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OpenSees Retractions

Original Post - 06 Nov 2024 - Michael H. Scott

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Citation cartels, peer-review rings, paper mills, and other schemes have eroded the integrity of scholarly publications. In some cases, articles can be retracted from journals; however, this outcome is rare.

I set out to find if any OpenSees articles, i.e., articles that refer to OpenSees, have been retracted. Google Scholar is usually a good place to start.

Google Scholar

Go to Google Scholar and search for “Retracted OpenSees”. The retracted articles that mention OpenSees are generally at the top of the results, but several legitimate articles are in the mix, e.g., where OpenSees appeared in an article along with retracted post-tensioning tendons or retracted actuators. But there are a few highlights among the OpenSees retractions.

Articles published in the 2018 proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Smart City and Systems Engineering were retracted. IEEE retracted the entire proceedings–not just the OpenSees stuff–due to “lack of confidence in the review mechanisms used by this conference to screen, review, and accept [the articles]”, i.e., the peer review process was inadequate.

An article published in the KSCE Journal of Civil Engineering was retracted by the author. If you read the retraction notice, you’ll see there was some doubt about how a time integration parameter was developed. Although worse things have happened with OpenSees publications, there could be more to this retraction than meets the eye.

The article “Electrochemical Mechanical Properties of Beam-Column Joints of Building Steel Structures under Impact Loads” published in the Journal of Chemistry, and claiming to use the C3D8R element of OpenSees, was retracted. This article piqued my interest because, well, what is OpenSees doing in a chemistry journal?

Although Google Scholar is good for finding retractions, Retraction Watch and PubPeer are better for drilling down for more information about this, let’s call it, “OpenSees chemistry article”.

Retraction Watch

Retraction Watch is a blog that reports on retracted papers and maintains retractions in a database. If you search for the “OpenSees chemistry article”, either by its real title or DOI, you will see several reasons for retraction:

It appears this article was part of mass retractions made by Wiley and Hindawi in 2023. Retraction Watch has a few blog posts, e.g., this post, explaining the mass retractions.

PubPeer

PubPeer is a website where users can post questions about journal articles. The questions are usually something like “why the fck did you cite this paper?” or “how in the fck did you get these results?”

You will find an entry for the “OpenSees chemistry article” on PubPeer. A user noted many extraneous, superfluous citations to articles on an array of subjects at the top of every OpenSees user’s mind: sports image capturing, COVID-19 spread, gas discharge, and textile manufacturing. Sure sounds like a citation cartel to me!


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