Adam Marcus

Former PhD student loses two papers for forging co-author’s name

The journal of a national scientific society in Europe has retracted a pair of papers after a heart specialist in Belgium complained that his name had been included on the manuscripts with neither his knowledge nor permission.

The articles appeared in the official journal of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts: Section of Medical Sciences this July.

Both were led by Sofija Popevska and included a single co-author: Frank Rademakers, a cardiologist at KU Leuven. One was titled “The Left Ventricular Pressure-Volume Area and Stroke Work in Porcine Model of Ascending Compared to Descending Thoracic Aorta Stenosis Creating a Chronic Early Vs. Late Left Ventricular Afterload Increase.” The other, “Prolonged Asynchronous Left Ventricular Isovolumic Relaxation Constant in Ascending Compared to Descending Thoracic Aortic Stenosis for Chronic Early Left Ventricular Afterload and Late Left Ventricular Afterload Increase.”

The problem, as Rademakers told us, was that he’d had nothing to do with the work.

‘A significant departure’: Former Kentucky researcher faked 28 figures in grant applications and papers, say Feds

A former researcher at the University of Kentucky committed misconduct in both published papers and grant applications, according to a federal watchdog.

The finding from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) comes two years after the University of Kentucky announced that it had concluded that the scientist, Stuart Jarrett, had committed misconduct on four papers and two federal grant applications – and demoted his supervisor.

Jarrett, a Wales native who left the school in September 2019, faked data in studies of melanoma and reported it in 28 figures in four papers, one funded NIH grant, and two unfunded NIH grants, according to ORI. “[T]hese acts constitute a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community,” ORI said.

Company’s Alzheimer’s treatment study earns a flag

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a federally-funded paper on Alzheimer’s disease after a sleuth on PubPeer noted potentially duplicated figures in the article.

We shouldn’t forget to mention, as the paper did, that one of the authors – a prominent scientist who happens also to be a co-editor in chief of the journal – has financial ties to a company with interest in the work. That author said the fault lies with the corresponding author.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, it seems, when it comes to neurofibrillary tangles. And we’ve seen at least one other case of a paper failing to disclose conflicts of interest in a paper he’d published in his own journal. (This is a subject that has been taken up elsewhere.)

The article in this case, “Human Umbilical Cord Blood-Derived Monocytes Improve Cognitive Deficits and Reduce Amyloid-β Pathology in PSAPP Mice,” appeared in Cell Transplantation, a SAGE title, in November 2015.

250th COVID-19 retraction is for faked ethics approval

Researchers in Iran have lost a paper on Covid-19 infection in a two-month-old boy after the journal learned that they’d fabricated ethics approval for the article.

It’s the 250th Covid-19 retraction by our count.

“Coronavirus disease 2019 in a 2-month-old male infant: a case report from Iran” appeared in December 2020 in Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics. The senior author of the paper was Sajjad Ahmadpour, of the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Diseases Research Center at Qom University of Medical Sciences.

According to the retraction notice (which doesn’t appear in the expected place but can be found here):

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions

Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.

The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.

One 2021 article, “Numerical investigation of nanofluid flow using CFD and fuzzy-based particle swarm optimization,” drew a significant amount of attention on PubPeer. In January, a commenter pointed out a variety of apparent problems with the paper and noted that questions have been raised about other work by members of the group – including this now-retracted article in … Scientific Reports.

Lawsuit prompts retraction of book chapter on outdated birth surgery

Springer Nature has retracted a 2020 chapter in a digital book – along with a related introduction – after a judge in Ireland ruled that the paper defamed another researcher and two attorneys.

“Truth or Dare; Women, Politics, and the Symphysiotomy Scandal”, was written by Oonagh Walsh, a professor of gender studies at Glasgow Caledonian University. The text appeared as Chapter 11 in the e-book GeoHumanities and Health, Global Perspectives on Health Geography.

The scandal, according to The Guardian, involved the controversial use of a surgery in which physicians:

Author objects to “irrelevant reviewers” as journal retracts four papers

Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports has retracted four papers by a researcher in Saudi Arabia who claims “irrelevant reviewers” just couldn’t understand “a new area of statistics.”

Here’s the notice for one of the articles, “Neutrosophic statistical test for counts in climatology,” which appeared in September 2021 and has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science:

February: ‘we don’t agree there is an issue here.’ June: Retracted.

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a paper on hepatitis C infection it had previously corrected for problematic data – but in between the editors declared the case closed.

The paper, “The interaction between microRNA-152 and DNA methyltransferase-1 as an epigenetic prognostic biomarker in HCV-induced liver cirrhosis and HCC patients,” was published in July 2019 in Cancer Gene Therapy. The authors were affiliated with Al-Azhar University, in Cairo, and the Ministry of Scientific Research, in Gizah, Egypt.

Some two years later, Alexander Magazinov – a data sleuth about whom we’ve written before – posted concerns on PubPeer about the article and three other papers by members of the group.

Seven months after an author request, journal retracts

Two weeks after we reported on the unsuccessful efforts of a researcher at The Ohio State University to have one of his papers retracted for data manipulation, the journal that had been delaying the move has acted.

As we wrote earlier this month based on a request for public records, Philip Tsichlis had been urging Nature Communications since November of last year to retract a 2021 article from his group which contained fabricated findings. But although a second journal had reacted promptly to the request, retracting the paper in December, the Nature Communications editors didn’t – resulting in a series of emails in which the researcher negotiated the wording of the retraction notice and expressed increasing frustration with the delay. (Both journals are owned by Springer Nature.)

Now, two weeks after our story, the journal has retracted the article, “AKT3-mediated IWS1 phosphorylation promotes the proliferation of EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinomas through cell cycle-regulated U2AF2 RNA splicing.”

According to the notice:

Author demands a refund after his paper is retracted for plagiarism

The author of a 2021 paper in a computer science journal has lost the article because he purportedly stole the text from the thesis of a student in Pakistan – a charge he denies.

According to the editors of Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, a Hindawi title, Marwan Ali Albahar, of Umm Al Qura University College of Computer Science, in Saudi Arabia, plagiarized from the student for his paper “Contrast and Synthetic Multiexposure Fusion for Image Enhancement.”

As the retraction notice states:

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