Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style.
Last May, the journal Cureus published a paper titled “Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia Due to Homozygous Loss of the CD4 Start Codon.” The paper caught the notice of Andrea Lisco, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, who earlier this month was looking for his own article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on the same topic. Lisco told us:
I did accidentally run in the Cureus paper while I was looking for my original publication on JID and I did report it immediately to Cureus and JID editorial offices.
The journal acted with what we’d consider to be remarkable haste. Within a few weeks came the following retraction notice:
This article has been retracted and removed due to substantiated and corroborated allegations of academic fraud and misconduct on the part of the authors, Srikar Sama, Ashrit Challa, Foram V. Patel, Sathvik Saineni, Sohan Erpenwar, Shashi Maryala, who utilized without any permission clinical and scientific information reported in a previously published article (Andrea Lisco, Peiying Ye, Chun-Shu Wong, Luxin Pei, Amy P Hsu, Emily M Mace, Jordan S Orange, Silvia Lucena Lage, Addison Jon Ward, Stephen A Migueles, Mark Connors, Megan V Anderson, Clarisa M Buckner, Susan Moir, Adam Rupert, Alina Dulau-Florea, Princess Ogbogu, Dylan Timberlake, Luigi D Notarangelo, Stefania Pittaluga, Roshini S Abraham, Irini Sereti, Lost in Translation: Lack of CD4 Expression due to a Novel Genetic Defect, The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Volume 223, Issue 4, 15 February 2021, Pages 645–654, https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiab025) along with images and preliminary data presented in a case conference webinar at the North America Immuno-Hematology Clinical Education and Research (NICER) on August 6th 2020.
This retracted Cureus article reported within the acknowledgements that “The authors would like to thank Dr. Vipul Patel, who provided the dot blot and gene sequencing images. These images were presented by him at the North America Immuno-Hematology Clinical Education and Research (NICER) symposium (October 2020, Virtual Event)”. This statement is false as the flow cytometry dot plots were generated by Dr. Roshini Abraham who personally presented them in the above-mentioned case conference presentation in August, 2020. Similarly, Lisco et al generated the gene sequencing data as well as all immunological and histological work-up at the National Institutes of Health.
Lisco et al shared as confidential material of relevance for clinical care the aforementioned presentation with the patient’s primary care provider, who then shared it with a colleague who subsequently shared it with Srikar Sama. All 8 figures included by Sama et al have been generated at the NIH on procedures, research activities or clinical materials obtained either at the NIH Clinical Center or at OSU and regularly transferred via release of medical information.
Sama et al in their manipulation of the materials contained in the NICER presentation have intentionally removed the authors listed in the initial slide as well as in other images. Such actions go well beyond simple misattribution or misrepresentation and constitute gross scientific misconduct by fraudulently obtaining data and figures they did not have part in generating nor legitimately obtaining.
This duplication was not detected by the journal’s plagiarism-checking software and attempts to contact the institutions of the authors were unsuccessful. When initially contacted with these allegations, Srikar Sama and his legal representation attempted to intimidate the journal into allowing Mr. Sama to write the retraction notice while escaping blame for all but the misattribution of images. Cureus takes matters of academic fraud and misconduct very seriously and has thus made the decision to retract and remove this article.
Saineni, the corresponding author on the paper, did not respond to a request for comment. But John Adler, the editor-in-chief of the journal, told us:
this was a clusterf**K. This problem was brought to our attention in an email from Dr. Lisco during the first week of December. Suffice it to say the journal was sent a letter from an attorney and numerous other legal threats were made/implied against the journal, invoking a range [of] dubious legal rationales including HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act].
Asked about the quick response once allegations of misconduct surfaced — which is not typical at other journals, particularly when lawyers are involved — Adler said:
the journal did an expeditious investigation once the problem was brought to our attention and the authors proved incapable of providing an adequate response to the allegations. Given the clear cut evidence at hand we were able then to arrive at a quick decision to retract, legal threats notwithstanding.
The retraction is the 17th from Cureus this year, by our count. In March, the journal retracted five papers because a medical resident had his wife peer review them.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a one-time tax-deductible contribution by PayPal or by Square, or a monthly tax-deductible donation by Paypal to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
It’s refreshing to know, that rascals whom engage in the above acts of scientific fraud are severely dealt with, and the justice that they so deserve, is metered out accordingly.
Perhaps Dr. Adler, EIC of Cureus, could weigh in on a question about their review procedures .
The retracted Sama et al paper indicates a very fast review- 3 days: review began 15 May 2021, review ended, 18 May 2021, published 26May2021. How does that work? “Case reports” do not require external reviewers?
Granted, peer reviewers are unlikely to recognize material lifted from other sources, and external peer review slows up the publication process. Still, relying on internal, review only would seem to increase the journal’s vulnerability to publishing questionable material.
I have had papers like this. Some publishers will set the revised date as the revised manuscript if the original submission was “revise and resubmit”.
This results in a re-review that appears extraordinarily fast.
“Granted, peer reviewers are unlikely to recognize material lifted from other sources”
Should we let this aspect go so easily? That is, I am not sure whether the content of Sama et al. matches the authors’ profiles and capabilities. If my suspicions are correct, a simple background check of the authors, either by an editor or by a reviewer, would have raised a red flag.
In my experience the usual “tell” is a sudden change in the level of diction and/or English competence. You can then Google distinctive phrases in the too-good part of the paper and often you will find the source right away.
I also once had the experience of thinking “wow, that’s nicely put, just like I would have said it”–and then checking and discovering that, of course, it sounded like me because it *was* me.
Seems like plagiarism detection software developers should up their game to better detect fraud. Additionally, ALL academic journals should be equipped with plagiarism checking software & all incoming manuscripts should be scrutinized as part of the initial processing procedure [with a written report provided to the editors]. If this was also widely known by everyone, perhaps it might discourage some potential ‘plagiarists-in-training’…
Good to see another practitioner of ‘science by law’ get his comeuppance so effectively & rapidly.
@Aina, software cannot detect plagiarism! It can only detect text that matches something in their database that can potentially be plagiarism. Institutions need to stop counting number of publications and deal severely with plagiarists.
Hi Debora,
As a journal editor I appreciate your comment: We don’t just press a button & ‘Hey Presto’ – the software decides whether something is plagiarized or not. That determination is a human one, a human one that takes editorial time. It is a time investment that is worth it in the end.
As a journal editor too, I find plagiarism detection software useful but only up to a point. It identifies loads of people who reuse bits and pieces of their own texts, which is bad but still not as serious an offense, but only the dumber, lazier, or less fluent of the true plagiarizers. Those services (or at least the one that we subscribe too) are blind to reworded text, not to speak of plagiarized figures, and all of the worst plagiarism cases that I have encountered were identified by humans (usually a referee) without software assistance.
The second author is now a first-year undergraduate student, the third author was a final-year undergraduate student who graduated mid-2021. Both of these authors are based in Dayton, Ohio, USA. The other authors are supposedly employed at a hospital in Hyderabad, India.