The National Institute for Ocean Science (Ifremer) in France has flagged 11 papers on PubPeer for concerns including faked authorship and plagiarism, and has blasted the journals involved for their failure to adequately address the unethical work.
Stories like this highlight an important point often made by Retraction Watch. Publications must do a much better job of fully and transparently reporting when they retract a paper failing to so perpetuates the enduring citation and impact of flawed and shonky papers. We recommend researchers check their reference list against the Retraction Watch database.
And in one case, a journal seems to have retracted the offending paper with no notice of any kind (we’re sure we don’t need to remind you that the Committee on Publication Ethics doesn’t approve of such practice).
A name that appears on nine of the articles is Bertrand Chapron, a researcher at Ifremer. Chapron had nothing to do with the articles – a fact his institution has been pointing out to the journals involved, without satisfaction, while noting that two of his putative co-authors have highly suspect affiliations.
In what reads like a surefire recipe for achieving 1K status, the list, per Ifremer, of the countries in which one of the co-authors listed institutional positions in articles published between 2018 and 2021…
