Retraction Watch

University of Newcastle investigating top melanoma researchers

The University of Newcastle in Australia is investigating the work of two prominent skin cancer researchers, Retraction Watch has learned.

Commenters on PubPeer have posted questions about the data in 42 papers by Peter Hersey and Xu Dong Zhang, both well-known in Australian melanoma research. So far, two of the papers have been retracted and four corrected.

The University of Newcastle’s head of research and innovation confirmed that the university has launched an investigation into both experts, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch. That official has a complex history of her own: a paper of hers was retracted in 2013, leading to the return of a substantial amount of grant funding.

Embattled rocket scientist loses paper following Retraction Watch report

A controversial rocket scientist in India earned his fourth retraction in October after an investigation at a physics journal found a core part of his work was “inaccurate and paradoxical.”

At issue is a highly technical concept developed by V.R. Sanal Kumar, a professor of aerospace engineering at Amity University in New Delhi. Other scientists have denounced the concept, which Kumar has dubbed “Sanal flow choking,” as “absolute nonsense,” as we reported in April.

The editors of AIP Advances appear to agree. An October 9 notice announcing the retraction of “A closed-form analytical model for predicting 3D boundary layer displacement thickness for the validation of viscous flow solvers” stated:

Weekend reads: Science journals and the U.S. presidential election; ‘delve’ and spelling errors in the literature; PruittGate revisited

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

How an article estimating deaths from hydroxychloroquine use came to be retracted

An article estimating how many people might have died during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic due to the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine in hospitals was retracted in August after advocates for the drug launched a campaign criticizing the study.

French media have reported criticism of the retraction as inappropriate, and speculation the journal caved to pressure from hydroxychloroquine advocates.

In a statement to Retraction Watch, the journal stood by its decision to retract the article due to “some clear fatal flaws” identified in letters to the editor, which it said it declined to publish due to their tone it deemed “not suitable for publication in a scientific journal.”

Meet the founder of a 100,000-strong Facebook group driving change in scientific integrity in Vietnam

Retraction Watch readers may have noticed an uptick of items in the RW Daily and Weekend Reads about scientific integrity issues in Vietnam over the past year. Many of those items had their genesis, and were circulated, on a Facebook group that now has close to 100,000 members — and was recently removed temporarily by Facebook. We asked Van Tu Duong, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, who founded the group, to tell us more about the history of the effort. This email interview has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Tell us about this history of the group. Why did you find it, and when?

Highly cited engineer offers guaranteed publication, citations in return for coauthorship

Last year, a researcher at a U.S. university received an email offering what the subject line described as a “great opportunity to publish an article.”

The author of the email, Mahdi Shariati, an adjunct professor of civil engineering at Ton Duc Thang University, in Vietnam, said he had read one of the researcher’s papers and was impressed by its quality. “It would be an honor for me to collaborate with you and jointly present your remarkable work,” Shariati added.

In exchange, Shariati promised:

Declaration of Helsinki revision adds nod to research misconduct

The Declaration of Helsinki on ethical principles for research involving human participants now includes a statement on scientific integrity and research misconduct.

Adopted in 1964 by the World Medical Association, the Declaration of Helsinki was conceived in response to the atrocities committed during World War 2 in the name of medical research on human subjects. The initial document – which has been updated many times over the last 60 years – included five key principles, including the primacy of informed consent, the need for a rigorous calculation of risks and benefits for a given study, and a consideration of the scientific value of a given study – that is, the experiment should be valuable to science and to the subjects involved.

In the recent process of revising the declaration, the World Medical Association added the following two sentences to the “general principles” section of the document:

Weekend reads: Puberty blockers paper remains ‘unpublished because of politics;’ ‘What Drugmakers Did Not Tell Volunteers in Alzheimer’s Trials;’ ‘Ginger Rogers science’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

eLife latest in string of major journals put on hold from Web of Science

Citing eLife’s unusual practice of publishing articles without accepting or rejecting them, Clarivate says it is re-evaluating the inclusion of the open-access biology journal in Web of Science, its influential database of abstracts and citations.

In contrast to the other journals recently placed on hold from indexing, including Elsevier’s Science of the Total Environment, Clarivate has cited a specific policy as the reason for re-evaluating eLife: “Coverage of journals/platforms in which publication is decoupled from validation by peer review.”

A Clarivate spokesperson described the policy as applying to “journals that do not make an editorial decision to accept or reject based on peer reviewers’ comments.”

Cambridge researcher pulls Cell paper five years after Nature, Science retractions

A cancer researcher at the University of Cambridge in the UK has retracted a paper from Cell after commenters on PubPeer questioned aspects of 10 images in the article.

Though an institutional investigation found the figures were “not reliable,” another of the authors objected to the retraction as “an overreaction.”

Steve Jackson, the University of Cambridge biology professor and lab leader, previously retracted two papers – including one in Nature and one in Science posted on the same day – after a Cambridge investigation found a co-author, Abderrahmane Kaidi, had falsified data.

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