2021 – Page 14 – Retraction Watch

Readers puzzle over marketing journal’s failures to retract

A marketing journal is taking heat on social media for issuing an expression of concern over a 2019 paper that many readers believe should have been retracted — and correcting another instead of retracting it.

The article now subject to an expression of concern, “Role of Ambient Temperature in Influencing Willingness to Pay in Auctions and Negotiations,” was written by Jayati Sinha, who holds the Macy’s Retailing Professorship at Florida International University and Rajesh Bagchi, of Virginia Tech University.

According to the abstract:

Weekend reads: Fraud in a study of dishonesty; scrutiny of an open access publisher; HHMI prof fired for sexual harassment

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

WHO COVID-19 library contains hundreds of papers from hijacked journals
Will the real hottest month on record please stand up?
Biotech co-founder faked data in NIH-funded research, says federal watchdog
The decade-long saga capped by a $215,000 settlement with the US government
Authors crop estimate that was off by a factor of 60 — or $3 trillion
Meet the alleged brain surgeon who squats on domains, punks journals and listed Wolf Blitzer as a co-author

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 149.

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

Meet the alleged brain surgeon who squats on domains, punks journals and listed Wolf Blitzer as a co-author

Wolf Blitzer, not a cardiology researcher

We have a confession right up front: You won’t meet the man — a man who claims to be a brain surgeon, no less — we refer to in the headline.

That is because, dear reader, we were not able to contact the person who publishes under the name Michael George Zaki Ghali.

What we do know is that someone using Ghali’s name bought two fake web domains for the Karolinska Institutet to make it look as though he was affiliated with the world-famous medical center and published seven dozen papers in peer reviewed journals owned by Elsevier, IMR Press, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. So far, seven those articles have now been retracted, by our count, including recently a 2020 paper in Acta Cardiologica that included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer as a co-author. [See an update on this post.]

Authors crop estimate that was off by a factor of 60 — or $3 trillion

A paper that tried to estimate the cost of invasive species to farming in Africa has been corrected because the researchers made a pair of errors that dramatically inflated their calculations.

One mistake led the group, from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ghana and Kenya, to overstate the cost to African agricultural of invasive vegetation by roughly $3 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a T. The second error pared their estimate for crop losses due to a single plant species from $11.4 billion to $4.1 billion.

Now, we’re not suggesting that the corrections negate the overall importance of the research. But we do wonder how errors of this magnitude weren’t immediately obvious to not only the peer reviewers and editors of the article, but to the researchers themselves. After all, the gross domestic product of the entire continent of Africa was an estimated $2.6 trillion in 2019.

The journal, CABI Agriculture and Bioscience — the official journal of CABI, a global nonprofit group focused on agriculture and the environment — has both a brief correction and a more detailed notice for the May 2021 paper, “Towards estimating the economic cost of invasive alien species to African crop and livestock production”. The short version reads:

The decade-long saga capped by a $215,000 settlement with the US government

If you need a reminder of how slowly the wheels of justice grind, here’s one.

Earlier this month, Sam W. Lee agreed to pay the U.S. government $215,000 to settle allegations that the former Harvard researcher had made false claims in a grant application.

It turns out that at least one skeptical researcher had notified journals and regulators about his concerns over the veracity of some of Lee’s other published findings back in 2011.

In July of that year, David Vaux, an Australian scientist and research ethicist now at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, wrote to Nature about a new paper by Lee with what he believed were several critical flaws. According to Vaux, multiple colleagues of his had raised questions about the article, “Selective killing of cancer cells by a small molecule targeting the stress response to ROS,” which the journal had published earlier that month.

Among the criticisms, wrote Vaux, a member of the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization, were:

Biotech co-founder faked data in NIH-funded research, says federal watchdog

A former researcher at the Mount Desert Island Laboratory in Maine who co-founded a lab spinoff faked data in research supported by federal funding, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The researcher, Viravuth Yin, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data,” the ORI said in an announcement about the case. The work was published and submitted from 2015 to 2019, and Yin was principal investigator on one of the grants named by the ORI, worth more than $900,000.

Will the real hottest month on record please stand up?

As anyone who follows the climate news is aware, July 2021 was the hottest month on record for our torrid little orb, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), with a combined temperature 1.67 degrees F higher than the 20th century average of 60.4 F.

NOAA noted in a Friday press release that the previous record was set in July 2016, and tied in 2019 and 2020. But as Bill Frezza, a sharp-eyed reader of Retraction Watch noticed, the agency’s website tells a different story. This press release, dated Aug. 15, 2019, and still live on noaa.gov, proclaims July 2019 to be the hottest month on record for the planet:

WHO COVID-19 library contains hundreds of papers from hijacked journals

A World Health Organization (WHO) database of papers about COVID-19 contains hundreds of articles published in hijacked journals whose publishers have stolen titles and legitimacy from the original publications.

That’s what I found when I analyzed the WHO’s “COVID-19 Global literature on coronavirus disease,” which as of August 1 included more than 318,000 papers sourced from typically trusted databases including the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Medline, Elsevier’s Scopus, and Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But the collection hosts hundreds of papers published in hijacked journals with fraudulent publishing practices. Hijacked, or clone, journals mimic legitimate publishers by creating a clone website or registering an expired one. They accept papers — often wildly out of scope of the original publication — without peer review, and collect fees from the authors.

Weekend reads: ‘An Anti-Tobacco Hero’s Complicated Legacy’; plagiarism at Snopes; is publishing in predatory journals misconduct?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Researcher in Japan suspended, demoted for plagiarism
Critics face legal threats as journal takes more than three years to act
Ivermectin meta-analysis to be retracted, revised, say authors
Authors blame a “ghoul” for retraction of paper claiming vaccines lead to health and behavioral issues
Authors — except one — retract 2014 Nature paper on genetics
Authors admit they “published the paper without completely studying their work.”
Attorney asks Retraction Watch to remove post because client has lost out on opportunities
False claims allegations cost Mass General, former Harvard researcher more than $1 million

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 149.

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

False claims allegations cost Mass General, former Harvard researcher more than $1 million

A former Harvard researcher has agreed to pay $215,000 to settle allegations that he used bogus data in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health — and the teaching hospital where he worked has already repaid more than $900,000 in grant funds.

The settlement, of which we were just made aware, was announced on August 6, six days before a lawyer for the researcher, Sam W. Lee, asked us to take down a post about his client’s problematic publications.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Lee knowingly made false claims when in June 2014 he submitted the “allegedly inauthentic data” as part of NIH grant R01 CA195534-01, titled “p53 survival target DDR1 kinase in DNA damage response and carcinogenesis”:

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