Dalmeet Singh Chawla
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Articles by Dalmeet Singh Chawla
Thousands of research studies violate journal policies on collaborations between editors and authors
A tool developed to mine metadata and find past collaborations between handling editors and authors has turned up thousands of cases that breach journal policies on such relationships. J. Di Scala et al/JCDL ’26 Over 10,000 peer-reviewed papers from two publishers breach journal policies about past collaborations between handling editors and authors, a new analysis has found.
Paper mill studies get cited by clinical guidelines, policy docs and more, analysis finds
Studies produced by a suspected paper mill are frequently cited in patents, clinical guidelines and policy documents, according to a new analysis. The work, posted on arXiv on August 31, examined the fate of nearly 2,000 academic papers with one common factor: At least one coauthor lists the Pharmakon Neuroscience Network (PNN) as an institutional affiliation. But there’s one problem: the PNN is not a real network of scientists.
Japan institute defends Nobel Prize winner amid allegations of image duplication
The Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) at Kyoto University in Japan is defending Nobel Prize winner Shinya Yamanaka against claims of image manipulation in multiple studies on which he was an author. The institute says questioning Yamanaka’s integrity without sufficient evidence is “completely unacceptable.” Yamanaka shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 and works at CiRA.
Just over 400 U.S. patents contain citations to retracted scientific papers
Around 400 U.S. patents contain at least one citation to a retracted scientific paper, a new study has found. The analysis, posted last month to the preprint server SSRN, analyzed granted patents in the United States in PatentsView, a database developed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) using artificial intelligence algorithms, and the Retraction Watch Database.
Doctored data sets could trick AI agents
Credit: Denis Borisov/Getty Researchers are increasingly using autonomous artificial-intelligence agents for data interpretation. The accuracy of this analysis depends on the data sets that are available to these programs, and a new study documents how easy it is for fraudsters to ‘poison’ these resources by uploading manipulated data sets that closely resemble the original ones but lead to different conclusions.
Springer Nature to start issuing expressions of concern for books
Hermann/Pixabay Springer Nature will start issuing expressions of concern notices for books after investigating hundreds of its books for integrity-related problems in recent years. The publishing giant has seen an uptick in the number of investigations for books. In 2022, Springer Nature carried out 124 such investigations.
Are AI chatbots infiltrating online survey data? Not yet, says new study
Mohamed Nohassi/Unsplash Despite concerns some have raised about potentially compromised data, AI chatbots aren’t yet completing online research surveys widely, according to a new preprint. The authors of the study, posted earlier this month on PsyArXiv, found that fewer than 1% of around 4,800 survey responses collected by 12 different companies contained text that was likely not written by a human.
Stolen economics study retracted following Retraction Watch coverage
An economics study that was stolen and had its authorship slots sold by a paper mill has been retracted. The move follows our reporting in January about a researcher in India who took to social media after an academic journal rejected her paper, noting that it had high similarity to a study published by other authors — despite the work being her own.
Preprint server removes study attributing increased infant mortality to vaccines
Alachua County/Flickr A preprint server has withdrawn a study that suggested children vaccinated in the second month of life are more likely to die soon after when compared to those who did not receive the vaccinations. The paper, posted at Preprints.org last December, was written by Karl Jablonowski and Brian Hooker of Children’s Health Defense, a New Jersey-based nonprofit organization founded by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F.
Study is stolen, sold, published. Now the victim is accused of plagiarism
The year 2026 did not start off kindly for Vijayalakshmi S, an economics researcher at RV University in Bengaluru, India. She received a rejection letter from a journal noting that a paper of hers was highly similar to another published study by other researchers. S couldn’t understand why that was — until she realised someone had somehow gotten hold of her study and published it as their own. She took to LinkedIn, expressing her concerns and tagging the authors responsible.
Meet the researcher aiming to halt use of ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality
Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence. To maintain the integrity of scientific literature, the professor of psychology at Brunel University of London and her colleagues are writing to journals that are publishing papers that rely on the so-called National IQ database, which aims to rank countries based on intelligence. It has drawn criticism for the way the data were collected.
‘Confusing and frankly, disturbing’: When researchers are impersonated
Ariel Karlinsky was confused. A Ph.D. student at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he had just received a message stating the paper he had submitted to an economics conference in Moldova had been accepted. But Karlinsky hadn’t submitted his work to the conference. In fact, he had never even heard about the event. At first, Karlinsky assumed a predatory conference had signed him up without his knowledge.
Retractions can reshape scientists’ careers in unexpected ways
Retractions can have profound effects on researchers’ careers, sometimes in unexpected ways, a study that tracked the career trajectories of thousands of authors has found. The range of experiences that authors go through raises questions about whether this mechanism — an important part of the scientific process — is working as intended, says co-author Shahan Ali Memon, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Dean accused of plagiarism in Bulgaria not guilty, ministry report says
A governmental ministry in Bulgaria has concluded a dean at Sofia University is not guilty of plagiarism. But it appears the inquiries might not be complete. As we reported in December, Milen Zamfirov, dean of the faculty of educational sciences at the university, had been accused of plagiarism in a 2021 paper that “seems to have significant overlap” with two other works.
Fake AI images will cause headaches for journals
Microscopic images of tissue samples can be generated so convincingly by artificial intelligence (AI) that journal editors, peer reviewers and readers are being warned to take a much closer look when reading papers. A study that presented people with real and fake histological images — used to study the microscopic structure of tissues — found that many participants could not tell the difference.
Suspended UK surgeon earns nine expressions of concern, one withdrawal
A U.K.-based surgeon who was suspended last year for conducting colorectal surgeries that caused harm to hundreds of women has had nine of his research papers flagged and one withdrawn.
Misappropriation of undergraduate work leads to study retraction
Researchers in Australia have retracted a 2020 nanotechnology study after their institution’s research integrity office found the paper had misappropriated the work of undergraduate students at their school. According to the retraction notice, the study stated the data belonged to an industry consulting project when in fact they originated from undergraduate work.
Journal retracts letter about pager explosion injuries in Lebanon
The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery has retracted a letter it published about a purportedly novel injury observed during the two deadly waves of pager explosions in Lebanon and Syria in 2024, reportedly linked to Israeli intelligence services. The original letter, “‘Pager’s trauma’ as a new and destructive type of blast injuries,” published Dec. 26, 2024, had not been indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Why do nearly 45,000 scholarly papers cite themselves?
While using bibliometric techniques to measure how disruptive research papers are to their field of study, Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann stumbled across a strange phenomenon. Just under 45,000 academic papers contained citations to themselves, they found. Haunschild and Bornmann — both information scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany — found these “paper self-citations” in journals indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science since 1980.
Could libraries band together to ensure open access for all?
More than 70 journals are trialling a publishing model called subscribe to open (S2O), in which libraries pay an annual subscription fee to make paywalled journals open access. The trial, set to start next January, will run for three years if there is enough participation. It aims to make academic journals freely available online without charging authors or relying on donations. Fifty-four societies, museums and research institutions around the world have signed their journals up.
Catchy, clear, concise: Three-part phrases boost research paper citations
From ‘Envy, inequality and fertility’ to ‘Market size, trade and productivity’, using catchy three-part phrases in the titles of research papers can boost their citations, suggests a study. The study used algorithms to examine more than 235,000 economics papers and 93,000 medical and life-sciences papers that contain three-part phrases in their titles.
Thousands demand withdrawal of review article recommending exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome
The decision to abandon a process to re-evaluate a review recommending exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has reignited calls for the article to be withdrawn. The 2019 version of the Cochrane Library review, “Exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome,” has accumulated 67 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Journal retracts Thermo Fisher Scientific study after ethical concerns
An academic journal has retracted a study conducted by researchers with the science services giant Thermo Fisher Scientific over concerns that a tool used in the study violates the ethical standards of forensic genetics. The John Wiley & Sons journal Electrophoresis published the original study in 2016.
Can novelty scores on papers shift the power dynamics in scientific publishing?
A publication platform called DeSci Publish aims to predict the impact of manuscripts by giving them a ‘novelty score’. The developers say that this score could assist journal editors in deciding which studies to publish, and could be an asset for researchers who are looking to be published in a competitive journal.
Journal won’t retract paper that involved human organ transplants in China
The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation (JHLT) has decided against retracting a November 2024 paper that violated the ethics policy of the publication. After publishing the paper, which describes a new mechanical circulatory support device used to treat heart failure that was developed in China, staff at the journal realised two of the patients in the study had received organ transplants in that country.
Dean in Bulgaria accused of plagiarism
Earlier this year, Milen Zamfirov, dean of the faculty of educational sciences at Sofia University in Bulgaria, was named an exceptional scientist in the social sciences and humanities. As part of the accolades at the prestigious Pythagoras Science Awards from the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and Science, Zamfirov received a commemorative plaque, diploma, and a cash prize of 8,000 BGN (US $4,300).
Russia accused of weaponizing science in Ukraine
Papers in scientific journals are increasingly citing universities based inside occupied Ukrainian territories as being affiliated with Russia, a new analysis has found. In 2022, 16 of the 156 studies (10.4%) published by researchers based at institutions in Donetsk, a region in southeast Ukraine, and indexed by the database Scopus listed the city as being in the Russian Federation.
Complaint from engineering software company prompts two retractions
An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used its software without a valid license. Both retracted papers were published by Ain Shams Engineering Journal in the last couple of years by different authors based in Egypt.
Thousands of published studies may contain images with incorrect copyright licences
More than 9000 studies published in open-access journals may contain figures published under the wrong copyright licence. These open-access journals publish content under the CC-BY copyright licence, which means that anyone can copy, distribute or transmit that work including for commercial purposes as long as the original creator is credited.
Monitoring the papers that are fed to AI
Monday, October 28, 2024 Please be aware that pubs.acs.org is undergoing maintenance on Friday, September 6, at 6 p.m. EDT that may have an impact on your experience. During this time, you may not be able to access certain features like login, purchasing single articles, saving searches or running existing saved searches, modifying your e-Alert preferences, or accessing Librarian administrative functions. We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve the ACS Publications platform.
Monitoring the papers that are fed to AI
A new tool is tracking which scholarly publishers are signing deals that allow tech firms to train large language models on academic papers and data. The deals have drawn attention from scientists and bodies representing scholars, who argue that researchers should be compensated if their work is used to train artificial intelligence and that they should also be able to opt out of having their work used in this way.
What's next for Kate the Chemist?
Kate Biberdorf knew she wanted to be a chemist from the age of 15. She attributes her decision to the passion of a high school teacher who had a knack for engaging students by running around the classroom and lighting things on fire. But Biberdorf, now popularly known as Kate the Chemist, didn't know she wanted to become a science entertainer until her first year as a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin.
Springer Nature journal has retracted over 200 papers since September
Optical and Quantum Electronics, a Springer Nature journal, has retracted more than 200 papers since the start of September, and continues issuing retraction notices en masse. According to the notices, which have similar wording, the retractions come after the publisher identified problems with the articles including compromised peer review, inappropriate or irrelevant references, and nonsensical phrases, suggesting blind use of AI or machine-translation software.
Only 36% of chief editors at top-ranking journals are women
Just over a third of chief editors of top-rankingscientific journals are women, according to a letter to the journal Nature ( Nature 2024, DOI: 10.1038/d41586-024-03121-x). The letter writers used names and publicly available images to estimate the gender of the chief editors of the 200 most highly ranked journals in the SCImago Journal and Country Rank, a portal that contains data on more than 34,000 journals published by some 5,000 publishers.
Funders launch online resource to help researchers navigate narrative CVs
A group of funding agencies and research organizations has created a free online platform to help academics to create narrative CVs. In the past few years, funders have increasingly favoured the narrative style over typical formats, which usually emphasize quantitative indicators. These include the titles of journals that papers are published in, and the amount of grant money received.
1 in 7 scientific papers is fake, suggests study that author calls ‘wildly nonsystematic’
In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career. Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said. The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake.
Academic publishers face antitrust lawsuit
Monday, September 23, 2024 Please be aware that pubs.acs.org is undergoing maintenance on Friday, September 6, at 6 p.m. EDT that may have an impact on your experience. During this time, you may not be able to access certain features like login, purchasing single articles, saving searches or running existing saved searches, modifying your e-Alert preferences, or accessing Librarian administrative functions. We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve the ACS Publications platform.
Academic publishers face antitrust lawsuit
Six scholarly publishers have been hit with an antitrust lawsuit for allegedly appropriating billions of dollars in public funds that the plaintiffs argue would otherwise have been used to carry out scientific research. The complaint was filed in the Eastern District of New York by plaintiffs that include a researcher who says they conducted peer review for all six companies: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publications, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer.
‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers
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 out the problem.
Pakistan university’s pharmacy department chair notches two retractions
Kashif Barkat, who heads the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Lahore in Punjab, Pakistan, has had two of his studies retracted and two more corrected, all for issues related to images in the papers. Several more of his studies are flagged on PubPeer for similar reasons. According to the retraction notice for one of the retracted articles, which appeared in Polymer Bulletin in 2020, Barkat does not agree with the journal’s decision to pull the paper.
YouTube is home to 800 active chemistry channels
YouTube is home to 1,619 channels producing English-language content on chemistry. Around half of them have uploaded at least one video in the past 12 months, and roughly 600 have uploaded at least one in the past 3 months. That's according to a new analysis -published before peer review on chemRxiv-conducted primarily by undergraduate students at the University of Strathclyde.
Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct
One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study. The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.
The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists
Research-integrity watchers are concerned about the growing ways in which scientists can fake or manipulate the citation counts of their studies. In recent months, increasingly bold practices have surfaced. One approach was revealed through a sting operation in which a group of researchers bought 50 citations to pad the Google Scholar profile of a fake scientist they had created. The scientists bought the citations for US$300 from a firm that seems to sell bogus citations in bulk.
Many publishers lack policies on using AI chatbots to write papers
Many scholarly publishers still don't have policies on whether researchers can submit papers written by artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT. Jeremy Y. Ng, a metascientist who works at the Centre for Journalology at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and colleagues audited the publicly available policies of 163 members of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM).
Award-winning chemist threatens to sue critic
A chemistry researcher who was awarded the Kavli prize in nanoscience earlier this year is threatening to sue a long-standing critic of his work. Chad Mirkin, who directs the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, developed nanoflares, a precursor to SmartFlare probes that were designed to detect RNA within living cells.
Should scientists be paid when AI chatbots use their work?
1 hour ago AI-powered companions are a growing industry amid rising loneliness and disillusionment with modern dating. At first glance, “Jenny” looks like a young, attractive Asian-American woman with a penchant for posting flirty photos and captions on her X account. Even if some of her features look a little …
Should scientists be paid when AI chatbots use their work?
Scientists should be compensated and credited when artificial intelligence chatbots pull information from their papers, a collecting society has said. The call comes amid news that two major academic publishers sold access to their research papers and data to large tech firms to train their artificial intelligence models without consulting authors.
The future of science publishing
In 2015, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable research foundations in the world, introduced a new publication policy that promised to pay publication charges for papers its grantees write as long as the content of the final version of the study was freely available to read somewhere online.
Are retraction notices becoming clearer?
Retraction notices issued by scholarly journals have, to an extent, become clearer over time, a new analysis suggests. The authors of the study examined 768 retraction notices issued by journals run by the publishing giants Springer Nature and Wiley in 2010, 2015, and 2020 ( Account. Res. 2023, DOI: 10.1080/08989621.2024.2366281). They obtained retraction records from the Retraction Watch Database, which contains more than 49,000 retractions to date.
Japanese chemistry institute sues archival site for hosting discontinued journal
The Japan Institute of Heterocyclic Chemistry has initiated legal proceedings against the digital preservation site CLOCKSS, which made thousands of papers published by a journal previously run by the institute accessible, Chemistry World has learned. In April, Chemistry World reported that the Japanese institute abruptly removed all the papers published by Heterocycles since it was launched in 1973 with little warning.
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