Peer Review Fail – Science Integrity Digest

Mega-corrections and weak editors

In the past months I have been going through my spreadsheet with over 2,000 papers with image or other problems. Many of these papers were reported by me in 2014 and 2015 to the editors of the journals in which they were published. Now, around 5 years later, it is time to see what happened with my reports.

In this post, I want to show you an example of a paper that I reported in 2014, and that was corrected about a year later.

In my opinion, the Editors of the journal made a huge mistake here. This should have been a retraction.

Photoshop as a management modality

On Twitter, @DrVanDamme pointed me to a paper in published in July 2019 in the International Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, a journal of the International Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (IAOMS).

Three diets, three papers, one retraction, and lots of concerns

Note: this post is not an allegation of misconduct. I do not have any strong feelings about low- or high-carb diets.

This post tells the tale of three paper. Paper #1 was retracted, republished as paper #2, and republished a second time as paper #3. Let’s take a look at what happened. Based on an original Twitter thread on Twitter and on ThreadReaderApp.

Surfing the water-DNA waves

A post about another “peer reviewed” paper published by World Scientific publishers (not included in any predatory publisher list that I could find). Based on this Twitter thread.

This paper is written by the same first author on the pregnancy/virus model from my previous post, a cardiology doctor from Rome. According to his website he “graduated with honors in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and is now publishing under the affiliation of the Guglielmo Marconi University in Rome.

The paper was published in the International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics – which seem to have a consistent problem with the quality of their peer review.

An astrophysicist who decapitates birds and wants to infect pregnant women with viruses

Note: this post has been updated on June 4, to include new information that the author was not affiliated with the RIAAM institute at the time of publishing his papers. The RIAAM takes this false affiliation very seriously and distances itself from the author’s views and ideas.

This blog post – again – is based on a Twitter thread (here is the unroll if you like that better). It is about a nuclear physicist who ~~works~~ has previously worked at the Research Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics of Maragha (RIAAM) in Iran.

External Qi

This blog posts starts with a 2018 paper that shows us that “External Qi” can kill lung cancer cells, but that lacks an explanation on what it exactly is. Going back in time trying to detangle a hairball of references, we end up in 2004 with a paper in Brain Research that explains how a Chinese Qigong master famous in the 1980’s and 1990’s can kill cancer cells and make other cells grow by using a special Qigong technique.

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