A 2022 paper in Cureus on causes of cancer around the world is under investigation by the journal following inquiries by Retraction Watch prompted by a reader’s email.
The paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors,” shares a title and figures with a 2005 paper in The Lancet. It also “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” an anonymous tipster told us.
As we’ve noted elsewhere in a report on the team that developed the phrase, “Tortured phrases are what happens to words that get translated from English into a foreign language, then back to English — perhaps by a computer trying to generate a scholarly publication for a group of unscrupulous authors.”
Graham Parker, Cureus’ director of publishing and customer success, told us to his knowledge, “the journal has not been contacted with any concerns regarding this article. Now that we are aware of a concern, we will examine both articles in question to see if any action is required.”
Neither Khizer K. Ansari, the corresponding author of the Cureus paper and a student at Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College in Wardha, India, nor Majid Ezzati, the corresponding author of the article in The Lancet and a professor at Imperial College London, responded to requests for comment.
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Cureus Should Die.
Its a sham journal.
Despite starting with good intentions, Cureus has transformed into a cesspool of low-quality articles with predatory publication practices.
Cureus must be de-indexed from PubMed and probably removed from the scientific record forever to prevent further pollution.
I strongly agree. The first step should be de-indexing it from PubMed. The main reason why so many are using Cureus for their academic progress is because of the PMID that they give to each paper.
I appreciate what the Editors tried to do, but this model is not working, and is making the whole pool dirty.
For residency applications and fellowship training, many programs are not considering publications from Cureus as actual publications.
I invite Cureus’ director of publishing and customer success to consider this page of the Problematic Paper Screener, tabulating Cureus articles with tortured phrases: https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:3::::RIR:IREQ_VENUE:Cureus
See also PubPeer and subscribe to the PubPeer journal dashboard: https://pubpeer.com/journals
With AI, this issue is going to be very significant. Keep an eye on papers published recently 1-2 years, this might be more productive.
My personal opinion :
Cureus relies a lot on authors from developing countries where English isnt their first language
So make sure you dont report accidental typos eg falure instead of failure.
Your system is good, some of the examples you flagged are just shocking
I wonder if they were just using thesaurus like Joey used in Friends.
More than 2/3 of the cureus articles flagged are within last two years.
There is a rise in AI use for fraudulent papers and paraphrasing, journals should screen all new submissions for such tortured phrases like they do with ithenticate and other plagiarism checkers. It is that simple, but will they?