Turner’s attitude and the journal’s stated mission, I won’t be submitting to or reviewing for the journal (which, granted, I have yet to ever do, anyway), and suggest others follow suit,” Philip N. Cohen wrote.

McCaffree told Retraction Watch he’d been invited to interview for the position. He said he was told “that turnaround times needed to be shortened and that the publishing vision needed to be more scientific, less political and more interdisciplinary.” He continued: 

Then we just got to work. The decision to remove the old board was made before I was asked to interview.

We do want to see the field improve along the lines suggested above, but that’s it. We don’t have any deeper agenda. 

I think, with any widescale shift in a journal’s board and direction, some people will be upset. Others will be intrigued and motivated. But, frankly, Jon and I do not answer for Springer;  their decision to change direction was theirs to make and – also – had the old board not resigned in a huff, we would have been happy to have many of them continue to serve.  But, they did resign, and we respect that decision. Our only focus now is on finding and platforming the best sociological theory we can find.

Turner told us he’d also been invited to edit the journal. He expected to “keep at least some of the board to sustain that part of the journal’s long-term tradition but add new members to reflect our desire to broaden the scope of theoretical approaches appearing in the journal.” 

The publisher, Turner said, “simply eliminated some [of] the board at the very time we were beginning to ask some to remain.” He and McCaffree have tried to bring some former board members back on, and recruit new members “that have a critical perspective,” he said, but they have refused. 

Besides assembling a new board, the incoming editors-in-chief are focused on going through a backlog of submissions, some over a year old, Turner said, to decide whether to send them out for review.  

Turner said:  

I remain surprised and saddened about the reaction of the board that consisted of many fine scholars. I don’t quite see why they are so upset but I cannot do much to change their minds in what appears to be an attempt, I guess, to punish Springer. For Kevin and me, we just need to keep the journal going as editors; and, at least on my part, I am simply ignoring the controversy and hope that when our first issues come out, everyone will see that the journal is meeting its mission to publish theories relevant to understanding the organization of human societies.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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10Jan / 2024

Exclusive: COPE threatens Elsevier journal with sanctions for ‘clear breakdown’ before seven retractions

An Elsevier journal has retracted seven articles by a prolific data fabricator – three and a half years after the publisher said it would retract 10 of his papers, and five months after the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) threatened the journal with sanctions for the delay. 

As we previously reported, the Journal of the Neurological Sciences had decided by June 2020 to retract 10 articles by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who are currently in positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions. But the papers remained intact until December 2023, when seven were retracted. The remaining three are still unmarked. 

“We have no idea why it took so long,” said Andrew Grey, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, who with colleagues Alison Avenell and Mark Bolland has scrutinized the work of Sato and Iwamoto. The group’s efforts have led to more than 100 retractions, but publishers have yet to assess a significant number of papers about which they have raised concerns. 

“We very much doubt that any action at all would have been forthcoming if we had not raised concerns, then followed up on multiple occasions, despite Elsevier having considerable knowledge of the Sato/Iwamoto integrity concerns,” Grey told Retraction Watch. “The involvement of COPE was probably pivotal in pushing the publisher to act, but, again, had we not repeatedly enquired of COPE as to what was happening, it is likely that nothing would have transpired.” 

Grey and his colleagues first contacted the Journal of Neurological Sciences about concerns with two of Sato’s papers in 2017. They flagged eight others in the next two years. 

“The journal editor didn’t engage with the issue, the Elsevier journal manager responded occasionally but unhelpfully, the Elsevier integrity staff ignored requests for updates,” Grey said. 

In 2020, after years of inaction, Grey requested help from COPE. Soon after COPE got involved, the Elsevier director of publishing services said the journal editor and society affiliated with the journal had decided to retract the problematic articles. 

“Given that we have made extensive efforts to find and contact all authors, we plan to now proceed with these retractions, unless COPE has serious concerns about this approach,” the Elsevier representative wrote in June 2020. 

When nothing had happened after two years, Grey and his colleagues followed up with COPE. The organization conducted another review, and in July 2023 sent a letter to Elsevier research integrity staff noting the publisher had not responded to “repeated communications” or retracted the articles. 

The letter, signed by Iratxe Puebla, Facilitation and Integrity Officer, stated COPE was considering sanctions for the journal for “refus[ing] or fail[ing] to engage with COPE to remediate ethical issues.” It continued: 

A group of three Trustees has reviewed the case and concluded that there is a clear breakdown in process speed and transparency at the journal level and/or publisher to journal communication. This is of particular concern in this case given that the articles report research involving humans and thus have implications for human health, in such situations the relevant COPE flowcharts would typically suggest an interim Expression of Concern to alert readers to the concerns about the publications. Consequently, the Trustee Board considers that the journal’s initial response, and the lack of follow-up response or steps to correct the record, are inconsistent with the standards that we expect from COPE members.

Puebla asked the journal to improve its processes, including those for investigating concerns about articles, communicating with the readers who raised the concerns, responding to COPE’s requests for information, and issuing retractions. Regarding the Sato papers the journal still hadn’t retracted, she wrote: 

We understand that the follow up on matters related to the accuracy or integrity of published work can take time, however, the journal indicated that a decision had been reached to retract the articles three years ago. We view the time elapsed as protracted and in breach of expectations per the Retraction guidelines. We request that you proceed with the publication of the retractions – or an appropriate public notification on the articles – without further delay. 

COPE gave the journal six months to make changes and report back on its progress, with a deadline of Jan. 31, 2024. 

At that point, the organization would “evaluate whether you have taken adequate steps to address our concerns about compliance with expectations of COPE members or, on the other hand, whether any further follow-up or further sanctions are required,” the letter stated. 

Based on COPE’s process for sanctions, the letter to Elsevier seems to fall under the first category of actions: “Private, written notification to both journal and publisher that the member has failed to comply with COPE principles,” with opportunity to improve. Subsequently, members could be placed on probation, then have their membership revoked. 

Puebla has not responded to our request for comment on the letter and whether COPE was still considering sanctions for the journal. 

John D. England, the editor in chief of the Journal of Neurological Sciences, has not responded to our request for comment. An Elsevier spokesperson sent us the following comment: 

We are continuing to investigate the papers published in the Journal of Neurological Sciences and have reached out to the institutions where the research took place for additional information. We will continue to publish corrections to the record where appropriate and according to COPE guidelines and our own policies.

Grey told Retraction Watch that one of the Elsevier staffers to whom the letter was addressed, Mihail Grecea, a senior expert in publishing ethics, contacted him in November with the news that seven of the papers would be retracted. 

The following articles were retracted in early December: 

The papers have been cited more than 300 times collectively, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, with two dozen citations since Elsevier told Grey and COPE it would retract them. 

Their retraction notices are nearly identical, and copy the “concerns” COPE summarized in a table appended to its letter. One notice stated: 

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief due to concerns about the integrity of the research reported. Numerous concerns have been raised and verified regarding this article, including uncertain funding, implausible recruitment, implausible laboratory testing, overlapping and duplicate data with other publications, impossible data, and implausible investigator workload.

The Editor-in-Chief no longer has confidence in this article and decided to retract it.

Grecea’s email “implied that there was not enough grounds for retracting” the remaining three papers, Grey said, although a university investigation recommended retracting one of them for authorship misconduct. The other two articles shared coauthors, including the senior author, with the paper for which the university found authorship misconduct, he said. 

“Thus, it appears that Elsevier/JNS is reneging on its earlier undertaking to retract all 10 publications by the Sato/Iwamoto group,” Grey said. As he wrote in a reply to Grecea: 

More broadly, 119 of Dr Sato’s publications have now been retracted. Why should readers have any confidence that any of his remaining publications are reliable? In the absence of robust evidence of reliability, they should all be retracted.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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08Jan / 2024

Journals retract six Didier Raoult papers for ethics violations

Didier Raoult

Two journals of a leading microbiology society have retracted six articles by Didier Raoult after a university investigation found breaches of research ethics in his work. 

A seventh article by authors affiliated with the research institute Raoult formerly led was also retracted for ethical issues. 

In comments to Retraction Watch, Raoult, who has filed a criminal complaint against a scientist who found issues in his publications, called the retractions “just another form of science censorship” based on “complete ignorance” of France’s research ethics laws.

The American Society for Microbiology, which publishes the journals in which the articles appeared, marked most of the papers with expressions of concern in September 2022. The notices stated that the articles were “being reviewed as part of a ‘scientific misconduct investigation’ by the University of Aix Marseille.” 

That investigation has apparently concluded, as each retraction notice mentions its findings with similar wording. The notice for one paper stated: 

Following the publication of the Expression of Concern at https://doi.org/10.1128/aac.00782-22, the University of Aix Marseille conducted an ethical assessment of this letter to the editor, for which the majority of the authors were also affiliated with IHU Méditerranée Infection. The ethics committee, comprising independent and international members, specifically evaluated participant recruitment for the study, sample collection, and whether the authors had appropriate ethical approvals from the Institutional Review Board.

According to the investigation report, the sentence in the letter reading “This study was performed after ethical approval by the local ethics committee (accession number 10–002, 2010)” is incorrect. Furthermore, this kind of study conducted for research purposes falls “under the French law on the protection of research participants, therefore, it should have been submitted to CPP (Committees of the Protection of Persons). Formally, this paper could not be deemed in conformity with the Declaration of Helsinki and the French Law and regulations.”

In light of the severity of the research ethics breach indicated by these findings and in accordance with COPE guidelines, this article is being retracted by ASM and AAC.

These are the seven retracted papers, which have collectively been cited more than 150 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science: 

The editors in chief of both journals that retracted papers told Retraction Watch they had no comment beyond the published notices. 

Scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik, who was one of the people who uncovered issues in Raoult’s work (and whom he sued), wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter): 

Other researchers flagged four of the now-retracted papers in an analysis that found issues with the ethics approvals of 456 studies published by researchers affiliated with the IHU Méditerranée Infection, including “248 [that] were conducted with the same ethics approval number, even though the subjects, samples, and countries of investigation were different.” 

Raoult retired as director of IHU-MI in 2022 after overseeing it since 2011. His retirement followed an inspection by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products that found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”

The retractions from the American Society for Microbiology are the latest in a string of publisher’s actions on Raoult’s articles. In October, Scientific Reports retracted two papers because the authors “were not able to provide documentation of appropriate approval from an ethics committee.” The publisher PLOS has marked nearly 50 of Raoult’s articles with expressions of concern related to ethics, and Elsevier is investigating an unspecified number of papers that appeared in New Microbes and New Infections and its other journals. 

In response to our request for comment, Raoult said he had been “harassed following incredulity on government and scientific press on covid 19.” 

He continued: 

The retractions are based on very primitive analysis of gels that we demonstrated are wrong, the failure to send the original western blor [sic] of a 23 year old paper and a complete ignorance of the ethic laws of France

This in [sic] insane and in contrast with most justice process this is not a balanced analysis

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05Jan / 2024

Elsevier’s Scopus to continue indexing MDPI’s Sustainability after reevaluation

Scopus has completed its reevaluation of MDPI’s journal Sustainability and will continue to index the title, according to the publisher. 

As Retraction Watch previously reported, Scopus, a product of Elsevier, had paused indexing articles from Sustainability at the end of October while reevaluating whether to include the journal. Removal from the index can lead to a decline in submissions because universities and funders use Scopus to create journal “whitelists.”

The reevaluation process concluded January 4, according to Stefan Tochev, CEO of MDPI. 

“Following this evaluation, it has been determined that Sustainability meets Scopus’s content selection standards,” Tochev said.  The content that was not indexed during the reevaluation will be added to Scopus within the next 4 weeks.

We asked Elsevier for comment on Scopus’ decision, and a spokesperson responded: 

The review was done according to the regular Scopus quality criteria and the decision was made to continue coverage by Scopus. Details about the journal review are confidential.

As we have noted:

In 2022, Norway removed Sustainability from its list of journals that researchers get credit for publishing in, and Finland followed suit at the beginning of 2023. 

…
The number of articles from Sustainability indexed in Scopus has increased nearly every year since 2009, its first year of coverage, when 78 articles were indexed. In 2022, the journal published over 17,000 articles. Scopus indexed about 13,500 in 2023, before the pause.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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04Jan / 2024

‘We should have followed up’: Lancet journal retracts article on hearing aids and dementia after prodding

via pxhere

When Jure Mur, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, realized the replication of a published study he was working on as a “sanity check” wasn’t producing matching results, his first reaction was “annoyance,” he said. 

He assumed the mistake was his own, and he’d have to thoroughly check his work to find it. “Only after double- and triple-checking my code did I start suspecting an error in the original paper,” Mur told Retraction Watch. 

Mur emailed the authors of the article several times, but they never responded to him, he said. He next contacted the editors of The Lancet Public Health, which had published the original paper, “Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort,” in April 2023. 

In months of back-and-forth correspondence, seen by Retraction Watch, Mur explained the discrepancies he’d found, then submitted a comment article the editors declined to publish. 

The paper was retracted in December, but only after Mur pushed the editors to consider the implications of the authors’ response to his comment, which confirmed his findings and contradicted their original paper. 

“The end result is positive for the scientific community,” Mur said. But because the editors seemed to address the issue he raised only after he and his colleagues submitted a comment article, and “either did not read or did not understand the response to our comment,” he said the experience “made me doubt the integrity of the editorial process at the journal.” 

Given the high praise the article received when it was first published, the analysis should be corrected and republished, not just retracted, said Jan Blustein, a professor at New York University who studies hearing loss.  

“It was declared to be the final word, and it’s apparently not,” she said. 

The Lancet Public Health article made international headlines when it appeared, from Der Spiegel to CNN (also in Spanish) to The Daily Mail. (CNN has added an update about the retraction to their story and removed references to the study.) It has been cited 15 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

“In people with hearing loss,” the authors wrote, “hearing aid use is associated with a risk of dementia of a similar level to that of people without hearing loss.” They proposed “up to 8% of dementia cases could be prevented with proper hearing loss management.”

In a simultaneously published editorial–now also retracted–other researchers wrote that with the addition of the article’s data, “the evidence that hearing aids can be a powerful tool to reduce the risk of dementia in people with hearing loss is as good as possible without randomised controlled trials.”  

Mur and his colleagues intended to build on the article with a related analysis on the same UK Biobank data. But when he couldn’t replicate the main findings, Mur scrutinized the paper more deeply. 

In mid-May, Mur emailed the corresponding author, Dongshan Zhu of Shandong University in Jinan, China. He wrote that he “had some questions regarding your analysis” and asked whether he should direct them to Zhu or the first author of the paper. Mur followed up several times, but Zhu never responded, he said. 

Mur also emailed the editors of The Lancet Public Health in late May, asking if they would share any other authors’ email addresses they had. He explained that he’d been having trouble replicating some of the findings in the paper, and the corresponding author hadn’t responded to his emails. One of the editors supplied the email address for another author, Chengchao Zhou, also affiliated with Shandong University. Mur’s emails to Zhou went unanswered as well. 

At the editors’ suggestion, Mur sent another email to Zhu and Zhou in June asking if they would share their code, and copied the editors. After again getting no response, Mur sent the editors a document detailing the discrepancies between his replication attempt and the results in the paper. 

Most notably, he found that hearing aid use did not correspond to a lower rate of dementia for people with hearing loss, as the authors reported. He found the opposite: among people with hearing loss, the dementia rate was higher for those using hearing aids. In his email to the editors, Mur wrote: 

Without comparing the code to clean and analyse the data, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions about what is going on. But I think it’s worth trying to resolve it.

In July, Audrey Ceschia, editor in chief of The Lancet Public Health, responded. She wrote that the journal had been “notified of an error in the paper” and was currently working with the authors on a correction that “might also help resolving some of the discrepancies you’ve noticed.” She said she would share the correction when it was ready, and also suggested Mur could submit his findings to the journal’s correspondence section. 

Mur and a few colleagues submitted a comment article to the journal in October, formally explaining the differences in their findings and the published paper, with a link to a repository of their code. In mid-November Ceschia sent Mur the authors’ response (with code they provided), but wrote that the journal had “decided not to publish the exchange of letters.” 

The authors’ response noted they had “found some discrepancies between coding schemes” and described a new analysis they’d run on the data. They reported on “the relationship between self-reported hearing loss, hearing aid use and risk of dementia,” as they had in their original paper, as well as an additional analysis on people who had severe hearing loss as measured with a hearing test. 

In supplementary material, the authors presented results in line with what Mur and his colleagues found, but contradicting their originally published work: 

Using self-reported hearing loss (no severity information), we found that in people with hearing loss, both using and not using [hearing aids] was linked to an increased risk of all-cause dementia, with HR (95% CI) of (1.47, 1.33-1.63) and (1.17, 1.09-1.25) respectively, i.e., using [hearing aids] had even higher risk of dementia

Mur responded to the journal editors, pointing out that this result “is exactly what we found, reported, and submitted as a comment to the Lancet Public Health and is contrary to the findings published by Jiang et al. (2023). Only in some of the supplementary analyses that were not part of that original published paper, do the authors find a confirmation of their original claim.” 

He continued: 

In my understanding of scientific integrity, it should now be the authors to retract the article based on these new analyses, or at least publish a major correction which includes a reinterpretation of findings in light of the extended analyses. Since they apparently do not intend to do so, we would now expect the publisher to take action and at least publish our comment (if you don’t plan on retracting the paper either). Please also note that the manuscript is a comment, not a correspondence piece. You may recall that we tried to have a correspondence with the authors and only decided to write a comment after multiple attempts were not successful..

The next day, Anika Knuppel, senior editor at the journal, responded that the editors were “looking into this.” A few weeks later, in early December, Ceschia wrote: 

Please accept our profound thanks for prompting us to investigate the reliability of the paper by Fan Jiang et al. To summarise an extensive series of exchanges with the authors, they have now explained that they have discovered analytical errors in their work that render their findings and conclusions false and misleading. We have taken the decision to retract their paper and will publish the retraction notice next week. We are very grateful to you for bringing your concerns to us directly and we are pleased to be able to correct the scientific record in a timely manner.

On December 12, The Lancet Public Health editors published the following retraction notice: 

On Nov 27, 2023, we have been informed by the authors of the paper—Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort—published on April 13, 2023,1 that an error was introduced in the output format setting of their SAS codes (data for people with hearing loss using hearing aids and with hearing loss without using hearing aids were switched), leading to errors in their analysis which render their findings and conclusions false and misleading. These errors were identified by the authors following an exchange with scientists seeking to reproduce the authors’ findings. We are therefore retracting this Article.

We asked Zhu why he and his colleagues had not requested a retraction once their reanalysis found different results than their original paper. He responded: 

Thanks for your attention to our research.

If the output formats were not mis-defined, using self-reported hearing loss, people with hearing loss using HA had 34% higher risk of dementia, and people with hearing loss not using HA had 7% higher risk dementia [sic].

We believe there are two prominent bias [sic] when self-reported hearing loss was used, i.e., self-reported bias, and hearing loss severity bias.

In the next step, we will try to control for self-report bias and severity bias to see the effect of wearing hearing aids after bias control on reducing the risk of dementia, especially in people with severe hearing loss.

When we reached out to Ceschia and Knuppel, we heard back from a spokesperson for The Lancet. Regarding the authors’ response to Mur and colleagues’ comment, the spokesperson said: 

While acknowledging “some discrepancies between coding systems”, they argued that “The overall message of the study did not change.” In good faith, we accepted the authors’ explanation, and decided not to publish the exchange. In retrospect, we should have followed up the admitted discrepancies more assiduously and worked with the authors and Dr Mur to settle any outstanding uncertainties. Dr Mur rightly challenged our decision in an email on November 16. We immediately recognised the seriousness of his concerns and wrote again to the authors on November 22 asking them to further clarify their analyses, based on Dr Mur’s evidence and our own by now heightened unease. On November 24, the authors reported major errors in their paper, which rendered their findings and conclusions false and misleading. We moved quickly to retract the paper on December 12, 2023.

When the paper first appeared, it seemed to confirm a widely held belief – that hearing loss is associated with developing dementia, and using hearing aids can help to reduce risk – about which the scientific evidence has been mixed, Blustein, the hearing loss researcher, told Retraction Watch. In her view, public health messaging and media coverage of the question has been “misleading.” 

The findings were picked up quickly and disseminated among the community of people following the question of hearing loss and dementia, she said. “I don’t think people are necessarily aware of retractions.” 

The analysis should be corrected, and if The Lancet Public Health were to receive a new version, they should publish it, Blustein said. 

The UK Biobank dataset “is a very valuable data source,” she said. The dataset’s large size, long followup period, and information about potentially confounding factors made the article an important piece of evidence. “To throw away data because somebody miscoded it is a mistake.”

Blustein also felt that the retraction notice was unclear about what readers should take away from the study, and the lack of clarity was “another reason why the record is incomplete” without a replacement analysis. 

While the retraction notice was “technically correct,” Mur said, it did “obfuscate the fact that it was primarily my colleagues and I – not the journal or the authors of the original paper – who identified a problem and invested plenty of time and effort to have it rectified.” 

To other researchers trying to correct the record, he advised: 

Be prepared for an uphill battle. In our case, the editors were always courteous and quick to respond to our emails but notifying them of the discrepancies and detailing them in a short report was not sufficient. We still had to write and submit a paper before any substantial action by the journal was evident.

But putting forth the effort was important, he said, “simply because we knew the results were erroneous.” He continued: 

The study had been mentioned in several media articles, featured in an editorial by the journal, and hailed by some in the field as the most definitive evidence on the topic one can get without performing a clinical trial. You can’t let that stand if you know it to be false.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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02Jan / 2024

Exclusive: MDPI journal undergoing reevaluation at Scopus, indexing on hold

Elsevier’s Scopus database has paused indexing content from Sustainability, an MDPI journal, while it reevaluates whether to include the title, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Other MDPI titles were reevaluated in 2023, and its mathematics journal Axioms is no longer included in Scopus’ nearly 30,000 titles. Clarivate also delisted two MDPI journals, including the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, from its Web of Science index earlier this year, meaning those journals will no longer receive impact factors. 

Universities and funders use Scopus to create “whitelists” of journals in which authors are encouraged to publish, so removal from the index can influence submissions.

In 2022, Norway removed Sustainability from its list of journals that researchers get credit for publishing in, and Finland followed suit at the beginning of 2023. In the announcement of its decision, the Finnish Publication Forum wrote: 

Sustainability also publishes high-quality articles, but the wide scope, large publication volume and fast publication processes have undermined confidence that the journal’s procedures to ensure scientific quality work reliably down the line. The large variability in quality is partly the result of thousands of special issues that are common also in other MDPI journals.

The number of articles from Sustainability indexed in Scopus has increased nearly every year since 2009, its first year of coverage, when 78 articles were indexed. In 2022, the journal published over 17,000 articles. Scopus indexed about 13,500 in 2023, before the pause. 

Staff for Sustainability learned on October 30 that Scopus’ Content Selection and Advisory Board (CSAB) were reevaluating the journal, according to Elaine Li, the managing editor. 

Li confirmed the journal’s indexing is paused due to the reevaluation. If the process concludes positively, the content put on hold will be indexed within four weeks, she said. 

According to Scopus’ title reevaluation policy, the index identifies “outlier and underperforming journals” for scrutiny based on citation metrics and benchmarks compared to other titles in the same field, when “legitimate” concerns are raised about the journal or publisher, or if Scopus’ algorithm flags outlier behavior. The CSAB can also decide the journal should be evaluated again. 

Li told us: 

No specific concerns were raised when the editorial office was asked to provide information required for the re-evaluation, therefore we are assuming that the reason for this re-evaluation is the continuous curation based on CSAB feedback. 

“Several other journals of MDPI’s portfolio have already undergone re-evaluation” in 2023, Li said, “and the majority was evaluated positively and is continuing to be indexed in Scopus.”

We asked Elsevier for more information, and a spokesperson responded:  

We consider information about journal reviews as confidential. Once decisions are made relevant outcomes will be communicated through the regular channels.

Update, 1/2/24, 2030 UTC: MDPI CEO Stefan Tochev told us after this story was published:

As at January 2024, MDPI has 269 of journals indexed in Scopus. Notably, 54 of these journals were added in 2023, underscoring our dedication to maintaining rigorous academic standards across various disciplines. While we acknowledge Scopus’ reevaluation process for specific journals, it’s crucial to understand the scope and depth of our presence in this indexing database.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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29Dec / 2023

Publisher donating author fees from retracted articles to charity

What should happen to the millions of dollars publishers rake in from authors whose work is later retracted? 

Guillaume Cabanac, one of the developers of the Problematic Paper Screener, has repeatedly suggested publishers donate such revenue to charity. 

And now one is doing just that.

Recently, IOP Publishing took Cabanac up on his suggestion, and has begun sending the article processing fees (APCs) from articles it retracts to Research4Life, an organization that “provides institutions in low-and middle-income countries with online access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content,” according to its website. 

In posts on twitter.com and PubPeer, and in a recent interview in The Times, Cabanac has called for publishers who charge APCs to authors of open-access papers to donate those fees when they issue retractions.  

Cabanac told us: 

APCs of retracted papers should not be kept by publishers (this would hinder incentives to correct the record).

They should not be returned to authors (especially when they are papermill customers).

Transferring APCs to a charity (or the CSI [Center for Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent nonprofit]) will support a good cause (or integrity endeavours).

Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at IOP Publishing, told us: 

We exist to disseminate trusted research and safeguard the scientific record, so we can’t justify financially benefiting from retracted papers. This donation, along with our promise to channel further APC revenues from retracted papers to Research4Life, feels like the right thing to do. It also means that something positive can come out of the current research integrity issues we are facing as an industry. We chose Research4Life because their work to boost access to knowledge and raise standards of research skills globally is so important and aligned with our values as a community focussed, society publisher.

IOP Publishing donated 100% of the money it received from retracted papers this year, and plans to do the same each year, a spokesperson said. The publisher declined to give a specific amount for the donation. 

As “a way to support research integrity even further,” Cabanac said, “sleuths should unite in a kind of nonprofit association funded by the APCs of retracted papers!” 

He continued: 

This money would encourage sleuthing and support the people who dedicate time and efforts to correct the literature — pro bono!

… and sometime taking risks of harassment, intimidation…

A kind of white hat hacking… but for sleuthing.

This association would welcome any donation from the publishing industry.

Cabanac does free consulting for the publishing industry, he said, and has heard from many publishers and integrity officers who use the tools he’s developed as a sleuth. He said:

I’m realising it’s unfair that these companies (oligopolies) don’t support some dedicated, brilliant fellow sleuths who are struggling to make ends meet.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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27Dec / 2023

The top ten stories at Retraction Watch in 2023

Each year since 2013, we put together a roundup of the 10  most-read stories we published on the blog over the past 12 months.

This list doesn’t have some of what you might think are the biggest stories of the year—Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation and retractions, allegations of fraud against Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, and the unraveling of the claimed discovery of a room-temperature superconductor. Or more recently, allegations of plagiarism, with associated corrections, by Harvard president Claudine Gay.

When other outlets are paying a lot of attention to a retraction-related story, we think it’s a better use of our limited resources to focus on stories they’re missing. This year, that included a prominent nanoscientist who retracted a paper after PhD students found an error, the delisting of 19 Hindawi journals from a leading index, and a Yale history professor whose first book misrepresents primary sources, according to other scholars. (And if you want to help us cover even more stories in 2024, it’s not too late to make an end-of-year tax-deductible contribution!)

The following list reflects the stories that grabbed our readers’ attention the most in 2023:  

  1. A researcher used ChatGPT to generate a paper on millipedes and posted it to a preprint server not once, but twice. The affair came to light when another scientist got an email notification that the preprint cited his work–but some of the papers he’d supposedly written didn’t exist. Staff at the preprint server pulled down the paper, which the corresponding author later reposted to a different server, still with fictitious references. 
  2. After the open-access publisher MDPI complained about an article in Research Evaluation classifying some of its journals as “predatory,” the offending article was retracted and replaced with a version with softer conclusions. Language throughout the article was changed to describe the findings less definitively, although some critical language remained. 
  3. Paul Weiss, a high-profile nanoscientist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, retracted an article after three doctoral students, one of whom was an author of the original study, flagged an issue with a measurement. The original data were lost, the authors said, and they’d not yet been able to replicate the experiments. 
  4. Nineteen Hindawi journals were removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science in March, and the hits just kept coming for Wiley, which bought the open-access publisher in 2021. Wiley retracted more than 8,000 Hindawi articles linked to paper mills this year, closed four journals, and lost an estimated $35-40 million revenue in the current fiscal year. 
  5. Late last year, a notorious paper with capital Ts apparently pasted onto a graph as error bars was retracted from a special issue in a Hindawi journal. The Ts attracted lots of attention on twitter.com, but they were just the most obvious strange thing about the paper. The journal that published the article was one of the 19 Hindawi titles Clarivate later delisted from Web of Science. 
  6. Anca Turcu, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, found an “unpleasant surprise” when going over her publication stats earlier this year: a paper with her name on it that she hadn’t written, which we found had plagiarized another article. We later heard from the academic listed as editor in chief of the journal that published the article in Turcu’s name, who told us he also was “not associated with the journal in any way.” 
  7. The journal Genetika, which lost its impact factor and spot in Clarivate’s Web of Science index this year, made good on a promise to retract dozens of papers with “compromised” peer review. Its retraction notice for the 31 articles and a corrigendum also stated that the journal had blacklisted the authors and reviewers of the papers. 
  8. The first book of a Yale professor of Chinese history “fails to meet basic academic standards” and is “filled with misinformation,” according to a no-holds-barred review. Two other critical reviews were subsequently published. The book’s author recently published a response in the same journal that ran the initial review, in which she “rebut[s] the reviewer’s false claims that the book is full of errors and that I have committed academic malfeasance.” 
  9. Lara S. Hwa, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, faked data in two published studies and two grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. One of the articles, published while she was a postdoc, has been retracted. Its notice stated the authors determined the published data “did not match the raw data values,” and after re-analyzing the raw data, “there were multiple changes in statistical significance, leading to an overall change in the interpretation of the results.” 
  10. A former chemistry professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville admitted to reusing data in four grant applications to the NIH while claiming that it came from different experiments, according to another ORI finding. She agreed to have any federally funded work supervised for four years.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Posted by in weekend reads

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21Dec / 2023

What analyzing 30 years of US federal research misconduct sanctions revealed

A U.S. federal agency that oversees research misconduct investigations and issues sanctions appears to be doling out punishments fairly, according to researchers who analyzed summaries of the agency’s cases from the last three decades. 

But the authors of the study also found more than 30 papers the ORI said should be retracted have yet to be.

The researchers looked for associations between the severity of penalties the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) imposed on scientists it found responsible for research misconduct and their race and ethnicity, gender, academic rank, and other qualities. The researchers published their findings in late November in Accountability in Research, as the agency is in the process of revising its key regulations, 

According to the new analysis, ORI’s sanctions correlated with factors indicating the seriousness of the misconduct, such as being required to retract or correct publications, but not with demographics. 

“We did not find evidence of bias,” Ferric Fang, a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of the study’s authors, said. 

Fang, also member of the board of directors of The Center For Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent nonprofit organization, told us: 

The ORI states that the severity of administrative actions should be based on the circumstances and severity of misconduct as well as the presence of aggravating or mitigating factors, such as repeated behavior, the impact of the misconduct on the research record and public health, retaliatory behavior, and whether the individual committing misconduct was directly responsible and accepted responsibility for their actions. Our findings suggest that the ORI has been consistent in applying these criteria.  

“In light of ongoing concerns about disparities in research funding and the STEM workforce, our findings should provide some reassurance that the ORI is applying its administrative actions in an even-handed manner,” Fang said. 

Specifically, the researchers found “factors related to the severity of the misconduct or aggravating factors, such as whether the person interfered with the investigation, had violated a prior agreement with ORI, or was required to retract papers, were positively associated with the severity of the administration action,” said David Resnik, the study’s corresponding author and a bioethicist with the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. He further summarized the group’s findings: 

Whether the person had committed plagiarism only (viewed by many as less serious than data fabrication/falsification) and whether the person admitted wrongdoing (a mitigating factor under most systems of punishment) were negatively associated with the severity of the administrative action.  Factors unrelated to the severity of the misconduct or aggravating or mitigating factors, such as the person’s race/ethnicity, gender, academic position, education, or institutional affiliation were not associated with the severity of administrative actions.   

The researchers found a three year period of research supervision or funding ban was the most common sanction ORI levied, accounting for 65% of cases. ORI has occasionally banned researchers from federal funding for life, and more recently issued a 10-year funding ban and a pair of seven-year penalties.

“I suppose that this is the default length of time,” Fang said of the three-year sanction, “and may represent a penalty that imposes a true hardship on a researcher without necessarily being career-ending.” 

We asked how the findings might be relevant to ORI’s current proposals for revising its regulations. Resnik, a Federal employee, declined to speculate. Fang said: 

I am aware that some of the recently proposed updates to ORI policies have been controversial, but I don’t believe that the administrative actions examined in our study will be substantially changed.

The researchers also found that 32 papers ORI said should be retracted as part of its sanctions have not been pulled from the literature. 

“We should be concerned” about this finding, Resnik said. “It means that the literature has not been properly corrected and that scientists may be unwittingly relying on fraudulent research.  Moreover, these are people who were caught committing misconduct, were sanctioned by their institutions and ORI, and were required to correct or retract papers.” 

Fang said: 

The fact that some papers that the ORI asks to be retracted are not necessarily retracted reflects that fact that only journals can retract publications, and unfortunately, not all appear to take this responsibility seriously. 

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, subscribe to our free daily digest or paid weekly update, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your RSS reader. If you find a retraction that’s not in The Retraction Watch Database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

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