A paper by a medical student and an associate professor in Florida has been retracted for errors with the central finding of the study, an electrocardiogram whose labeling “does not actually represent any of the characteristics” of the tracing.
The paper, “Silent Myocardial Infarction: A Case Report,” was published in Cureus in August 2023 and has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction notice dated January 28 details issues with the tracing:
The caption does not make sense for the ECG shown. The arrows do not point to what is stated in the caption. There are no yellow arrows as stated in the caption. The blue arrows do not point to a QRS, and the green arrows do not point to Q waves. The ECG is the focal point of the article, but it does not actually represent any of the characteristics described within. Repeated attempts to contact the authors have been unsuccessful. As a result, the journal is left with no choice but to retract this article.
An ECG measures electrical activity in the heart. The QRS and Q waves reflect the electrical activity associated with ventricular contraction.
The lead author of the latest retracted paper is Maria Kolesova, who was a medical student at Florida International University, in Boca Raton, at the time of publication. She is now an internal medicine resident at Mt. Sinai in Miami Beach, according to match results released by the school. Kolesova did not respond to our request for comment.
The corresponding author, Suzanne Minor, told us in an email she was “mentoring” Kolesova by helping her prepare the manuscript and said she agreed with the retraction. “The image is not labeled accurately, unfortunately, and this was missed in the submission,” Minor wrote. At the time of publication, Minor was an associate professor and assistant dean of faculty development at FIU. She is now a family medicine specialist at Memorial Primary Care in Pembroke Pines, Florida.
As we have reported, Cureus has retracted a number of papers recently. In October 2024, the journal said it would retract a case report in which the original physicians weren’t credited, then changed its mind. In August, the journal retracted an article for plagiarizing images from an online lecture. In another case study example, Cureus retracted a redundant article that duplicated a report on the same patient but with different authors. Cureus has retracted 13 articles so far this year, according to the Retraction Watch database.
A reader alerted the journal to issues with the ECG paper, a spokesperson for Cureus told us in an email. When we asked how issues with the ECG went unnoticed during peer review, they told us they couldn’t discuss the review process for confidentiality reasons.
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Cureus has, shall we say, minimal vetting for reviewers. They accepted clearly faked credentials from one fraudster that allowed him to plagiarize articles he “reviewed” and publish them in predatory journals.
https://x.com/SmutClyde/status/1717333359180013640