The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals after failing to meet quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch.
On December 16, Clarivate—a scholarly publication analytics company—removed the journal Chemosphere from its platform, the Web of Science, which is a key index for academic journals. The indexing platform tracks citations and calculates journal "impact factors," a proxy for relevance in its field. It's a critical metric not only for the journals but for the academic authors of the journal's articles, who use the score in their pursuit of promotions and research funding.
To be included in the Web of Science, Clarivate requires journals to follow editorial quality criteria. In an email to Ars Technica, Clarivate confirmed that Chemosphere was removed for "not meeting one or more of the quality criteria." According to Retraction Watch, Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April.
In a December 12 news release, Chemosphere acknowledged the quality concerns and laid out steps it will take to improve its editorial process. Those include improvements to article vetting and peer review, along with assurances that articles will be retracted if there's evidence of policy breaches.
"We believe that these measures will help us regain the standard of research integrity that has always been so important to us," the news release stated.
Questioned conclusions
The removal from the Web of Science on December 16 came just a day after a correction was issued on the black plastic study. That study claimed to find a "high exposure potential" of toxic flame retardants in plastic household items, particularly kitchen utensils, that are made from recycled electronics. The findings sparked a firestorm of media coverage imploring people to immediately throw away any black plastic utensils in their kitchens.
However, the authors made a math error in their analysis that put their estimate of exposure to toxins from kitchen utensils off by an order of magnitude. Corrected, the article notes that the exposure potential from kitchen utensils is actually less than a tenth of the limit considered safe by the Environmental Protection Agency. Further, the study found flame retardant contamination in less than 10 percent of the 203 household products it examined—and only about 8 percent of 109 kitchen utensils.
Despite this, the correction notice on the article states that the error "does not affect the overall conclusion of the paper."
When Ars Technica reported on the correction earlier this week, we reached out to the lead author of the study to ask why the error didn't change the paper's conclusions. Since publication, the author—Megan Liu of the environmental health advocacy group Toxic-Free Future—got back to us. She didn't respond directly to our question, but she pointed to an updated statement on Toxic-Free Future's site about the correction.
The statement says that, regardless of the math error, the study still found unnecessary flame retardants in some products and that the compounds can "significantly contaminate" those products.
12/20/2024 8:50am: This post has been updated to include additional information from Clarivate.