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.”

The papers were published in Nanotechnology in 2015 and 2016, respectively. They have been cited 19 and 18 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notices appeared online March 30. They state that an investigation by the journal’s publisher, IOP Publishing, found that a figure in each report was “duplicated from another source without disclosure.” 

In the 2016 paper, an electron-microscopy image was apparently copied from the 2015 paper; that paper contained a histogram from a 2013 paper on which  Spadavecchia was an author.

The duplications in the two papers are not isolated incidents. In an open letter to CNRS published on Dorothy Bishop’s blog, the psychologist and scientific sleuth, along with 16 other researchers, responded to the recent article in Le Monde about misconduct in Spadavecchia’s lab. They pointed to 23 instances, noted in an appendix to their letter, where commenters on PubPeer flagged Spadavecchia’s studies for image duplication and manipulation. A search for Spadavecchia’s name on PubPeer yields more than 30 results with at least one comment. 

Only one of Spadavecchia’s studies had been retracted until now. That article, “Design and Synthesis of Gold-Gadolinium-Core-Shell Nanoparticles as Contrast Agent: a Smart Way to Future Nanomaterials for Nanomedicine Applications,” was pulled by the International Journal of Nanomedicine in 2022 for problematic data presented in histograms. The journal’s editors determined that “this part of the article was integral to the study and the admission of these errors, because of the miscalculation, meant the data was unreliable,” according to the retraction notice. 

In their letter, Bishop and her coauthors wrote that although CNRS did decide to take disciplinary action against Spadavecchia, the organization removed her from her lab for only a month. According to the letter, such “institutional malaise”: 

allows those who are prepared to cheat to compete with other scientists to gain positions of influence, and so perpetuate further misconduct, while damaging the prospects of honest scientists who obtain less striking results.

We were not able to reach Jane Politi, the first author of both papers in Nanotechnology. Spadavecchia did not respond to an email from Retraction Watch. 

Nanotechnology’s retraction notices state that: 

The authors have provided explanations and offered to make a correction; however, these do not adequately explain the re-use of the image and raise more concerns about the integrity of the work. As such IOP Publishing and the Editor in Chief agree this article should be retracted. IOP Publishing express thanks to the anonymous whistleblower and subject experts who were consulted during the investigation.The authors disagree with this retraction.

Luca De Stefano of the Italian National Research Council, the senior author of the 2015 paper, said the papers should have been corrected, not retracted. Of the duplication of the image from the 2015 paper, he told us in an email: 

I don’t know what exactly was the mistake at the basis of this error (since I was not the corresponding author of the paper at that time), but I offered to IOP the replication of the AuNPs synthesis and a new SEM image to correct the one found in the second (in order of time) paper published, but they refused. I agree that it is on all the authors’ responsibility to check the material submitted for publication but in international cooperation work unfortunately it could happen with such kind of mistake. I simply believe that replicability is much more important, this is the reason for my proposal against the retraction. If the result is replicable, the figure is only a mistake.

IOP said that the authors attributed the mistake to an unnamed student. A spokesperson for the publisher told us that the authors originally suggested updating the image caption, “claiming the similarities occurred because they reused nanoparticles from the previous study,” although the methods included in the newer study were different from the former. 

The spokesperson said the authors claimed the different methods would not affect the size or distribution of the nanoparticles. The authors also requested to change the synthesis description in the 2016 paper’s methods section, IOP said, which outside experts worried would change the results of the study. The authors then offered to create new images with the stated methods. 

The authors did not explain how a histogram in the 2015 study was duplicated from a 2013 paper, according to the IOP spokesperson. They simply suggested replacing the histogram with a new one using the correct data, which were notably different. Both circumstances, the spokesperson said, were concerning enough to warrant retracting the studies. 

De Stefano declined to comment on how the histogram was duplicated because he was not an author of the 2013 study, but reiterated that in his view the paper should have been corrected, not retracted, since the experiment could be replicated.

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