Adam Marcus

In which we ask: What exactly did peer review accomplish here?

A retraction notice for a 2021 paper in an environmental sciences journal has us wondering if the peer review process for the publication should be declared a Superfund Site.

The article, “Experimental study and numerical prediction of HTO and 36Cl− diffusion in radioactive waste at Téguline Clay,” appeared in Environmental Technology, a Taylor & Francis title, and was written by a group at Central South University, in Changsha.

Evidently, little in that title was accurate.

According to the retraction notice:

Former Tufts grad student settles lawsuit alleging retaliation for whistleblowing

A former veterinary student at Tufts University has settled a $1 million lawsuit alleging that she was punished for claiming that her mentor at the school falsified data in a 2014 article.

In 2019, Kristy Meadows sued Tufts and two faculty members, Elizabeth Byrnes and Dean Joyce Knoll, whom she said retaliated against her for claiming that Byrnes cooked her results in an article Meadows and Byrnes published in Neuroscience titled “Sex- and age-specific differences in relaxin family peptide receptor expression within the hippocampus and amygdala in rats.”

According to Law360, which first reported on the settlement:

Publisher offers cash for citations

Worried about scarce research funding? Does the prospect of paying rent on that meager post-doc salary keep you up at night? Fear no more!

Innoscience Research in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to the rescue.

The company has launched an innovative (read: shady) scheme to pay researchers to cite studies from several journals it controls. How much can you earn? That depends. The payout is structured this way: $6 a citation and up to five cites, or $30, per paper, or $150 in total across all five journals.

COVID-19 wastewater tracking paper ends up in the sewer

A paper that sought to bring some math to the idea that the spread of COVID-19 could be tracked in human excrement has been retracted because of the authors submitted it to two different Elsevier journals on the same day — and because of some eyebrow-raising behavior by the alleged peer reviewers.

The first author of the article was Ernestine Atangana, a researcher in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein.

The article, “Will the extraction of COVID-19 from wastewater help flatten the curve?,” appeared in Chemosphere in May — where it caught the eye of a researcher in the field (who did not want to be identified) who was struck by its sheer awfulness. (We should note that others have explored the same idea, and come to mixed conclusions.)

Among the more risible sections, the researcher told us, was this:

Publisher retracting more than 30 articles from paper mills

The publisher SAGE is in the process of retracting more than 30 papers across three of its journals after determining that they were churned out by paper mills — prompting the company to take a closer look at its policies and procedures.

The suspect papers were initially flagged by Elisabeth Bik and others as part of a group of some 400 articles that showed signs of having been milled. As we reported in March, a dozen of the articles were hit with expressions of concern — prompting some head-scratching from Bik, in particular, about why they weren’t being retracted outright.

A spokesperson for SAGE told us:

Biotech’s data supporting Alzheimer’s trials under scrutiny

A law firm known for filing shareholder suits says that data supporting a drug company’s plan for trials of its experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease show evidence of manipulation.

Stock in the company, Cassava Biosciences, tumbled yesterday after the FDA posted material from the firm, Labaton Sucharow, and a top research integrity expert tells Retraction Watch he sees near-certain signs of fabrication in the data.

Earlier this week, Labaton Sucharow submitted a “citizen’s petition” to the FDA regarding a regulatory filing from Cassava, and called on the agency to halt trials of Cassava’s drug simulfilam on the grounds that it had:

Second time’s the charm: The author who requested a retraction twice

As Jason Isbell sings, doing the right thing is the hardest thing to do. But sometimes it’s even harder than it needs to be. Ask Cory Xian.

When Xian, a bone researcher at the University of South Australia, in Adelaide, and his colleagues found an error in their 2018 paper in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research — a top journal for the field — they notified the editors and asked for a retraction. But the journal demurred, instead issuing a correction for the article, titled “Release of CXCL12 From Apoptotic Skeletal Cells Contributes to Bone Growth Defects Following Dexamethasone Therapy in Rats.”

The correction states that “incorrect photos had been accidentally and mistakenly used by a staff person as representative photos”.

Xian, the senior author of the article, told us:

Journal retracts more articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

Eight months after a psychology journal retracted a pair of articles that were “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda,” the publication has pulled three more papers — all at least a quarter century old — for the same reason.

All five papers were written by J. Philippe Rushton, formerly of the University of Western Ontario, who died in 2012. As we wrote in December 2020, Rushton published dubious studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that:

Doing the right thing: Co-authors of researcher who covered up data fakery retract paper

A group of researchers in Canada who’d collaborated with a one-time rising star in the bone field have retracted a 2014 article after determining that the data were unreliable.

They did so even though the paper was not a focus of the investigations into the work of Abida Sophina “Sophie” Jamal, whose once sparkling career in endocrinology crumbled after an investigation found that she had fabricated data and took elaborate steps to cover her deception — from doctoring patient records to changing the temperature of a freezer at a government blood facility to damage samples that might reveal the fraud.

Readers puzzle over marketing journal’s failures to retract

A marketing journal is taking heat on social media for issuing an expression of concern over a 2019 paper that many readers believe should have been retracted — and correcting another instead of retracting it.

The article now subject to an expression of concern, “Role of Ambient Temperature in Influencing Willingness to Pay in Auctions and Negotiations,” was written by Jayati Sinha, who holds the Macy’s Retailing Professorship at Florida International University and Rajesh Bagchi, of Virginia Tech University.

According to the abstract:

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