Tag: retraction

• AI slop clears peer-review

  Here’s an image from a paper that was published by Nature Scientific Reports on November 19 and retracted on December 5:

  

  This paper made it through peer review at the journal. Let that sink in for a moment. Perhaps the reviewers wanted to stick it to the editors. Then again how the image made its way past the editors is also a mystery.

  Nature Scientific Reports has had several problems before, enumerated on its Wikipedia page. It’s a ‘megajournal’ in the vein of PLOS One and follows the gold OA model, with an article processing charge of “£2190.00/$2690.00/€2390.00”.

  2025.12.06

• The journal’s part in a retraction

  This is another Ranga Dias and superconductivity post, so please avert your gaze if you’re tired of it already.

  According to a September 27 report in Science, the journal Nature plans to retract the latest Dias et al. paper, published in March 2023, claiming to have found evidence of near-room-temperature superconductivity in an unusual material, nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (N-LuH). The heart of the matter seems to be, per Science, a plot showing a drop in N-LuH’s electric resistance below a particular temperature – a famous sign of superconductivity.

  Dias (University of Rochester) and Ashkan Salamat (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), the other lead investigator in the study, measured the resistance in a noisy setting and then subtracted the noise – or what they claimed to be the noise. The problem is apparently that the subtracted plot in the published paper and the plot put together using raw data submitted by Dias and Salamat to Nature are different; the latter doesn’t show the resistance dropping to zero. Meaning that together with the noise, the paper’s authors subtracted some other information as well, and whatever was left behind suggested N-LuH had become superconducting.

  A little more than a month ago, Physical Review Letters officially retracted another paper of a study led by Dias and Salamat after publishing it last year – and notably after a similar dispute (and on both occasions Dias was opposed to having the papers retracted). But the narrative was more dramatic then, with Physical Review Letters accusing Salamat of obstructing its investigation by supplying some other data as the raw data for its independent probe.

  Then again, even before Science‘s report, other scientists in the same field had said that they weren’t bothering with replicating the data in the N-LuH paper because they had already wasted time trying to replicate Dias’s previous work, in vain.

  Now, in the last year alone, three of Dias’s superconductivity-related papers have been retracted. But as on previous occasions, the new report also raises questions about Nature‘s pre-publication peer-review process. To quote Science:

  In response to [James Hamlin and Brad Ramshaw’s critique of the subtracted plot], Nature initiated a post-publication review process, soliciting feedback from four independent experts. In documents obtained by Science, all four referees expressed strong concerns about the credibility of the data. ‘I fail to understand why the authors … are not willing or able to provide clear and timely responses,’ wrote one of the anonymous referees. ‘Without such responses the credibility of the published results are in question.’ A second referee went further, writing: ‘I strongly recommend that the article by R. Dias and A. Salamat be retracted.’

  What was the difference between this review process and the one that happened before the paper was published, in which Nature‘s editors would have written to independent experts asking them for their opinions on the submitted manuscript? Why didn’t they catch the problem with the electrical resistance plot?

  One possible explanation is the sampling problem: when writing an article as a science journalist, the views expressed in the article will be a function of the scientists that I have sampled from within the scientific community. In order to obtain the consensus view, I need to sample a sufficiently large number of scientists (or a small number of representative scientists, such as those who I know are in touch with the pulse of the community). Otherwise, there’s a nontrivial risk of some view in my article being over- or under-represented.

  Similarly, during its pre-publication peer-review process, did Nature not sample the right set of reviewers? I’m unable to think of other explanations because the sampling problem accounts for many alternatives. Hamlin and Ramshaw also didn’t necessarily have access to more data than Dias et al. submitted to Nature because their criticism emerged in May 2023 itself, and was based on the published paper. Nature also hasn’t disclosed the pre-publication reviewers’ reports nor explained if there were any differences between its sampling process in the pre- and post-publication phases.

  So short of there being a good explanation, as much as we have a scientist who’s seemingly been crying wolf about room-temperature superconductivity, we also have a journal whose peer-review process produced, on two separate occasions, two different results. Unless it can clarify why this isn’t so, Nature is also to blame for the paper’s fate.

  2023.09.28

• Gender equity in retractions

  From the abstract of a fascinating study published in PLoS ONE on May 3, 2023:

  … this study investigated gender differences in authorship of retracted papers in biomedical sciences available on RetractionWatch. Among 35,635 biomedical articles retracted between 1970 and 2022, including 20,849 first authors and 20,413 last authors, women accounted for 27.4% [26.8 to 28.0] of first authors and 23.5% [22.9 to 24.1] of last authors. The lowest representation of women was found for fraud (18.9% [17.1 to 20.9] for first authors and 13.5% [11.9 to 15.1] for last authors) and misconduct (19.5% [17.3 to 21.9] for first authors and 17.8% [15.7 to 20.3] for last authors). Women’s representation was the highest for issues related to editors and publishers (35.1% [32.2 to 38.0] for first authors and 24.8% [22.9 to 26.8] for last authors) and errors (29.5% [28.0 to 31.0] for first authors and 22.1% [20.7 to 23.4] for last authors). Most retractions (60.9%) had men as first and last authors. Gender equality could improve research integrity in biomedical sciences.

  That last line was unexpected, no? Were the authors suggesting that bringing more women into science would reduce retractions or that men are predisposed to publishing the sort of papers that are later retracted? To be sure, both are dangerous – and probably misguided – positions to take. I suspect the authors included that line in the abstract because they felt they had to put down some sort of takeaway. Nonetheless, the authors attempt some kind of analysis later in the paper; for example:

  … the gender differences in reasons for retraction deserve careful consideration. Women’s underrepresentation was greater for misconduct and fraud and lower for plagiarism, duplication of content, and errors. Women’s representation was also higher for issues related to editors and publishers, which are out of author’s remit [sic]. This is in keeping with previous studies suggesting that men are more likely than women to be involved in fraud and misconduct in research [9, 15]. For instance, in a sample of 113 retractions from diverse scientific fields, fraud and plagiarism accounted for 28.6% of women-authored retractions and 59.2% men-authored retractions [9]. The underlying reasons for these gender differences are difficult to pinpoint. They may be related to attitudes toward research integrity, which are themselves influenced by career goals and ambitions as well as social norms [16, 17]. Gender stereotypes and bias at societal level may result in differences in moral standards and values, which then influence attitudes and behaviours related to research integrity. …

  Although only a small fraction of biomedical research papers is estimated to be retracted [2], the marked gender differences in underlying reasons for retractions may have important implications. Addressing longstanding gender bias and other barriers that hinder women’s progression in academia and research could enhance the integrity and moral standards of the scientific community overall and, hence, reduce misconduct and fraud [19]. Achieving gender equality across the academic ladder, particularly in positions of power and influence, would allow women to serve as role modellers and exert a positive influence on research teams and institutions to adhere to the highest standards of research integrity. This could have far-reaching benefits from increasing public’s trust in science [20], to improving the value of research for populations and reducing the long-term harms caused by fraudulent research [21].

  There have been many indications that women already in science feel the need to perform better than their male counterparts in order to be credited with the same level of success (all arbitrarily defined, of course). Recall the allegations of bullying against Marcella Carollo at the Institute of Astronomy at ETH Zurich until August 2017. Against this backdrop, it seems to me to be possible that the minority female population in science may feel compelled to be more law-abiding and rule-bound in order to lower the risk of being ejected from the field. It’s also possible that because women already struggle more than men to enter science, and thereon to ascend through the ranks, that the opportunities to and the importance of being a role-model to the women who follow weigh heavier upon their shoulders than on the shoulders of male scientists.

  But this is only when the female population in science has minority status compared to the male population, and many barriers persist to more women holding positions of authority and power at scientific institutions. When this is not true, i.e. when there are no gender-based barriers to excelling in science (defined in any way), I don’t think it will be possible to draw relationships between a person’s gender and their proclivity for substandard or ‘retractable’ science. If such relationships exist, they will quite likely have a specific historicity, and in the absence of such historicity, I can’t think of any reason why any arbitrarily selected demographic group should be less or more capable of being responsible for research misconduct.

  With this in mind, I don’t think “gender equality could improve research integrity in biomedical sciences” is a helpful statement in the context of a limited and strictly quantitative assessment, especially if the prevention of misconduct is being advanced as a reason to bring more women into or retain women in science.

  2023.05.07

• Whose fault is a retraction?

  A journal called Advances in Materials Science and Engineering retracted a paper it published and issued the following notice, excerpted from Retraction Watch, December 22, 2022:

  Advances in Materials Science and Engineering has retracted the article titled “Monitoring of Sports Health Indicators Based on Wearable Nanobiosensors” [1]. Since publication, readers have raised concerns that the error bars in Figure 9 appear to be the letter “T.” Moreover, it has been noted that the authors state that “no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study” which is contradictory to the study described. This therefore raises questions about the reliability of the underlying data and the article’s conclusions.

  … and about the journal, surely? This is a good example of a disingenuous retraction notice: it puts all the blame on a paper and its authors instead of admitting that the journal’s peer-review process is a sham.

  Assume, strictly for the sake of argument, that the authors weren’t aware of what they were doing, and now they have a retraction to their name. Retractions of this nature don’t look good, either on the authors or on the journal. Yet the journal was willing to let this happen, probably because it admits bad papers into its pages presuming (fairly) that the chances of their being detected are very small. As a result, the papers’ authors have technically published many papers and, if the journal has a publishing fee, it has made a good amount of money. However, the retraction becomes a black mark on the scientist’s résumé. The incentives are lopsided and the journal doesn’t seem to be interested in fixing that.

  In the present case, of course, the authors had to have known they were being dishonest in composing their paper the way they did. But when journals retract a paper because it was found, after publication, to contain plagiarised text – but which is legitimate in every other way – the authors don’t at all deserve all the blame (even less if English isn’t their first language) because the journal should have caught it before publication.

  The website of Advances in Materials Science and Engineering, a Hindawi title, sports a diagram of an elaborate workflow that specifies at least four opportunities for unsuitable papers to be rejected. Yet a paper so ridiculous as to paste the letter ‘T’ on graphs to make them look like error plots sailed through and was accepted for publication.

  Two inferences: 1) The paper didn’t encounter a single honest reviewer on its way to publication. It’s also probable that it landed on the desk of a reviewer who could have been sympathetic – to anything from the paper’s authors (because they were friends?) to an aspiration by the institute or the relevant community to increase its publication count. 2) Journals exist that wish to appear respectable but aren’t careful about meeting the requisite expectations fundamentally because they don’t care about that stuff. Many such journals complicate the desire to draw a definitive line between the visible symptoms of a legitimate journal and a journal that will publish any paper for money. Their habits are brought to light only when they publish a paper that catches the public attention; until then, they operate quietly in the background.

  For these reasons, it’s useful to not think of the scientific literature as a large, monolithic chunk of knowledge. It’s more like a river with some water coming in, some water going out, with some stretches polluted and others clean. Similarly, the literature is fragmented by dishonest journals, practices that enhance their prestige at the cost of the quality of published results, habits like ambulance-chasing and inflation bias, activities like paper mills, etc.

  2023.01.08

• An Indian paper retracted for ‘legal reasons’

  The Editor-in-Chief has retracted this article because it was published in error before the peer review process was completed. The content of this article has been removed for legal reasons. The authors have been offered to submit a revised manuscript for further peer review. All authors agree with this retraction.

  This is the notice accompanying the retraction of a paper published in Springer Nature’s Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing. The editor in chief is Shailesh Nayak, the director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies at IISc campus in Bengaluru. As Retraction Watch reported, the paper – about “suspicious activities” on the Indo-China border in 2020 – was being retracted for, legal reasons aside, being replete with grammatical errors. The excerpt on the Retraction Watch page also suggests it’s qualitatively less like a research paper and more like an internal submission; the paper’s corresponding author, an Aditya Kakde of the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, a private institute in Dehradun, also didn’t comment on the retraction, and isn’t contesting it either.

  The comment by Nayak, the editor in chief, is interesting: he says the badly-written paper had been published before it was peer-reviewed. First, how is this possible?

  Second, I’m personally convinced Nayak is trying to protect his journal’s reputation by implying that the mistake was processual in nature, and that their functional peer-review system would have caught the paper’s quality problem. But this is also an ex post facto explanation that makes Nayak’s claim hard to believe, considering the process error was a big one.

  Third, if you think you need an exercise as formally defined and intensive as a peer-review to catch such low-quality papers, I doubt your credentials as an editor.

  Fourth, and to continue from my previous post, when editors publish bad papers like this, instead of helping authors correct their mistakes and thus avoid a retraction later for bad language, they’re practically setting up the authors to incur a retraction against their names.

  Finally, why – in Nayak’s telling – was the paper retracted for “legal reasons”? It seems like a ridiculous, but also devious, thing to say. Considering the paper’s authors, including Kakde, haven’t been accused of other issues, I assume the paper’s contents are legitimate: that the authors have developed an image-analysis tool that purports to eliminate one step of some military surveillance procedure (although the images in the paper look quite simplistic). At the same time, one of the hallmarks of the current Indian government is its, and its supporters’, tendency to threaten their detractors with vexatious police and court cases, especially under draconian anti-terrorism and sedition provisions in Indian law.

  So Nayak’s allusion “legal reasons” can’t be dismissed easily, as an attempt to be ambiguous and beyond reproach at the same time – although that’s just as possible (note: he’s a “distinguished scientist” in the Ministry of Earth Sciences).

  2022.01.28