Adam Marcus

Anesthesiologist joins the 100-retraction club

Until this year, only one researcher — Yoshitaka Fujii — had eclipsed the century mark for retractions. But Fujii can no longer claim dibs on being the only scientist to lose three digits worth of papers.

Joachim Boldt, a fellow anesthesiologist fraudster, recently notched three more retractions, bringing his tally, by our count, to an even 100.

Boldt was one of Europe’s leading anesthesiologists for decades. A critical care specialist, he was internationally known for his work on the use of substances called volume expanders that are used during surgery to preserve blood pressure. That fame was replaced in the early part of the last decade by questions about his work, and findings of misconduct.

There are retractors in plastic surgery — and not just of the instrument kind

A plastic surgeon in Turkey has notched his fifth retraction for plagiarism and other issues.

That makes him a retractor — even if most plastic surgeons would have something else in mind if they used that term.

Ilteris Murat Emsen, then of the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery at the Numune State Hospital in Erzurum, has lost five papers dating back to 2006. Four were pulled in 2009. The most recent retraction appeared last month in the European Journal of Plastic Surgery, for a 2007 article titled “Management of the large septal perforations with the support of porous high-density polyethylene (MEDPOR).”

According to the notice:

Two retractions prove fresh is best

To the list of best practices in experimental research, here’s another item to add: Always use fresh cheesecloth when separating biomasses.

We’ll explain.

WHO formally retracts opioid guidelines that came under fire

The World Health Organization has officially retracted its controversial guidelines on the use of opioid analgesics.

The agency’s move applies to two statements, issued in 2011 and 2012. Last June, WHO announced that it was “discontinuing” the guidelines in the wake of a critical report which said the documents were heavily tainted by commercial bias. According to a BMJ story published at the time:

Crossfit wins $4 million sanction in lawsuit stemming from now-retracted paper

A Federal court in California has ruled in favor of the popular training program CrossFit in its lawsuit against a nonprofit group — a competitor in fitness training — awarding the workout company nearly $4 million in sanctions.

Why are you reading about this case on Retraction Watch, you might ask? Well, at the heart of the suit, first filed in 2014, was a now-retracted 2013 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research — published by the NSCA — showing, erroneously, that CrossFit was linked to an increased risk for injuries. The journal initially corrected the article, but as CrossFit noted, the publication never acknowledged fabrication of data.

The senior author of that paper, Steven Devor, resigned his position at The Ohio State University after the retraction in mid-2017. As we reported at the time, the institution had demanded:

Journal retracted at least 17 papers for self-citation, 14 with same first author

A medical journal in Italy has retracted at least 17 papers by researchers in that country who appear to have been caught in a citation scam. The journal says it also fired three editorial board members for “misconduct” in the matter.

The retractions, from Acta Medica Mediterranea, occurred in 2017 and 2018, but we’re just finding out about them now; 14 involve roughly the same group of neuroscientists, while three are by different authors from some of the same institutions as the first team.

The journal last year issued two statements on its website about the cases, which it began investigating in 2018. The first, on Feb. 1, 2019 (we think), declared:

Prominent cancer researcher loses nine papers, making 10

Andrew Dannenberg (credit Patricia Kuharic)

The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) has retracted nine papers in bulk by a group of cancer researchers in New York led by the prominent scientist Andrew Dannenberg.

The work of Dannenberg’s group at Weill Cornell — and the figures in particular — has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for more than two years.

The group also lost an article more than a decade ago in The Lancet, bringing their total so far to 10. Cancer Discovery subjected a paper to an expression of concern in August. Much of the tainted work was funded by grants from the U.S. government, as well as from funding authorities in other countries.

According to the notice for 2014’s “p53 protein regulates Hsp90 ATPase activity and thereby Wnt signaling by modulating Aha1 expression“:

PLOS ONE retracts a paper first flagged in 2015 — and breaks the 100 retraction barrier for 2019

A team of researchers in Saudi Arabia, led by an ex-pat from Johns Hopkins University, has lost three papers for problems with the images in their articles.

The three retractions pushed the journal — which has become a “major retraction engine” for reasons we explain here and here — over 100 for 2019.

In December, PLOS ONE retrcated three papers by the group, led by Michael DeNiro, of the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. First, the journal retracted a 2011 article, “Inhibition of reactive gliosis prevents neovascular growth in the mouse model of oxygen-induced retinopathy,” the co-authors were Falah H Al-Mohanna and Futwan A Al-Mohanna. According to the retraction notice:

A look back at Retraction Watch in 2019 — and forward to our 10th anniversary

In August 2020, Retraction Watch will turn 10 — a milestone we still can’t quite wrap our minds around. When we started the blog in 2010, we thought we might have enough material for a post or two a month. Little did we know that our little side gig would eventually lead to the world’s largest database of retracted papers; or that there would be so many of them (now more than 1,400 per year); or, to be honest, how little we (and others) knew about these events.

This year saw several important developments for our project. We entered into a partnership with Zotero that allows them to alert users to retractions of any papers in their personal libraries — and, we hope, helps researchers to better avoid citing retracted papers in their work. Our database now includes more than 20,000 retractions.

‘A satisfactory explanation was not provided’: Physicists in India lose third paper

A team of physicists in India has notched their third retraction for problematic images and other issues that also have prompted at least four corrections of their work.

The authors, Sk. Shahenoor Basha, of the Solid State Ionics Laboratory at KL University in Guntur, and M.C. Rao, of Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada, have lost a 2018 article in the International Journal of Polymer Science titled ““Spectroscopic and electrochemical properties of [PVA/PVP]:[MgCl2{6H2O}] blend polymer electrolyte films.”

According to the retraction notice:

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