On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.”
“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.
Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:
Research misconduct is damaging in any field, but I am particularly disturbed by these articles. Besides its harms to the research community, a fabricated clinical trial with clinically actionable conclusions has the potential to do real and immediate harm to patients. I have already seen one of these articles picked up for discussion on a popular psychiatry podcast; I would hate to see clinicians begin acting on this information in their practice.
Then he waited.
After six months, Neurotherapeutics pulled one of the studies, stating in a Sept. 7, 2022, notice, “there are serious issues with the ethical oversight, the reporting and the availability of audited data for this clinical trial.” Yet nearly a year after Ross’s email, the paper in CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics remained in place, as we reported in February 2023.
“I don’t think this was [a case] where it took a lot of, you know, complex sleuthing, like doing statistical analysis or anything like that, to be very suspicious about these papers,” Ross told us at the time.
Now, after two years, the Wiley journal has finally issued a retraction. In a March 11 notice, the publisher stated:
Following publication, multiple concerns were raised by a third party about the integrity of the clinical trial. An investigation revealed significant issues regarding the reliability of the reported data. As a result, the Editor-in-Chief no longer has confidence in the validity of the results presented in this article.
The paper has been cited 11 times since Ross first contacted the journal, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science — including by a Hindawi/Wiley journal paper that was since retracted for likely paper mill activity.
We contacted Wiley on Friday to learn what caused the long delay, particularly given Springer Nature’s previous retraction, but have yet to hear back from the publisher, which recently trumpeted its efforts to retract thousands of paper mill articles from its Hindawi subsidiary. An email seeking comment from the corresponding author of the two papers, Mahmoud S. Abdallah of the University of Sadat City, in Egypt, also went unanswered.
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I’ve been working with the Editor in Chief of CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics for a little over a year now to retract a paper riddled with egregiously inaccurate claims and reporting errors. She had me write a statement of concern in the form of a letter to the editor, which was peer reviewed and published back in January (PMCID: PMC10805389). She has been investigating the matter and waiting for a response from the authors (which I suspect will never come). To date, there is no indication that there is any statement of concern associated with the original article. This is in spite of the Editor’s efforts to associate the two, which have been brushed aside by Wiley. The Editor has recently involved me in the conversation with Wiley. They have decided that they are going to start over with their own “investigation”. Extremely frustrating publisher to deal with. I was not aware that my experience with Wiley is part of a larger trend with this publisher.
Publishing companies are insidiously undermining the scientific enterprise for profit. Shameful.
All of the publishers are slow to act, see times from notification of concerns to correction for papers by the Sato/Iwamoto group, by publisher. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/08989621.2021.1920409?scroll=top
These times increased as more evidence of compromised publication integrity accumulated.
Since this post is about Wiley and their long “investigations”.
This funny special issue is still largely unacted upon (sans one accidental retraction of an even earlier reported “work”). All that despite 3.5 years having passed, and despite media reports on Retraction Watch and elsewhere.