Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: MIT rescinds support of AI paper; should AI write science papers, anyway?; another pub steps in for paused NIH journal

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

How do retractions impact researchers’ career paths and collaborations? A Q&A with the study’s authors
Clarivate to stop counting citations to retracted articles in journals’ impact factors
Dozens of Elsevier papers retracted over fake companies and suspicious authorship changes
Paper with duplicated images retracted four months after concerns were raised
Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive. When we asked them about it, they removed it

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 59,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Scopus indexed a journal with a fake editorial board and a sham archive

Editor’s note: We asked Elsevier to respond to some of the findings in this post. In response, a spokesperson told us they will now remove the journal from Scopus. See Elsevier’s response in this story.

I received a letter recently pointing me to a questionable journal indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database. Scopus indexes many problematic and even hijacked journals, but this case is the most outrageous I have seen to date.

Scopus indexed Science of Law in July 2024. According to its profile in the database, the journal is published by the “Editorial Team of SoL.” However, “the editorial team” and many members of the editorial board are fake names and that such individuals do not actually exist. For example, the three editors listed — Alessio Miceli from the University of Alabama School of Law, Anita Steinberg from Wichita State University, and Jeffrey Robinson from McGeorge School of Law — do not have author profiles in Scopus. The universities themselves do not have anyone with these names in their directories.

Elsevier removes journal from Scopus after Retraction Watch inquiry

Elsevier has removed a journal from its Scopus database after Retraction Watch inquired about its review process for the journal, whose editorial board lists fake names and digital fingerprint shows other red flags.

Scientific sleuth Anna Abalkina uncovered several issues with Science of Law, which she details in a post published today. Besides editors and editorial board members who cannot be verified and don’t seem to exist, the journal’s history doesn’t match its publication record, early articles show signs of fabrication, and its publisher data in Scopus doesn’t match that in Crossref. Despite this, Scopus added the journal to its index last year.

To understand how these problems could have evaded reviewers at Scopus, we asked Elsevier if Scopus staff verifies editorial board members when vetting journals, and if they assess the quality and validity of articles in journals before adding them to the index.

Paper with duplicated images retracted four months after concerns were raised

We write plenty of stories about lengthy investigations and long wait times for retractions. So we are always glad when we can highlight when journals act in a relatively timely fashion.

The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences, published by Wiley on behalf of Kaohsiung Hospital in Taiwan, seemed to exhibit some urgency after a sleuth raised concerns in December 2024 about a 2019 paper with problematic figures.

The sleuth, who has asked us to remain anonymous but goes by “Mitthyridium jungquilianum” on PubPeer, had pointed out similarities between the 2019 paper and another article by different authors, published in Oncotarget in 2014. One figure from each work was “more similar than expected” to each other, Mitthyridium wrote, citing ImageTwin.

Clarivate to stop counting citations to retracted articles in journals’ impact factors

Clarivate will no longer include citations to and from retracted papers when calculating journal impact factors, the company announced today.

The change comes after some have wondered over the years whether citations to retracted papers should count toward a journal’s impact factor, a controversial yet closely watched metric that measures how often others cite papers from that journal. For many institutions, impact factors have become a proxy for the importance of their faculty’s research.

Retractions are relatively rare and represent only 0.04% of papers indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science, according to the announcement. But the overall retraction rate has risen recently, to about 0.2%, which, along with a decrease in the time it takes to retract papers, motivated the policy change. Nandita Quaderi, the editor-in-chief of Web of Science, said in the announcement the policy would “pre-emptively guard against any such time that citations to and from retracted content could contribute to widespread distortions in the [journal impact factor].”

Dozens of Elsevier papers retracted over fake companies and suspicious authorship changes

One of several retraction notices noting “the existence and nature” of a company couldn’t be confirmed.

Since March of last year, Elsevier has pulled around 60 papers connected to companies in the Caucasus region that don’t seem to exist. The retraction notices attribute the decision to suspicious changes in authorship and the authors being unable to verify the existence of their employers. Online sleuths have also flagged potentially manipulated citations among the articles.

Each of the retracted papers appears to follow an identical pattern, based on the details given in the retraction notices. First, a solo author submits a paper and claims to be affiliated with a company that doesn’t appear in any business registries. During the revision process, the author adds several other authors to the paper — including new first and corresponding authors, despite no clear contribution to the original work. This behavior is typical of paper mills and authorship-for-sale schemes.

When asked by the editors, the original authors are unable to explain why they added the additional authors, nor validate the “nature” or “existence” of the companies they were claiming an affiliation with, according to the retraction notices.

How do retractions impact researchers’ career paths and collaborations?

About 46% of authors leave their publishing careers around the time of a retraction, a new study has found.
*SA Memon et al/Nat Hum Behav 2025*

Several studies have tackled the issue of what effect a retracted paper has on a scientist’s reputation and publication record. The answer is, by and large, it depends: The contribution the researcher made on the paper, their career stage, the field of study and the reason for the retraction all play a role.

Three researchers from New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi wanted to better understand how a retraction affects a scientist’s career trajectory and future collaborations. Using the Retraction Watch Database, they looked at papers retracted between 1990 and 2015, and merged that data with Microsoft Academic Graph to generate information on researchers’ pre- and post-retraction publication patterns, as well as their collaboration networks. They also looked at Altmetric scores of retractions to factor in the attention a retraction got.

From that data, they extrapolated if and when researchers with retracted papers left scientific publishing, and looked for trends in researchers’ collaboration networks before and after the retraction.

Weekend reads: Majorana manipulation allegations; Norway’s most-published researcher committed misconduct; ‘second chance’ for convicted Harvard chemist

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

‘Now is not the time to fade’: Retraction Watch awarded Council of Science Editors’ highest honor
A ‘stupid mistake’: EPA researcher added their underage child as an author on manuscript
Journal collected $400,000 for papers that it later retracted
Web of Science delists bioengineering journal in wake of paper mill cleanup
Journal investigating placebo effect study following Retraction Watch inquiry

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Journal investigating placebo effect study following Retraction Watch inquiry

An Elsevier journal is investigating a paper by a controversial author after a Retraction Watch inquiry about the article. The article concluded that “placebo effects have a significant impact on observed outcomes” in both placebo and treatment groups in clinical trials.

The senior author of the paper is Harald Walach, whose name may be familiar. In one paper, now retracted, Walach and his coauthors claimed COVID-19 vaccines killed two people for every three deaths they prevented. In a different paper, also retracted, Walach and his colleagues claimed children’s masks trap carbon dioxide; they later republished the article in a different journal. He lost two papers and a university affiliation in 2021.

One of his latest papers, “Treatment effects in pharmacological clinical randomized controlled trials are mainly due to placebo,” appeared online December 27 in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology.

Web of Science delists bioengineering journal in wake of paper mill cleanup

Bioengineered has lost its spot in Clarivate’s Web of Science index, as of its April update. The journal has been working to overcome a flood of paper mill activity, but sleuths have questioned why hundreds of papers with potentially manipulated images have still not been retracted.

A spokesperson for Taylor & Francis, which publishes the journal, said it has taken action against the paper mill; the journal has retracted 86 papers since January 2022. They are “disappointed” at the delisting decision, the spokesperson said. The journal now faces up to a two-year embargo before it can rejoin the citation index.

Bioengineered publishes bioengineering and biotechnology research. In 2021, journal editors launched an investigation when submissions spiked and several authors of submitted and accepted articles asked for authorship changes – both hallmarks of paper mill activity.

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