Adam Marcus

Two years: That’s how long it took a PLOS journal to flag a paper after a sleuth raised concerns

Two years after being alerted to a questionable figure in a 2016 paper by a group with a questionable publication history, a PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern about the article.

The paper, “Deprivation of L-Arginine Induces Oxidative Stress Mediated Apoptosis in Leishmania donovani Promastigotes: Contribution of the Polyamine Pathway,” was published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and was written by a team based at the Rajendra Memorial Research Institute of Medical Sciences in Patna, India, along with a few other institutions in that country.

The penultimate author of the paper is Chitra Mandal, of the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. Mandal’s name appears dozens of times on PubPeer, where posters have flagged the figures in her papers. In a 2019 article in The Hindu, Mandal hinted that an institutional investigation into her work was underway but she dismissed the problems as “unintentional minor mistakes”:

Award-winning nursing researcher’s paper retracted for ‘failure to acknowledge the contribution of other researchers and the funding source’

A nursing journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a researcher in Scotland after learning that she’d taken a wee bit more credit for the article than she deserved.

The paper was titled “Co-designing technology with people with dementia and their carers: Exploring user perspectives when co-creating a mobile health application” and was written by Siobhan O’Connor. The article, which appeared in the International Journal of Older People Nursing (IJOPN), has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

O’Connor had been a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow before moving to the University of Edinburgh, from which she received the Florence Nightingale Scholarship, a year-long fellowship award for nursing researchers. While at Edinburgh, she wrote and published the paper in question, using data that she’d had access to in Glasgow.

‘Tortured phrases’, lost in translation: Sleuths find even more problems at journal that just flagged 400 papers

What do subterranean insect provinces and motion to clamor have to do with microprocessors and microsystems?

That’s an excellent question. Read on, dear reader.

‘Please don’t be afraid to talk about your errors and to correct them.’

A “systematic error” in a mental health database has led to the retraction of a 2017 paper on how people with psychosis process facial expressions.

Joana Grave, a PhD student at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, and her colleagues published their article, “The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders,” in Psychiatry Research, an Elsevier title.

According to the abstract of the paper:

Paper from company claiming phototherapy could treat COVID-19 is retracted

A study that touted phototherapy as a way to combat the COVID-19 pandemic has been retracted after Elisabeth Bik noted a litany of concerns about the article, from duplications in the figures to the authors’ failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

The article, “Methylene blue photochemical treatment as a reliable SARS-CoV-2 plasma virus inactivation method for blood safety and convalescent plasma therapy for COVID-19,” appeared in mid-April in BMC Infectious Diseases, a Springer Nature title. Unlike many papers rushed into publication during the pandemic, it had been in peer review since the previous April. The authors listed affiliations with various institutions in China, including a company called Boxin (Beijing) Biotechnology Development LTD, which helped fund the study — more on that in a moment.

According to the paper, methylene blue (a versatile medical product that serves as a drug and a dye) when used with something called the “BX-1 AIDS treatment instrument,” could be a wonder therapy for the SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The authors describe BX-1 as:

Researcher committed misconduct while at NIH, say institutes — but is allowed to publish a revised version of a paper

An investigation by the National Institutes of Health has led to the retraction of a 2016 paper in PLOS Biology for manipulation of the data in the article. But the journal has republished a revised version of the paper — minus the bad data — on which the researcher found to have committed the misconduct remains the first author.

The original article, “Exosomes Mediate LTB4 Release during Neutrophil Chemotaxis,” came from the laboratory of Carole Parent, who was a cancer researcher at the NIH at the time it was published and is now at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. It has been cited 93 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the notice:

‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke

File this under “doing the right thing:” A group of stroke researchers in Germany have retracted a paper they published earlier this year after finding an error in their work shortly after publication that doomed the findings.

Julian Klingbeil, of the Department of Neurology at the University of Leipzig Medical Center, and his colleagues had been looking at how the location of lesions in the brain left behind by cerebral strokes were associated with the onset of depression after the attacks. According to the study, “Association of Lesion Location and Depressive Symptoms Poststroke”:

Elsevier says “integrity and rigor” of peer review for 400 papers fell “beneath the high standards expected”

Elsevier says it is reassessing its procedures for special issues after one of its journals issued expressions of concern for six such publications, involving as many as 400 articles, over worries that the peer review process was compromised.

The journal, Microprocessors & Microsystems, published the special issues using guest editors.

The EoCs vary slightly, but the journal has issued the following blanket statement for these six issues:

‘They seem to mean business’: Cardiology journal flags papers cited hundreds of times

A European cardiology journal has issued expressions of concern for seven widely-cited papers dating back to 2009 after a reader flagged suspicious images in the articles.

Although the cast of characters changes, the senior author on all seven papers is Chao-Ke Tang, of the First Affiliated Hospital of the University of South China, in Hengyang, Hunan. To date, at least 15 of Tang’s papers have come under scrutiny on PubPeer. Two months ago, for example, Elisabeth Bik posted about “unexpected similarities” in multiple figures in a 2013 paper by Tang and colleagues that appeared in PLoS ONE.

But Sander Kersten, the chair of Nutrition, Metabolism and Genomics and Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, said he believes that the researcher’s output for roughly the past decade is unreliable.

Kersten said his concerns about Tang date back to 2014, when he reviewed — negatively — a manuscript for Atherosclerosis, an Elsevier title, from the researcher:

Researchers forfeit $10,000 award when paper’s findings can’t be replicated

The authors of a prizewinning paper on how large financial institutions hedge risk have retracted their article and have returned the award after another researcher could not replicate the findings.

The paper, “Risk Management in Financial Institutions,” was published in 2019 in the Journal of Finance by a group from Duke University, in Durham, N.C., and HEC Paris, in France. In January 2021, the article received a 2020 Brattle Prize Distinguished Paper in Corporate Finance for the work, which has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The prize carries a $10,000 award.

But when Paul Guest, a finance scholar at King’s College London, in the United Kingdom, tried to replicate the study, he found he could not. In an article published earlier this month in the Journal of Finance, Guest detailed his approach, which revealed: “six discrepancies in [the article’s] reporting, coding, and data.”

According to the retraction notice, the authors say they are returning the Brattle Prize:

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