Adam Marcus

Former UCSD prof who resigned amid investigation into China ties has paper flagged for using the wrong test

Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern about a 2020 paper on the genetics of colorectal cancer by a group in China whose results were pegged on a test that couldn’t have produced the findings.

The article, “Circulating tumor DNA methylation profiles enable early diagnosis, prognosis prediction, and screening for colorectal cancer,” appeared in January, with authors from both academia and an outfit called the Guangzhou Youze Biological Pharmaceutical Technology Company.

Study claiming broader spread of aerosolized coronavirus is retracted

A schematic based on the now-retracted findings, as published in newspapers

A study which found that aerosolized novel coronavirus could be spread nearly 15 feet — twice what health officials had believed — has been retracted, but the journal isn’t saying why.

Practical Preventive Medicine published the paper in early March. Titled “An epidemiological investigation of 2019 novel coronavirus diseases through aerosol－borne transmission by public transport,” the authors, from institutions in China, looked at the spread of the virus on a bus linked to one infected passenger.

According to the abstract:

‘Fiasco’ as publisher misses authors’ request to hold off publishing their paper on rubber gloves

The authors of a 2019 paper on rubber gloves have retracted their work after the journal to which they’d submitted their manuscript somehow missed their request to put a hold on the article.

The paper, “Are rubber gloves marketed as accelerator-free truly free of accelerators?,” was published in Dermatitis, a Lippincott Williams & Wilkins title. The authors, led by Makenzie Pillsbury, of the University of Minnesota, had looked for traces of potential allergens in gloves. According to the abstract of the article:

An author realized a paper had plagiarized his thesis. It took the journal four years to retract it.

After more than four years of doing, well, not much, evidently, Scientific Reports — a Springer Nature title — has retracted a paper which plagiarized from the bachelor’s thesis of a Hungarian mathematician.

The article, “Modified box dimension and average weighted receiving time on the weighted fractal networks,” was purportedly written by a group of researchers from China led by Meifeng Dai, of the Nonlinear Scientific Research Center at Jiangsu University.

Except it wasn’t. As the retraction notice states:

A paper plagiarizes an article retracted for plagiarism and other sins — but it isn’t being retracted.

We make a point of never calling for a particular paper’s retraction, nor ever weighing in on whether a journal should have made that move. That would be, we often say, like a financial reporter recommending stocks. But a recent expression of concern is sorely testing our resolve on the matter.

The expression of concern is for a 2014 article, “shRNA-mediated silencing of ZFX attenuated the proliferation of breast cancer cells,” which appeared in Cancer Chemotherapy and Pharmacology, a Springer title, and was led by a team from Zhejiang Cancer Hospital in Hangzhou.

Here’s the notice:

Elsevier investigating hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 paper

Elsevier has weighed in on the handling of a controversial paper about the utility of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 infection, defending the rigor of the peer review process for the article in the face of concerns that the authors included the top editor of the journal that published the work.

On April 3, as we reported, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy issued an expression of concern (without quite calling it that) about the paper, which had appeared in March in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, which the ISAC publishes, along with Elsevier. According to the society, the article, by the controversial French scientist Didier Raoult, of the University of Marseille, and colleagues:

Authors aren’t happy to lose four more papers in chemistry journals

A pair of researchers in India with a history of stealing a paper from other authors during the peer review process have lost four more articles, this time for questionable data.

The papers, by Priyadarshi Roy Chowdhury and Krishna G. Bhattacharyya, of Gauhati University in Jalukbari, appeared in journals published by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry. At least some of the hijinks by the pair resulted in a misconduct inquiry by the institution — the report of which one of the authors told Retraction Watch “was completely one-sided and vindictive.”

One of the papers, “Ni/Co/Ti layered double hydroxide for highly efficient photocatalytic degradation of Rhodamine B and Acid Red G: a comparative study,” was published in 2017 in Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences. According to the notice:

A building consultant rigs peer review

The construction industry in New York City is notorious for rigged bids, but rigged peer review?

A Queens, NY, building consultant has lost four papers for forging — or having had forged — the peer reviews of his manuscripts. (For background on how this works, read this.)

Faruque Hossain’s articles appeared in a variety of engineering-based Elsevier publications between 2017 and 2019. Hossain is listed as being the owner of an outfit called Green Globe Technology Inc., which is based in Flushing.

Here’s the notice for “Green science: Decoding dark photon structure to produce clean energy,” which Energy Reports published in 2018:

Hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study did not meet publishing society’s “expected standard”

The paper that appears to have triggered the Trump administration’s obsession with hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for infection with the novel coronavirus has received a statement of concern from the society that publishes the journal in which the work appeared.

The April 3, 2020, notice, from the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, states that the March 20 article, “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of Covid-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial”

Former star cancer researcher who sued his university for discrimination notches eighth retraction

Jasti Rao, who once earned $700,000 a year at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria and was named the first “Peorian of the Year” before a misconduct investigation put an end to his time there, has now lost eight papers.

Rao’s case is among the more colorful that we’ve covered. A highly-regarded cancer specialist, Rao was caught up in a morass of misdeeds, including not only plagiarism and manipulation of data but gambling and behavior tantamount to extortion of his employees. As we reported in 2018:

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