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:
Continue reading Author objects to “irrelevant reviewers” as journal retracts four papers
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.
Continue reading February: ‘we don’t agree there is an issue here.’ June: Retracted.
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:
Continue reading Seven months after an author request, journal retracts
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:
Continue reading Author demands a refund after his paper is retracted for plagiarism
A Science journal has issued expressions of concern for two papers on Alzheimer’s disease over concerns about the integrity of the data.
One involves a 2016 article by a star-studded group of neuroscience researchers over allegations of manipulated data in one of the figures. That paper, “Gain-of-function mutations in protein kinase Cα (PKCα) may promote synaptic defects in Alzheimer’s disease,” appeared in Science Signaling and came from a team led by Rudolph Tanzi and Roberto Malinow, of Harvard and UC San Diego, respectively.
Here’s the notice for the paper, which has been cited 64 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science:
Continue reading Papers on Alzheimer’s slapped with expressions of concern
A med-tech journal whose editor-in-chief is the president-in-waiting of the American Medical Association has retracted six papers for compromised peer review and related problems.
The Journal of Medical Systems, led by Jesse Ehrenfeld – an anesthesiologist in Wisconsin who this week became president-elect of the AMA – said the articles were part of a special issue that ran in 2018 titled “Advancements in Internet of Medical Things for Healthcare System.”
Here’s the retraction notice for “LSTM Model for Prediction of Heart Failure in Big Data”:
Continue reading Journal run by new AMA president-elect caught in special issue scam
A cancer journal has retracted a 2016 paper by a group in China after deciding – more than five years after publication – it couldn’t stand behind the work.
The article, “The preoperative platelet–lymphocyte ratio versus neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio: which is better as a prognostic factor in oral squamous cell carcinoma?”, appeared in Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology, a SAGE title. The authors were led by Shan Chen, of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.
The notice reads:
Continue reading Retraction leads to review change at SAGE journal
A group of researchers in Japan who lost a paper earlier this spring in Science for misconduct have notched two more retractions, bringing their total to three.
As we reported in April, Science pulled a 2020 article led by Masaya Sawamura, of Hokkaido University, in Sapporo, saying the authors discovered:
Continue reading Chemistry group at Hokkaido up to three retractions
The authors of a controversial meeting abstract linking ivermectin to lower mortality from Covid-19 have retracted the study, saying that the work has been widely “misinterpreted” and might be leading to patient harm.
The abstract, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database,” was presented at the 2021 International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance.
According to the researchers, from the University of Miami, Covid-19 patients who took ivermectin were about 70% less likely to die of the disease than those who took remdesivir.
Continue reading Widely touted abstract on ivermectin and COVID-19 retracted
An Elsevier journal has issued a rather remarkable expression of concern for a 2021 paper on rabbit husbandry after learning that the lead author misrepresented the authorship of the article – and possibly more.
The paper, “Supplementing rabbit diets with butylated hydroxyanisole affects oxidative stress, growth performance, and meat quality,” appeared in animal and ostensibly came from a group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia led by Tharwat Imbabi.
But as the journal explains, the article wasn’t the first rabbit rodeo for Imbabi, of the department of animal production at Benha University. According to the notice, the researcher had failed repeatedly to publish his manuscript in other journals, so he turned to “third parties” for help.
Those contributors did the bulk of the work – but wanted none of the credit. Meanwhile, Imbabi appears to have found other authors willing to join the list.
We’ll let the expression of concern tell the rest:
Continue reading A hare-raising expression of concern after an author hires a third party to get a paper published