Exclusive: The studies that most frequently refer to withdrawn research papers

In January an overview article 1

The case is one of the most extreme that A huge project to identify papers, the results of which could be questionable because they cite withdrawn or problematic research. The Creator of the Project, The Informatiker Guillaume Cabanac from the University of Toulouse in France shared its data with the Message team from Nature , which she analyzed to find the paper that cited the most withdrawn work, but were not withdrawn themselves (see "Returned references").

“We do not accuse anyone of doing anything wrong. We only observe that in some bibliographies the references have been withdrawn or withdrawn, which means that the paper could be dubious," says Cabanac. He calls his tool a Feet of Clay Detector, based on an analogy that originally comes from the Bible and refers to statues or buildings that collapse due to their weak sound bases.

The Ieee paper is in second place in the list compiled by Nature , with 18 of the 30 cited studies. The authors did not respond to comments, but the integrity director of the IEEe, Luigi Longobardi, says that the publisher knew nothing about the problem until Nature asked and that he examined it.

CABANAC, a research integrity detective, has already developed software in order to do thousands of problematic papers in the literature on problems such as Computer-written texts or hidden plagiarism . He hopes that his latest detector, whom he has developed in the past two years and which he this week he has been in a Comment in Nature describes another way to prevent bad research in the scientific literature-including some fake works by" PaperMill "companies .

further examinations

Cabanac lists the results of the detector on his website , but elsewhere online-on the paper check-up website pubpeer and on social media-he explicitly marked over 1,700 papers that caught the eye because they rely on withdrawn work. Some authors thanked Cabanac for notification of problems in their references. Others argue that it is unfair to effectively suspect their work, just because retractions have been made after the publication that they think their papers do not affect.

References withdrawn not clearly show that a paper is problematic, notes Tamara Welschot, part of the team for research integrity at Springer Nature in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, but they are a useful sign that a paper could benefit from a further review. (The Nature news team is independent of its editor, Springer Nature.)

Some researchers believe that the withdrawal of references in a narrative overview - which describes the state of research in one area - does not necessarily make the original paper invalid. But if studies are withdrawn from a systematic review or meta-analysis, the result of this review should always be recalculated in order to bring the literature up to date, the epidemiologist Isabelle Bouton from the University of Paris City.

Find out fraudsters

Some of the paper who quote a high proportion of withdrawn work comes from well -known academic fraudsters who have withdrawn many of their own work. These include the engineer Ali Nazari, who was released in 2019 by Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, after examining his activities after examining the university forge. Previously, he worked at Islamic Azad University in Saveh, Iran, and his current whereabouts is unknown. After Nature had told the publishers of his still existing papers 2 , 3 , including Elsevier and FAP-Unifesp, a non-profit foundation that supports the Federal University of São Paulo in Brazil, they said that they would check the articles. One of the relevant magazines was discontinued in 2013, noted Elsevier.

Cabanacs Detector also marks Papers 4 by chen-yuan chen 2014 worked at the National University of Education in Pingung, Taiwan. He was behind a syndicate that carried out fake peer reviews and increased quotes, which became known in 2014 after an examination by the publisher Sage. A