2021 – Page 30 – Retraction Watch

“Falsifying elements” prompt retraction of three more papers by former “Peorian of the Year”

Jasti Rao, a former star scientist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria whose career flamed out over concerns about misconduct, gambling and allegations that he had mistreated employees, is now up to 16 retractions.

The International Journal of Oncology, a Spandidos title, has retracted three of Rao’s papers dating back to 2011, citing the presence of “falsifying elements” in the images.

Here’s the notice for the 2011 paper “Oncogenic role of p53 is suppressed by si‑RNA bicistronic construct of uPA, uPAR and cathepsin‑B in meningiomas both in vitro and in vivo”:

Bad blood at a lab leads to retraction after postdoc publishes study without supervisor’s permission

A former postdoc at Stony Brook University who was moonlighting in a different lab has lost a study after a university investigation found issues with the work, including “overlap” with prior grants and an earlier study that her supervisor had published, as well as misreported data.

The supervisor — neuroscientist Joshua Plotkin, who was the complainant in the investigation — said that the study was published without his permission, according to an email seen by Retraction Watch. The former postdoc, Catarina Cunha, has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a “witch hunt,” claiming that the university ignored her exculpatory evidence and that the paper’s findings are valid and original.

Weekend reads: A JAMA editor resigns; why correcting the record takes so long; focus on predatory journals

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:

Journal flags a dozen papers as likely paper mill products a year after sleuths identified them
Authors retract Nature Majorana paper, apologize for “insufficient scientific rigour”
Elsevier journals ask Retraction Watch to review COVID-19 papers
Drug researchers retract two papers, one because “human stem cells were actually mouse stem cells”
Supplement-selling doctor who ran afoul of FDA and state medical board up to 20 retractions

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 87.

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

Supplement-selling doctor who ran afoul of FDA and state medical board up to 20 retractions

Dove Press, which late last year retracted more than a dozen articles by a U.S. physician who appears to have used the articles and other publications as marketing material for dietary supplements he sold, has pulled six more of his papers.

The new retractions make 20 removals by Dove — a unit of Taylor & Francis — for Marty Hinz.

As we have reported, Hinz has a long history of running afoul of regulatory bodies, from the FDA to the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, which in March 2020 reprimanded and fined him more than $7,000 following allegations including that he claimed on his website to have “reinvented the medical science foundation of Parkinson’s disease” and to “treat and do things for our Parkinson’s disease patients that most doctors of the world believe are impossible.”

Drug researchers retract two papers, one because “human stem cells were actually mouse stem cells”

A group of drug researchers has lost a pair of 2020 papers for a lack of reproducibility and other problems, including the unfortunate mislabeling of murine stem cells as having come from humans. (In case you’re wondering, mouse and human stem cells are at once quite similar and highly divergent.)

One article, “Divergent synthesis of 5-substituted pyrimidine 2′-deoxynucleosides and their incorporation into oligodeoxynucleotides for the survey of uracil DNA glycosylases,” appeared in Chemical Science. The second, “Convenient synthesis of pyrimidine 2′-deoxyribonucleoside monophosphates with important epigenetic marks at the 5-position,” was published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. Both journals belong to the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The senior author on the papers was Yana Cen, a medicinal chemist now at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Cen has not responded to a request for comment.

According to the abstract of the Chemical Science paper:

Elsevier journals ask Retraction Watch to review COVID-19 papers

Ivan Oransky: Not a COVID-19 expert
*credit: Elizabeth Solaka*

At the risk of breaking the Fourth Wall, here’s a story about peer reviews that weren’t — and shouldn’t have been.

Since mid-February, four different Elsevier journals have invited me to review papers about COVID-19. Now, it is true that we will occasionally review — often with our researcher, Alison Abritis — papers on retractions and closely related issues. And at the risk of creating more work for ourselves, we often wonder who exactly reviewed some of the papers we see published, given how badly they mangle retraction data.

These manuscripts, however, had nothing whatsoever to do with retractions. In case you need evidence, here it is:

Authors retract Nature Majorana paper, apologize for “insufficient scientific rigour”

Leo Kouwenhoven, credit De Sebastiaan ter Burg

The authors of a Nature paper that could have meant a great leap forward for Microsoft’s computing power are retracting it today after other researchers flagged serious problems in the work.

The researchers, led by Leo Kouwenhoven, a physicist at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who is also employed by Microsoft, published “Quantized Majorana conductance” on March 28, 2018. Along with work at other labs, the paper, which claimed to have found evidence for a long-elusive particle known as a Majorana fermion, prompted this quotation in a BBC story:

Journal flags a dozen papers as likely paper mill products a year after sleuths identified them

A journal has issued a dozen expressions of concern over articles that a group of data sleuths had flagged last year on PubPeer as showing signs of having been cranked out by a paper mill.

The 12 articles were published between 2017 and 2019 in the International Journal of Immunopathology and Pharmacology and were written by authors in China. They carry the same notice: