Adam Marcus

Publisher infected twice with the same anti-vaccine article

Researchers who lost a paper derided by critics as anti-vaccine have republished their article in a different journal … owned by the same publisher (hint: rhymes with “smells of beer”).

As we reported in April 2019, the original article version of “Cognition and behavior in sheep repetitively inoculated with aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines or aluminum adjuvant only” appeared in November 2018 in Pharmacological Research.

Antivaccine advocates such as Celeste McGovern seized on the study, which also drew harsh criticism from Skeptical Raptor and Orac, who called it

Author initiates “a legal process” against a journal and its publisher after a retraction, expressions of concern

An author tells us he is taking legal action against a journal and its publisher after the editor retracted one of his papers and flagged two others.

The Health Informatics Journal has issued expressions of concern for two articles on autism and retracted one on obesity in children. According to the journal, the papers — led by Fadi Thabtah, of the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand — were marred by compromised peer review.

But that’s not all. Apparently, well, things change.

Here’s what the EoCs have to say:

Journal drops the ball as it tries to juggle an embargo request and Elsevier’s temporary removal policy

So much for author instructions.

Researchers who’d submitted a paper to Social Science & Medicine on smoking in public places briefly lost their article after the journal had some confusion about an embargo they’d requested.

The article, “Neighbourhood greenspace and smoking prevalence: Results from a nationally representative survey in England,” has since been republished in the journal, an Elsevier title. So harm, no foul. But the initial appearance of the paper online earlier this fall surprised senior author Benedict Wheeler, of the University of Exeter Medical School:

Author blames “multitasking dementia” for duplicated cancer paper

The authors of a 2017 paper on resistance to cancer chemotherapy have retracted and replaced the article after learning that it included duplicated material from previously published work by one of the duo.

The article, “The evolution and ecology of resistance in cancer therapy,” was written by Robert Gatenby and Joel Brown, of the Moffitt Cancer Center, in Tampa, Fla. It appeared in Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine.

Richard Sever, the editor of the journal, told us that sometime after publication, a reader alerted his office that the paper included passages of text that were identical to those in a 2015 paper in Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), by Gatenby and two other co-authors:

Journals flag concerns in three dozen papers by nutrition researchers

Journals have flagged more than three dozen articles by a team of authors in Iran for concern over the integrity of their data. The moves have come in the 15 months since data sleuths raised questions about the data in more than 170 papers from the group.

Among the most recent moves, a nutrition journal has issued expressions of concern for three of the team’s articles. The papers, which appeared in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (JACN), from Taylor & Francis, were published in 2015 and 2017. The senior author on all three articles was Zatollah Asemi (also listed as Zatolla Asemi), a specialist in metabolic diseases who sits on the faculty of Kashan University of Medical Sciences.

Concerns about the findings from Asemi’s shop have been circulating for several years. The group came under scrutiny on PubPeer three years ago, when a commenter noticed apparent irregularities in the data in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology. That paper has yet to be flagged in any way.

Researchers tried to correct a figure after questions on PubPeer. Then the real trouble started.

Pro tip to would-be fraudsters: If you’re going to submit new figures to support your claims, make sure they’re not obviously fake.

That’s a lesson a group of cancer researchers learned the hard way for their 2016 article in DNA and Cell Biology titled “miR-106a-5p suppresses the proliferation, migration, and invasion of osteosarcoma cells by targeting HMGA2.” The corresponding author was Fang Ji, of The Second Military Medical University in Shanghai.

The paper appeared on PubPeer earlier this year, where a commentor noted dryly:

Why duplicate publications matter: A retraction notice goes above and beyond

Here’s a retraction notice after our own hearts.

Brain Research Bulletin, an Elsevier journal, has retracted a 2017 article which duplicated a substantial amount of previously published papers by some of the same authors. But unlike many journals, which merely point out the overlap, BRB explains to readers why the copying matters.

The article, “Erythropoietin rescues primary rat cortical neurons from pyroptosis and apoptosis via Erk1/2-Nrf2/Bach1 signal pathway,” was written by Rui Li, Li-Min Zhang and Wen-Bo Sun, anesthesiologists at Cangzhou Central Hospital in China.

According to the notice:

Authors earn praise — but a “poorly worded” retraction notice — for flagging their errors

The authors of an October 2020 paper on the genetics of thyroid cancer are getting praise from the journal for retracting their article after learning that it contained a critical error.

The paper, “Mendelian randomization supports a causative effect of TSH on thyroid carcinoma,” had appeared in Endocrine-Related Cancer, a bioscientifica property.

Jonathan Fussey, a surgeon at Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, and the first author of the study, told us:

Nanoscience researcher loses four papers for image manipulation, forged authors

Journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry have retracted four articles by a researcher in China for a range of misconduct, including manipulation of images, fabrication of authors and more.

The papers were written by Rijun Gui, of Qingdao University and formerly of the School of Chemistry and Molecules Engineering at East China University of Science and Technology, in Shanghai, and published in 2013 and 2014. Gui has a sizable entry on PubPeer, where many of his studies have come under scrutiny for years. Together, the four papers have been cited nearly 150 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

It’s not quite Rashomon, but each of the retraction notices adds a bit of detail to the story.

Our bads: Publisher error leads to double retractions for psych researchers

Here’s a Halloween tale that will drive authors batty.

A psychology journal has retracted two papers from the same group of authors in Spain because it published the articles inadvertently. But in doing so, the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, where the two articles were never supposed to appear but did, managed to botch the retractions, too.

One of the articles, “Sudden complex hallucinations in a 14-year-old girl: schizophrenia spectrum disorders versus dissociative disorders-the influence of early life experiences on future mental health,” was published online in June.

The other, “Abrupt and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder in an 11-year-old girl-PANDAS/PANS syndrome: an entity to be considered-management implications,” appeared in the June/July print issue of the journal. The authors were Parisá Khodayar-Pardo and Laura Álvarez-Bravos, of the Universiy of Valéncia.

The retraction notices, which arrived in September, read identically:

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