Adam Marcus

‘A costly mistake’ prompts retraction of paper on hair loss

Image by Martin Slavoljubovski from Pixabay

A “costly mistake” has led to the retraction of a paper by a team of dermatology researchers in West Virginia who failed to obtain permission to use the data in their study for the specific purpose for which it was used.

The article, “Association Between Alopecia Areata and Natural Hair Color Among White Individuals,” which appeared in March 2021 in JAMA Dermatology, was a case-control study based on data from the UK Biobank — a large repository of medical and genetic data from people in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the article was Michael Kolodney, the chair of the department of dermatology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown.

In fact, Kolodney and his colleagues had produced two articles using data from the biobank: one on alopecia areata — an autoimmune condition that causes relatively early-onset hair loss — and another that linked baldness to an increased risk of Covid-19 in men. The Covid research was published in November 2020 as a letter to the editor in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

The Covid paper remains intact. But as the retraction notice indicates, the folks at UK Biobank hadn’t granted Kolodney’s group permission to publish the alopecia findings:

Kentucky professor resigns ahead of vote that could have stripped him of tenure

A former endowed professor at the University of Kentucky has resigned from the faculty days before a committee at the institution was scheduled to vote on whether to fire him for misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

In 2018, the university began investigating Xianglin Shi, a toxicologist and cancer biologist who that year, as we reported then, lost three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry for image manipulation. At the time, Shi was the principal investigator of a 5-year, $7.4 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES).

In the wake of the retractions, Shi was stripped of his title as the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and his role as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine.

Abstracts flagged because conferences — including one in Wuhan in late 2019 — may not have happened

A journal has issued an expression of concern after learning that it may have published abstracts from meetings that appear not to have taken place.

As many journals do, Basic & Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, a Wiley title, occasionally publishes meeting supplements. But according to the journal, it recently learned from several authors that a dozen of those supplements that it produced

between 2018 and 2020 might have contained suspect work. According to a statement we received from the journal:

Medical journal retracts article on “tribalism” after readers call it offensive

*Journal of Hospital Medicine* editor Samir Shah

A journal has retracted — and replaced — an article on “tribalism” in medicine and deleted a tweet about it, too, after readers complained that the language in the piece was offensive to Indigenous peoples.

The article, which appeared in the Journal of Hospital Medicine in April, was titled “Tribalism: The Good, The Bad, and The Future.” The authors were Zahir Kanjee and Leslie Bilello, of Harvard Medical School.

The journal used social media to promote the article — which prompted a flood of criticism about the use of the word “tribalism” and its permutations.

On May 21, Samir Shah, the editor-in-chief of JHM, and four other editors issued a statement apologizing for publishing the article:

First, this paper was corrected. Now it has an expression of concern. And maybe, just maybe, it will be retracted.

Never let it be said that journals are not deliberative when it comes to correcting the record.

Of course, “deliberative” also means “slow.”

Take a 2018 article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) by a group of authors in India.

Two meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary outcomes

A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles.

The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of meditation developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and promoted by the Art of Living Foundation, which describes itself thusly:

Imperial College London researcher fired for research misconduct

Eric Lam, a highly-published cancer specialist, has been fired from his post at Imperial College London following a university investigation that found misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

Lam’s work has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for some three years, dating back to a 2018 post pointing out suspicious images in a 2003 paper by him and his colleagues in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. In 2019, his group corrected a 2011 paper in Oncogene, a Springer Nature title, for image problems.

However, the new retraction marks the first such retraction for the researcher, whose LinkedIn page states that he is now affiliated with Sun Yat-Sen University, in China. According to an Imperial College London spokesperson:

Anesthesiology researcher guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers: Investigation

Showa University Hospital, via Wikimedia

A Japanese anesthesiologist has been found guilty of fabricating data and other misconduct in 142 articles, leading to his termination and the sanction of several of his co-authors.

Showa University says its investigation into Hironobu Ueshima, the existence of which we first reported on last June, found that the prolific researcher had doctored his results, falsified his findings and tinkered with authorship.

The university’s report on the case is available here, in Japanese, and a similar report from the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists is available here in English. The JSA report cites 142 papers — including 120 letters to the editor, 12 original papers, and 9 case reports — with evidence of misconduct including fabricated data and improper authorship. The investigation also found evidence of misconduct in several unpublished studies by Ueshima. By our count, he has six retractions to date.

Reporter prompts corrections in Nature, New York Times after researcher fails to disclose ties to Cargill

A journalist in Washington, D.C. prompted a correction in both Nature and the New York Times after finding that the lead author of a paper on fish farming failed to disclose financial ties to one of the world’s largest aquaculture companies.

The article, “A 20-year retrospective review of global aquaculture,” found that the practice of fish farming has become significantly more friendly to the environment than it was two decades ago.

The paper caught the attention of the New York Times, which wrote about the findings. It also grabbed the attention of Tim Schwab, who noticed something a bit, well, fishy, about the study.

Two Japanese universities revoke PhDs, one for plagiarism and one because of cell line contamination

A scientist in Japan has lost her doctoral degree from Kyoto University after an investigation determined that she had plagiarized in her thesis.

According to the university, Jin Jing, who received her degree in September 2012 in human and environmental studies, has become the first person at the institution to have a doctorate revoked. In a statement about the move, Kyoto University president Nagahiro Minato said:

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