March 2023 – Retraction Watch

Journal pulls papers by embattled scientist at national research center in France

A nanotechnology journal has retracted two papers coauthored by a scientist in France who is accused of manipulating or reusing graphs and figures in nearly two dozen instances, Retraction Watch has learned.

The scientist, Jolanda Spadavecchia (pictured), is research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In December, an article in the newspaper Le Monde described allegations of misconduct in Spadavecchia’s lab.

Spadavecchia is second author of one of the retracted papers, “Interaction of Thermus thermophilus ArsC enzyme and gold nanoparticles naked-eye assays speciation between As(III) and As(V);” she is senior author of the other, “One-pot synthesis of a gold nanoparticle–Vmh2 hydrophobin nanobiocomplex for glucose monitoring.”

One small error for a physicist, one giant blunder for planetary science

For a decade, scientists have been scratching their heads when trying to put a date on primeval events like the crystallization of the magma ocean on the moon or the early formation of Earth’s continental crust.

Their problem? A revised estimate of the half-life of a radioactive isotope called samarium-146 that is used to gauge the age of ancient rocks.

The updated value, published in 2012 in Science, shortened samarium-146’s half-life by a whopping 35 million years, down to 68 million years from the standard estimate of 103. This reset the clock on the solar system’s early history and suggested the oldest rocks on Earth could have formed tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought.

Exclusive: Committee recommended pulling several papers by former Cornell med school dean

Following an investigation launched by Cornell University, a committee recommended pulling several papers by lung-disease researcher Augustine M. K. Choi, who served as dean of Weill Cornell Medicine until this year, Retraction Watch has learned.

Choi’s latest retraction, which brings him up to three so far, came on March 15, when The Journal of Clinical Investigation pulled “UCP2-induced fatty acid synthase promotes NLRP3 inflammasome activation during sepsis.” The paper has been cited 178 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice reads:

Norway demotes Hindawi journal after claims one published a stolen paper

In June 2021, Espen Flo Bødal began to believe that a paper he’d co-authored had been stolen.

The news came via a ResearchGate alert that the Norwegian researcher’s work had been cited, according to the publication Universitets (article in Norwegian). When Bødal checked the alert, he saw that part of his doctoral thesis had been published, essentially word for word.

But instead of his name and those of his collaborators at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the article listed researchers at the Huzhou Power Supply Company and North China Electric Power University as its authors.

“Bust Size and Hitchhiking” author earns five expressions of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern about five papers by a psychology researcher whose studies related to women’s sexual behavior and perceived attractiveness have raised eyebrows.

As we’ve previously reported, sleuths have identified seemingly impossible and likely fabricated results in the work of Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of marketing at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, leading to the retraction of four of his papers.

The latest expression of concern relates to five articles in Perceptual and Motor Skills, a SAGE title, which has published eight studies of Guéguen’s, including several on which he is listed as the sole author.

The notice applies to:

Exclusive: Australia space scientist made up data, probe finds

A space scientist formerly based at the University of Sydney made up data in an unpublished manuscript, an investigation by the institution has found.

The researcher, Joachim Schmidt, “utilised Adobe Photoshop to make up results,” according to a letter dated Feb. 15, 2023, from Emma Johnston, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of Sydney, to scientists at the University of Michigan who reported complaints in late 2019 about work by Schmidt and his former professor Iver Cairns to the Australian institution.

“Given the above, the Panel found there had been breaches of the Research Code on the part of Dr Schmidt. The breaches were viewed as serious, and the Panel considered them to be sufficiently serious to warrant a finding of research misconduct as defined in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research,” the letter, obtained by Retraction Watch, stated.

Weekend reads: A bizarre shark story ends in a retraction; one scientist’s decades-long fight; the math wars

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are more than 39,000 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):

In unusual move, publishers remove authors victimized by forger

Three major publishers have removed several authors’ names from five papers, most published a decade ago, following correspondence from an attorney representing one of the individuals.

Three of the papers appeared in PLOS ONE in 2013, one appeared in Springer Nature’s Tumor Biology the same year, and one appeared in Elsevier’s Obesity Research & Clinical Practice in 2014. As we reported in 2016, the journals retracted the articles because one of the authors – Lishan Wang – had forged the rest of his co-authors’ names and manipulated the peer review process.

Years later, Yongyong Shi, a distinguished professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Bio-X Institutes and one of the authors whose name Wang forged, hired a lawyer named Joseph Lewin, a solicitor with Dorsey & Whitney (Europe) LLP. Lewin, in turn, requested that the three publishers remove Shi’s name from the original papers.

Paper co-authored by controversial Australian journalist earns expression of concern

One more paper co-authored by Australian health journalist Maryanne Demasi has earned an expression of concern for image duplication.

The move comes seven years after the journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) was first made aware of potential problems with a figure in Demasi’s paper that showed Western blots. It marks the third time one of the former researcher’s scientific publications has been officially flagged as concerning or retracted.

Demasi, who earned her PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2004, has been in the news recently after she did a controversial interview with the lead author of a Cochrane review that cast doubt on face masks. She has drawn frequent rebuke over the past decade, beginning with a 2013 program in which her reporting questioned statins. She and her co-authors told us in 2018 that they believe her work as a journalist made her research a target of criticism.

Nearly 20 Hindawi journals delisted from leading index amid concerns of papermill activity

Nineteen journals from the open-access publisher Hindawi were removed from Clarivate’s Web of Science Monday when the indexer refreshed its Master Journal List.

The delistings follow a disclosure by Wiley, which bought Hindawi in 2021, that the company suspended publishing special issues for three months because of “compromised articles.” That lost the company $9 million in revenue.

Clarivate updates its Master Journal List of titles included in Web of Science on a monthly basis. It dropped more than 50 journals from its indexes in March, according to a blog post by Nandita Quaderi, editor in chief and vice president of Web of Science, for failing to meet 24 quality criteria such as adequate peer review, appropriate citations, and content that’s relevant to the stated scope of the journal.

Delisting 50 journals at once is more than usual for Clarivate, and may be the beginning of a larger culling. Quaderi wrote that the company developed an AI tool “to help us identify outlier characteristics that indicate that a journal may no longer meet our quality criteria.” The tool flagged more than 500 journals at the beginning of this year, according to her blog post, and Web of Science’s editors continue to investigate them.

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