July 2022 – Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: 50 years after Tuskegee; ‘Is psychological science self-correcting?’; ‘The peer review system is broken’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

An editor invited me to submit a commentary, then he rejected it – and named and blamed me in an editorial
University of Fukui professor called out for fake peer review, loses “love hormone” paper
Crystallography database flags nearly 1000 structures linked to a paper mill
University’s story changes: It requested 33 retractions, not ‘several’
Exclusive: OSU investigation finds dishonesty and “permissive culture of data manipulation” in cancer research lab

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 253. There are more than 35,000 retractions in our database — which 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):

An editor invited me to submit a commentary, then he rejected it – and named and blamed me in an editorial

The American Journal of Public Health is the flagship publication of the American Public Health Association, which has more than 25,000 members worldwide. The AJPH boasts that it is “a highly influential publication,” which is why I accepted an invitation from editor-in-chief Alfredo Morabia in 2020 to comment in a journal forum on FDA regulation of e-cigarettes. At that time Morabia invited a range of experts, both advocates and supporters of FDA tobacco regulation and critics.

Notably, I and Derek Yach, former president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, acknowledged our conflicts of interest with the tobacco industry. My commentary, which was critical of FDA actions, was published here. (I had first published in AJPH a quarter century before.)

At the time of the forum, AJPH editors wrote, “we will invite everyone to reassess the situation in a year.” After a delay perhaps caused by Covid, on March 16, 2022 I was invited by Morabia to submit a commentary by April 1. Neither AJPH invitation email provided any guidance as to form or content for my submission.

I did so, and you can read the draft here. On April 22, Morabia summarily rejected my commentary. That same day, I wrote to him, expressing my confusion and asking for reconsideration (available here). There was no response.

University of Fukui professor called out for fake peer review, loses “love hormone” paper

A researcher in Japan appears to have written laudatory comments about her articles that a colleague passed off as his own during peer review. This may have happened for as many as five papers, two of which have been retracted.

Akemi Tomoda, of the Child Development Research Center at the University of Fukui, collaborated with Kenji Hashimoto of Chiba University’s Center for Forensic Mental Health on multiple fraudulent peer reviews, the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported in June. Neither Tomoda nor Hashimoto has responded to requests for comment.

Tomoda is an established researcher with some articles that have hundreds of citations, such as a 2009 study in Neuroimage claiming that corporal punishment harms the mental capacity of children. She has also given a TED talk about the importance of bonding between parents and children to a child’s mental health.

Crystallography database flags nearly 1000 structures linked to a paper mill

A chemistry database of crystal structures has marked nearly 1000 entries with expressions of concern after finding they were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill.

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) added notes to 992 structures in its database, according to a notice posted to its website in May. And a crystallography researcher tells us the impact on the field could be significant.

The notes state:

University’s story changes: It requested 33 retractions, not ‘several’

The University of Wyoming has requested that journals retract 33 papers by a former associate dean and “highly cited researcher” at the institution.

The news came just a week after we broke the story that heart researcher Jun Ren had been demoted following an earlier investigation. At the time, a university spokesperson told us that “Based on the findings of this examination, the university is recommending retraction of several publications due to concerns regarding data irregularities inconsistent with published conclusions.”

Exclusive: OSU investigation finds dishonesty and “permissive culture of data manipulation” in cancer research lab

A university investigation found an emeritus professor had committed research misconduct after reviewing dozens of allegations, culminating in a recommendation to retract 10 papers and revoke his emeritus status.

The Ohio State University investigated 20 manuscripts by the cancer research group of Samson Jacob after the university received allegations in 2017 of image manipulation stretching over years of work, according to a misconduct investigation report we obtained via a public records request.

The 209-page report, dated February 9, 2021, tells the story of an investigation spanning more than a decade of Jacob’s lab’s work that encountered “dishonesty” from the lab members interviewed.

After determining that Jacob had committed research misconduct, the investigation committee recommended sanctions and asked for the immediate retraction of 10 papers in addition to the 10 that had already been addressed (nine retracted and one corrected) prior to the close of the inquiry. The school revoked Jacob’s emeritus position in May 2021, the OSU Lantern reported at the time.

The investigation committee reviewed 67 allegations, but declined to probe many more concerns that surfaced for the sake of time, according to the report.

Weekend reads: Harvard sued over retracted paper; ‘retraction with honor’; critiquing our fake peer review coverage

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions
250th COVID-19 retraction is for faked ethics approval
Papers in Croce case with “blatantly obvious” problems still aren’t retracted after misconduct investigation: sleuth

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 250. There are more than 34,000 retractions in our database — which 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):

Papers in Croce case with “blatantly obvious” problems still aren’t retracted after misconduct investigation: sleuth

This week, Nature reported on two institutional reports that found scientists in Carlo Croce’s cancer research lab at The Ohio State University had committed research misconduct including plagiarism and data falsification.

Another institutional investigation directed at Croce did not find he committed research misconduct but did identify problems with how he managed his lab, according to Nature.

It’s the latest chapter in a years-long saga of mounting numbers of corrections and retractions for Croce, a 2017 article in the New York Times that brought him to widespread attention, a scientist sleuth trying to clean up the literature, and lots and lots of lawyers, some of whom may have a claim on Croce’s house after he didn’t pay his legal bills.

250th COVID-19 retraction is for faked ethics approval

Researchers in Iran have lost a paper on Covid-19 infection in a two-month-old boy after the journal learned that they’d fabricated ethics approval for the article.

It’s the 250th Covid-19 retraction by our count.

“Coronavirus disease 2019 in a 2-month-old male infant: a case report from Iran” appeared in December 2020 in Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics. The senior author of the paper was Sajjad Ahmadpour, of the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Diseases Research Center at Qom University of Medical Sciences.

According to the retraction notice (which doesn’t appear in the expected place but can be found here):

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions

Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.

The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.

One 2021 article, “Numerical investigation of nanofluid flow using CFD and fuzzy-based particle swarm optimization,” drew a significant amount of attention on PubPeer. In January, a commenter pointed out a variety of apparent problems with the paper and noted that questions have been raised about other work by members of the group – including this now-retracted article in … Scientific Reports.

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