Adam Marcus

Author retracts Nature commentary over concerns about section’s sponsorship

Nature has retracted a recent commentary after the author complained that he had been misled by the relationship of the publication to a financial sponsor and told to avoid critiquing work from the institution. The journal says it is revisiting its “editorial guidelines and processes” in the wake of the case.

Kenneth Witwer, an RNA expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said he had been approached by Nature earlier this year to contribute a piece to one of the journal’s “Outlook” sections.

Outlook sections are sponsored, and in this case, the supporter was Nanjing University in China. One of the institution’s deans and star researchers, Chen-Yu Zhang, had arranged the section and written an article for it as well — a piece Witwer described as essentially an advertorial for Zhang’s questionable research. [Springer Nature, in comments to Retraction Watch, said that “The Zhang piece is advertorial, is clearly labelled as such and uses a different typeface from editorial content to promote transparency.”]

According to Nature policy:

Why did a journal suddenly retract a 45-year-old paper over lack of informed consent?

A journal has retracted a 45-year-old case study over concerns that the authors had failed to obtain proper informed consent from the family they’d described.

The article, “Stickler syndrome report of a second Australian family,” appeared in Pediatric Radiology, a Springer Nature title, in 1975. The first author was Kazimierz Kozlowski, a prominent radiologist who was born in Poland and worked in the United States and Australia, where he studied skeletal diseases in children.

Retraction of paper on romantic crushes marks second for psychology researcher

A psychology researcher who left her tenure track position at Northwestern University in 2018 amid concerns about the integrity of her data has lost a second paper.

Here’s the abstract of the 2018 paper, titled “Romantic crushes increase consumers’ preferences for strong sensory stimuli:”

Infectious disease researcher “recklessly” faked data in grants worth millions, says federal watchdog

A pediatric infectious disease specialist in California “recklessly” fabricated his data in a 2009 published study and four grant submissions, worth millions of dollars, to the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

The federal watchdog said in a settlement agreement published today that Prasadarao Nemani, of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly including falsified and/or fabricated data” in a 2009 paper — retracted in 2018 — and four NIH grant applications.

Specifically, Nemani (who has published under the name Nemani V Prasadarao):

Calling exercise data “atypical, improbable, and to put it bluntly, pretty weird,” sleuths call for seven retractions

A group of data sleuths is calling for the retraction of seven articles by an exercise physiologist in Brazil whose data they believe to be “highly unlikely” to have occurred experimentally.

In a preprint posted to the server SportRxiv, the group — led by Andrew Vigotsky, a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University — details their concerns about the work of Matheus Barbalho, a PhD student at the Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, part of the Universidade da Amazônia, in Belém. Barbalho’s mentor is Paulo Gentil.

In addition to the preprint, titled “Improbable data patterns in the work of Barbalho et al,” Greg Nuckols, one of the coauthors, has posted a lengthy “explainer” about the analysis.

The Brazilian group already has one retraction, for a study in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance titled “Evidence of a ceiling effect for training volume in muscle hypertrophy and strength in trained men—less is more?” According to the notice:

A physics paper claimed the Koran had predicted the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Now it has an expression of concern.

A paper on how the Koran anticipated the discovery of the Higgs Boson — aka the “God particle” — has been hit with an expression of concern.

The article, “God particles in the perspective of The AlQuran Surah Yunus: 61 and modern science,” appeared in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, which in 2017 published submissions to the 2016 International Conference on Science and Applied Science (Engineering and Educational Science), held in Indonesia. It was authored by Sri Jumini, of the Physics Department Program of Sains AlQuran University in Java.

Being neither particle physicists nor scholars of world religions, we’re not well-equipped to summarize Jumini’s theory, so here’s how he describes the work in the abstract:

Fowl play? Poultry researcher has two more papers retracted for “grave mistakes”

The journal Poultry Science has retracted two papers for authorship issues.

The first author on both articles was Sajid Umar, of the Arid Agriculture University, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, who now has lost at least four papers for similar reasons.

One article, from 2016, was titled “Synergistic effects of thymoquinone and curcumin on immune response and anti-viral activity against avian influenza virus (H9N2) in turkeys.” According to the retraction notice:

“Consistently unsurprised”: Nigerian vaccine study with no Nigerian authors retracted

Last month, PLOS ONE published a paper reporting on a trial to improve the uptake of the measles vaccine in Nigeria. The researchers were affiliated with IDinsight, a San Francisco-based “global advisory, data analytics, and research organization that helps development leaders maximize their social impact.”

San Francisco is about 7,800 miles from Lagos, and the list of authors — Sam Brownstone, Alison Connor and Daniel Stein, a former economist at the World Bank — seemed suspiciously devoid of Nigerian names.

That omission was even more strange given the title of the article: “Improving measles vaccine uptake rates in Nigeria: An RCT evaluating the impact of incentive sizes and reminder calls on vaccine uptake.” Almost immediately after publication, Ejemai Eboreime, a physician and public health worker, pointed out on Twitter the implausibility of the implied claim that no local scientists were involved in a randomized controlled trial covering nine clinics throughout the country — which he alleged also was a violation of local research ethics provisions.

French university rescinds researcher’s PhD after misconduct finding

*Saccharomyces cerevisiae* cells in DIC microscopy via Wikimedia

A university in France has stripped a researcher of her doctoral degree after she was found to have committed misconduct in at least two studies of yeast.

As we reported in May, Marjorie Petitjean, who received her PhD from the National Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of Toulouse, was accused of having fabricated and manipulated data while in the lab of Jean-Luc Parrou — who described her output as “a complete work of fiction.”

Petitjean left Parrou’s lab for a post-doc in Scotland, where, he said, she continued her bad habits:

“I am the first one to regret not being more careful in the first place”: Paper on rat semen retracted

A journal has retracted a paper on the semen of diabetic rats after learning about problems with authorship, and possibly more.

Physiology International, which also is called Acta Physiologica Hungarica, published the article, “The effects of sericin in recovering spermatogenesis and sexual hormone levels in diabetic rats,” in 2019. The first author was Ali Olfati, of Tabriz University in Iran. The second author — on paper, at least — was Felipe Martínez-Pastor, of the University of León, in Spain.

Not so. Per the retraction notice (which now directs to a “page not found” error):

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