2023 – Page 13 – Retraction Watch

Former postdoc who admitted to faking data pleads guilty to attempted forgery

A cancer researcher who admitted to faking data has pleaded guilty to attempted forgery in a case involving letters of recommendation he passed off as coming from his former supervisor.

Last year, Georgios Laliotis, a former postdoc at The Ohio State University, was charged with forgery for allegedly creating a fake email address with the name of his PI, Philip Tsichlis, and using it to send two letters of recommendation to prospective employers.

Laliotis was later indicted for identity fraud, forgery, and telecommunications fraud, and pleaded not guilty to each count.

Happy 13th birthday, Retraction Watch: Another eventful year

In our old diner haunt, more than a decade ago

If Retraction Watch were the child of Jewish parents – which happens to be the case – it would be celebrating its bar mitzvah this year. Yes, that’s right, mazel tovs are in order: Retraction Watch turns 13 today.

And as the blog becomes some version of an adult, we have plenty to celebrate. This week, we published an op-ed in Scientific American. And here are highlights of the past 12 months:

A new $250,000 grant from the WoodNext Foundation that allowed us to hire another editor, Fred Joelving, who is already breaking stories right and left.
The additional bandwidth got us back to partnering with other outlets. Since January, we’ve published investigations and other stories with Undark, Science, STAT, and the Flatwater Free Press (with pickup by Nebraska Public Media).
A study published in Research Policy “found that reporting retractions on RW significantly reduced post-retraction citations of non-swiftly retracted articles in biomedical sciences.” In other words, when Retraction Watch covers a retraction, the retracted paper is less likely to be cited.
The Retraction Watch Database surpassed 40,000 retractions, which is three times as many as PubMed and multiples of other sources, and powers scholarship as well as retraction alerts in Edifix, EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. Clarivate has begun using it to vet its Highly Cited Researchers list. The Economist used data from the Retraction Watch Database to illustrate the amount of fraud in the biomedical literature.
We published an invited editorial in Anesthesiology, “How to Stop the Unknowing Citation of Retracted Papers.”

An editor resigned in protest. Now, Wiley is firing him four months earlier than he planned to leave.

The publisher Wiley has fired the chief editor of the Journal of Biogeography after he resigned over conflicts with the company.

Michael Dawson, a professor at the University of California, Merced, submitted his resignation on June 21, tweeting that he made the decision “because journal management declined to explore productive solutions to a suite of challenges facing the journal.”

He also tweeted:

President of Japanese university resigns after findings of ‘self-plagiarism’

The president of Aizu University in Japan has resigned after two investigations found he had self-plagiarized or double-submitted a dozen papers.

Toshiaki Miyazaki was also found to have “filed an application for a project subsidized by the national government without going through the university official procedures,” which “caused confusion,” according to Aizu. He resigned effective today [July 31].

The move comes more than a year after the first investigation, as we reported, which concluded in February 2022 and found that Miyazaki had self-plagiarized four papers. At that time, he had to forfeit 20% of one month’s salary.

A month later, according to a report issued last week by the university, Miyazaki “self-reported that there were 12 papers suspected of self-plagiarism.” A preliminary investigation then began, with a full investigation starting in April and lasting until February of this year.

Exclusive: How a dean went about correcting the scientific record even when at least one journal said he didn’t need to

Less than a year after he became dean of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Dentistry, an uncomfortable email landed in Russell Taichman’s inbox.

Overlapping and duplicated panels in one of Taichman’s 2005 papers were among a list of complaints relayed by the publisher of Cellular Signalling in the April 2020 correspondence – complaints which were publicly posted on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik.

“The substance of the complaint is image manipulation, which if true, would violate our publishing policies,” the email stated. “Please note that if we do not have an adequate and timely response, we may be forced to conclude that the allegations are truthful.”

The paper, “Diverse signaling pathways through the SDF-1/CXCR4 chemokine axis in prostate cancer cell lines leads to altered patterns of cytokine secretion and angiogenesis”, eventually became the first of five of Taichman’s papers to be retracted. We first reported on the retractions last September. Since then, following a public records request, we’ve obtained 20 pages of redacted emails that reveal the story behind the retractions.

Weekend reads: The black market for papers; the secret life of retractions; a ‘troublesome pattern’

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to nearly 350. There are now 41,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in Edifix, EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 200 titles. 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):

Science rescinds expression of concern issued last month

Science has rescinded an expression of concern it issued one month ago after the authors provided data that “addressed concerns about the integrity of the paper.”

The journal had published the expression of concern for the 2021 article “Light-induced mobile factors from shoots regulate rhizobium-triggered soybean root nodulation” after two separate readers contacted the editorial team about an issue in the paper, as we reported at the time. The expression of concern noted that “that data presented in Fig. 5 assessed GmNSP1 expression rather than GmNIN expression.”

The article has been cited 43 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal is publishing the newly submitted data as a correction, as well as an editor’s note explaining the removal of the expression of concern. The new notice states:

Exclusive: Public health journal says it will retract vaping paper for questions authors say were addressed in peer review

The journal BMC Public Health plans to retract an article that found smoking rates fell faster than expected in the US as use of e-cigarettes increased, Retraction Watch has learned.

The authors contend that they addressed the issues cited in the retraction notice during the peer review process and say they addressed them even more extensively when the journal said they intended to retract.

The paper, “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults,” was published last October. The authors are all employees of Pinney Associates, a consulting firm that they disclosed “provide[s] consulting services on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc.” The article also disclosed that Juul Labs funded the research and reviewed and provided comments on a draft manuscript.

Some journals, including several in the BMJ family and the American Journal of Public Health, will not publish research funded by the tobacco industry, which has led to at least one retraction. But the planned BMC Public Health retraction notice does not refer to that conflict of interest.

Exclusive: City of Hope cancer researcher goes to court to fight misconduct finding

An alumna of the lab of Carlo Croce, a high-profile cancer researcher at The Ohio State University with 14 retractions, has sued the institution over the results of its investigation that found she committed research misconduct.

Flavia Pichiorri is now a principal investigator with her own lab researching potential therapies for multiple myeloma at City of Hope – a cancer center that also owns Cancer Treatment Centers of America – in Duarte, Calif.

She worked at Ohio State from 2004-16, first as a postdoctoral researcher in Croce’s lab, then as a research scientist, and finally as an assistant professor of hematology. She has been a PI on grants that garnered millions of dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health since switching jobs.

Meet the author who has published more than 500 letters to the editor in a year

Hyperprolific authors have been drawing attention for some time. In 2018, for example, a Nature article reported that “thousands of scientists have published a paper every five days.” And earlier this year El Pais noted that a now-suspended scientist was publishing a paper every 37 hours.

What about an author who publishes more than once a day, on average?

Viroj Wiwanitkit has published 543 items indexed in PubMed in the last 12 months, the vast majority of them letters to the editor. Most of Wiwanitkit’s letters with colleagues appear to be only a single paragraph. Many concern COVID-19 and vaccinations, but the catalog includes letters about monkeypox, knee replacement surgery, bipolar disorder, even ChatGPT.

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