Adam Marcus

A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title

What a difference a D makes.

Ask Kevin Pile. Pile edits the International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases (let’s call it the IJRD), a Wiley publication. Last year, he published a guest editorial by Vaidehi Chowdhary, a rheumatologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on a form of kidney disease.

But it turns out that Chowdhary, a member of Pile’s editorial team, had intended to submit her article, “When doing the right thing is wrong: Drug efflux pumps in steroid‐resistant nephrotic syndrome,” to a different journal, the Indian Journal of Rheumatology, or IJR. We think you can see how this all went down.

According to Pile, the episode was “a tail of consecutive mistakes”:

‘Immortal time bias’ fells JAMA journal asthma paper

One of the many fun things about reporting on retractions is that we get to expand our statistical knowledge. To wit, follow along as we explore the concept of immortal time bias.

A JAMA journal has retracted and replaced a paper by authors at the University of Massachusetts after another researcher identified a critical statistical error in their study.

The paper, “Association of Antibiotic Treatment With Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized for an Asthma Exacerbation Treated With Systemic Corticosteroids,” was written by a group led by Mihaela Stefan, the associate director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science at UMass, and appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019.

The study purported to find that:*

Here comes the judge, ready to plagiarize your paper

Not long ago, Amy Barnhorst opened an email from the editor of a journal to which she and a colleague submitted, but ultimately pulled, a paper on gun violence.

The cheery note — “thought you two might be interested to see what we came up with” — announced the publication of a recent article in the Journal of Health Service ~~Psychiatry~~ Psychology by a pair of authors. The title,“Collaborating with Patients on Firearms Safety in High-Risk Situations,” had an unpleasant whiff of irony to it — because the article was, in fact, Barnhorst’s own work. (Barnhorst told us she wanted to wait to name the paper until it was retracted, but the JHSP paper, identified by sleuth Elisabeth Bik, matches passages and descriptions tweeted by Barnhorst.)

As Barnhorst, the vice chair of psychiatry at UC Davis, and the director of the Bullet Points Project, a program to help clinicians prevent firearm injuries among their patients, tweeted:

The mill and the loss: Journal up to 39 retractions, just under half linked to paper mills

We’re rounding out the week with a third post about paper mills: A Taylor & Francis journal is up to 39 retractions, 18 of which appear to have been the work of at least one such operation.

Last March, The publication, “Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology,” issued an expression of concern for 13 of the articles, after a group of data sleuths pointed out problems with the papers.

As Science magazine pointed out at the time, the sleuths, including Elisabeth Bik, found evidence that more than 400 articles generated by the suspected mill contained fabricated images. All of the papers came from research teams based in China, they noted.

Publisher retracting 68 articles suspected of being paper mill products

It appears to be Paper Mill Sweeps Week here at Retraction Watch.

On Tuesday, we reported on an editor who believes one such operation was responsible for the withdrawals of at least two articles in her journal.

Now, the Royal Society of Chemistry is retracting 68 articles, across three of its titles, after an investigation turned up evidence of what it suspects was the “systemic production of falsified research.” The society said it is in the process of beefing up its safeguards against milled papers and plans to train its editors to have “extra vigilance in the face of emerging, sophisticated digital fraud.”

Exercise science grad student at Australian university dismissed after he admitted faking data, says supervisor

A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.

The articles, both of which were published last year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, came from a group at the Murdoch Applied Sports Science Laboratory, part of Murdoch University. The first author on both papers was Liam J. Hughes, a PhD student at Murdoch who was terminated as a result of the misconduct.

“There can be no justification for such studies”: Paper on artificial eyes for dogs earns expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2020 paper by researchers in Korea who have used 3-D printing to create artificial eyes for dogs.

The study triggered a slew of critical comments from readers, who were outraged by the ethics of the research and what they saw as inadequate protections for the animals against pain.

The paper is titled “Custom-made artificial eyes using 3D printing for dogs: A preliminary study,” and the senior author is Kyung-Mee Park, of Chungbuk National University. According to the abstract:

Journal expresses concern over study of potential treatment for autism

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on a study of a potential treatment for autism.

The article, by a group in Slovakia, purported to show for the first time that the drug ubiquinol — a form of the compound coenzyme Q₁₀ — could improve the ability of children with autism to communicate with their parents, communicate verbally, play games with other children and help with other behaviors.

The paper was published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, a Hindawi journal. The first author was Anna Gvozdjáková, of Comenius University in Bratislava, and the last author was Fred Crane, a former biologist at Purdue University in Indiana. Crane, who died in 2016, is credited with being the discoverer of coenzyme Q10 in mitochondria in 1957. The 2014 article — which has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was among the last of his 400-plus papers to appear in print.

Per the EoC:

‘Deeply unfair’: First author of newly retracted paper on weight and honesty speaks out

The first author of a highly controversial — and now retracted — paper linking body weight to integrity calls the journal’s decision to pull the article “a bitter surprise” and its handling of the article after publication “deeply unfair.”

Eugenia Polizzi di Sorrentino

The article, “Dishonesty is more affected by BMI status than by short-term changes in glucose,” was published in Scientific Reports in July and retracted this week. Eugenia Polizzi di Sorrentino, of the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies at the National Research Center, in Rome, who along with her colleagues disagreed with the retraction, told us:

Springer Nature journal retracts BMI, honesty paper

More than five months after outraged readers demanded that a Springer Nature journal retract a paper linking body mass index to honesty, the publication has been pulled.

The journal now says that a post-publication review of the article found that the data don’t support the authors’ conclusions — which is another way of saying that the pre-publication peer review missed that fact.

Publication by Scientific Reports of the article, “Dishonesty is more affected by BMI status than by short-term changes in glucose,” last July caused consternation on social media, as readers wondered what they were reading and why the journal had agreed to publish the study, as well as on the journal’s website.

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