March 2022 – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

UNC-Chapel Hill vice chancellor resigns post after admitting to plagiarism

Terry Magnuson, the vice chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s medical school, has resigned from that post two days after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity said that he had admitted to plagiarizing text in an NIH grant application.

As we reported March 8, Magnuson

“engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarizing text” from two guides, material from a company that makes sequencing kits, and a review article, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Magnuson did not respond to our requests for comment earlier this week about whether the finding would have any effect on his positions at UNC. But in a letter today to the “Carolina Community,” chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and provost and chief academic officer J. Christopher Clemens wrote:

Lancet journal retracts, replaces paper on treatment for pancreatic cancer

A Lancet journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 paper on the treatment of pancreatic cancer over an error that prompted an institutional investigation.

The article, “Stereotactic body radiotherapy plus pembrolizumab and trametinib versus stereotactic body radiotherapy plus gemcitabine for locally recurrent pancreatic cancer after surgical resection: an open-label, randomised, controlled, phase 2 trial,” appeared last July in Lancet Oncology and received a significant amount of attention on social media. It has already been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the journal, after publication readers notified the editors about potential problems with the data – in particular, apparent issues with the survival curves in study. In October 2021, the journal published a letter to the editor by a group in Japan detailing the concerns and stating that:

UNC-Chapel Hill vice chancellor admits to plagiarism

The vice chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s medical school has admitted to plagiarizing text in an NIH grant application, according to a U.S. federal watchdog.

Terry Magnuson, who serves as the Kay M. & Van L. Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of Genetics at UNC-Chapel Hill as well as vice chancellor for research, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarizing text” from two guides, material from a company that makes sequencing kits, and a review article, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

[See an update on this post.]

Magnuson submitted the plagiarizing grant application on March 1, 2021. He has received NIH funding as recently as August, and over his career has been a principal investigator on more than $50 million in grants from the agency.

Often, retractions take years. This one took three days.

“The retraction that took years” is a common enough refrain on Retraction Watch that it might as be its own genre. Here’s one that didn’t.

A journal wasted no time pouncing on a suspect paper, retracting the 2016 article just three days after a commenter flagged concerns about the images in the work on PubPeer.

As the commenter, Actinopolyspora biskrensis, wrote:

Engineers’ research starts to look shaky as retractions mount

A group of structural engineering researchers based in Iran has lost at least five papers for problems with the data – and a data sleuth says more look shaky, too.

Four of the articles appeared in Construction and Building Materials between 2018 and 2020 and were written by a changing cast of characters with two constants: Mansour Ghalehnovi and Arash Karimipour, both of the Department of Civil Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Karimipour’s LinkedIn profile lists an affiliation with the University of Texas at El Paso from 2019 to January of this year.

The journal, an Elsevier title, says it began investigating the papers after a whistleblower raised questions about the integrity of the data. In some cases, for example, data in one article were found in other papers but were represented as demonstrating different materials. The authors also used images from other researchers or the internet without proper attribution.

Here’s the notice for “Experimental study on the flexural behaviour and ductility ratio of steel fibres coarse recycled aggregate concrete beams,” from 2018:

Weekend reads: An academic and a Russian spy; concussion expert resigns from committee; publishing peer reviews

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Sports medicine researcher Paul McCrory requests another retraction
Journal editor explains ban on manuscripts from Russian institutions
NASA researchers retract Nature paper on climate change and evapotranspiration
Was leading sports medicine researcher’s plagiarism ‘an isolated and unfortunate incident?’
Author asks ‘Why? Why? And why?’ as his paper is retracted
‘This is frankly insulting’: An author plagiarized by a journal editor speaks

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 213. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

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

Sports medicine researcher Paul McCrory requests another retraction

A high-profile sports medicine researcher who earlier this week had an editorial he wrote while editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted has asked for another of his articles to be retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

On Monday, we published a guest post by Steve Haake, whose work the former editor, Paul McCrory, had plagiarized. And on Wednesday, we reported that McCrory had called the plagiarism “isolated” but that sleuth Nick Brown had found at least two similar cases.

Of those two cases, McCrory, who has also served as an Australian Football League consultant, now tells Retraction Watch:

Journal editor explains ban on manuscripts from Russian institutions

Earlier this week, a scientist in Russia posted, on Facebook, part of a letter rejecting a manuscript explaining that “the editors of the Journal of Molecular Structure made a decision to ban the manuscripts submitted from Russian institutions.” That move was confirmed by Richard van Noorden of Nature.

Here, in an email he sent to us on Monday when we contacted him but which he learned just today had bounced back, Rui Fausto, the editor in chief of the journal, explains the decision.

First of all, let me say, because there is some misunderstanding circulating in some social media regarding the issue you asked me for information, that the editors of the Journal of Molecular Structure did not decide to implement any sort of ban to articles submitted by Russian authors. This would be something I, or my colleagues, could never accept. Our Russian colleagues, as all our colleagues from all around the world, deserve us maximum respect.

However, it was decided by the editors of the journal to not consider manuscripts authored by scientists working at Russian Institutions, in result of the humanitarian implications emerging from the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. This position is temporary and shall apply until the refugees (whoever they are, Ukrainians, Russians, or of any other nationality) have conditions to return to their homes, their jobs, and join their families.

NASA researchers retract Nature paper on climate change and evapotranspiration

The authors of a 2021 Nature paper on how climate change might affect the amount of evaporation from the earth’s land surface have retracted the article after learning of a crucial error in their analysis.

The crux of the paper, titled “A 10 per cent increase in global land evapotranspiration from 2003 to 2019,” was the finding that:

Variability in global land evapotranspiration is positively correlated with El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The main driver of the trend, however, is increasing land temperature. Our findings provide an observational constraint on global land evapotranspiration, and are consistent with the hypothesis that global evapotranspiration should increase in a warming climate.

In other words, according to the authors – from a pair of NASA labs in California and Maryland – the rate of evapotranspiration over that 17-year-period was twice as high as previous estimates. As the lead author, Madeleine Pascolini-Campbell, said in this press release (Wayback Machine link) from NASA:

Was leading sports medicine researcher’s plagiarism ‘an isolated and unfortunate incident?’

Earlier this week, we wrote about a case of plagiarism in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) involving a highly credentialed researcher and Australian Football League consultant who’d cribbed roughly half of an article from another scholar.

The researcher, Paul McCrory, has still not responded to our requests for comment. But in an email to Steve Haake, whose work McCrory lifted while editor of the BJSM, Paul McCrory said that the offense was:

an isolated and unfortunate incident …

That resulted from the uploading to the journals’ website of a “working draft” that “failed to appropriately cite your original and excellent work as the source of the manuscript.”

Unfortunate, yes. Isolated? That’s a bit less clear.

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