Adam Marcus

Publisher investigating paper a lucrative scale is based on following Retraction Watch reporting

The publishing firm Wiley says it is investigating a pivotal paper about a controversial public health tool after Retraction Watch reported on a robust critique of the article which highlighted a number of potentially serious flaws with the research.

We’re talking about the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), whose developer, Donald Morisky, has been hitting researchers with hefty licensing fees — or demands to retract — for nearly two decades.

One of the key papers supporting the validity of the MMAS-8 (the second iteration of the MMAS) was a 2008 article by Morisky and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Hypertension.

Lancet retracts 10-year-old case report

The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work.

The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming behaviors they ultimately attributed to a previously undetected neuroendocrine tumor called a pheochromocytoma.

According to the retraction notice, however, the tumor wasn’t the only thing about the paper that was hidden. The authors also misled the Lancet when they said they hadn’t published about the case when they submitted their writeup about the case — a fact unknown to the journal until this summer:

A correction is retracted (sort of)

Thanks to a publisher’s error, a group of infectious disease researchers has experienced a double negative for their 2020 article on tick-borne illness in South Africa.

The paper, “Serum-free in vitro cultivation of Theileria annulata and Theileria parva schizont-infected lymphocytes,” appeared in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, a Wiley title. The authors were affiliated with institutions in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the United States.

Earlier this year, the authors corrected their article. The notice, dated May 26, reads:

‘We have done a terrible job’: Journal retracts, replaces paper on mosquito-borne infections

A virology journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 article on mosquito-borne infections in Africa after one of the authors identified errors in the publication — an episode that has prompted a change in practice at the journal to avoid similar issues in the future.

The article, “Mosquito-borne arboviruses in Uganda: history, transmission and burden,” was written by a group in the United Kingdom and Uganda and appeared in the Journal of General Virology last June.

According to the retraction notice:

Here’s what happened when a publisher looked more closely at a paper milled paper

Although it’s never too late to say sorry, sometimes the apology turns out to be worse than keeping quiet.

Consider the case of a group in China, who admitted that their 2020 paper on brain tumors was the work of a paper mill.

The article, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” came from a group led by Fangen Kong, of the Department of Neurosurgery at The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, in Zhuhai.

Missing from the list of authors, however, was another…well, something, as the retraction notice points out:

Retraction of review of broccoli’s health benefits is 22nd for deceased author, 5th for one of his postdocs

Broccoli almost certainly is good for you — but just how good might have taken a bit of a hit with the retraction of a 12-year-old review on the vegetable’s health benefits by a notorious fraudster.

By our count, the retraction, which appeared in July, marks the 22nd for Das, formerly of the University of Connecticut, who died in 2013.

It’s also the fifth retraction for Das’ co-author, and former postdoc, Hannah Vasanthi; four of those papers were collaborations with Das but the most recent, in Carbohydrate Polymers, was not. Several other papers by Vasanthi have been flagged on PubPeer — over concerns about plagiarism, image issues and problematic data — and she has had at least four corrections and one expression of concern. (One article by Vasanthi that Elisabeth Bik identified in 2019 appears to contain text lifted from a 2010 article by Bharat Aggarwal, formerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose name may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers.)

Criticism engulfs paper claiming an asteroid destroyed Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah

Scientific Reports is taking heat on social media and from data sleuths for publishing a paper implying that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might have been the retelling of the devastation wrought by an exploding asteroid in or around the year 1,650 BCE.

To the lay reader — and to peer reviewers and editors, evidently — the article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” makes at least a superficially plausible and scientifically rigorous case.

According to the abstract:

Kyoto University fires researcher for fraud in Kumamoto earthquake studies

Damage from the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake

Kyoto University has fired a researcher after determining that he committed fraud in at least five papers about the deadly Kumamoto earthquake of 2006.

In a report released earlier this week (Sept 28), the institution said it found Aiming Lin guilty of 37 counts of “fraudulent activity” in four of the articles, not including a 2017 paper Lin published in Science which the journal retracted in 2019. The university suspended Lin for a year at the time.

Kyoto University said (courtesy of Google translate) earlier this month Lin was subject to “disciplinary dismissal” in the case:

Paper that ripped off a PhD thesis is retracted

The authors of a 2021 article on “cognitive radio” have lost the paper after the journal learned that they’d pilfered the work from a doctoral dissertation.

“A Cluster-Based Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Techniques in Cognitive Radio” was published in the proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, which was held in Coimbatore, India. The proceedings was a supplement to Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, a Springer Nature title.

Cognitive radio, according to Wikipedia, “can intelligently detect whether any portion of the spectrum is in use, and can temporarily use it without interfering with the transmissions of other users.”

Scale whose copyright owner defends zealously falls under scrutiny — and journal takes two years to publish a critique

As long-time readers of this blog know, we’ve spilled more than a few pixels on the work of Donald Morisky. His Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) has been a financial boon to himself — and the bane of many researchers who have been forced to either retract papers or pay Morisky what they consider to be exorbitant fees to retroactively license the instrument.

But lately things have been a bit rocky for Morisky. Last year, he and his former business associate (read, legal enforcer) found themselves embroiled in a lawsuit which claims, as we reported, that Morisky used:

their company as a personal piggy bank and taking steps to starve the business of clients and funnel money to his family.

And now, a researcher has questioned the validity of the MMAS, arguing that his review of a foundational paper underpinning the instrument shows serious flaws.

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