Adam Marcus

Will the real Tim Chen please stand up? A trip down the rabbit hole of deceit

When Marianne Alunno-Bruscia, the research integrity officer at France’s national oceanographic science institute, uncovered nearly a dozen papers with fraudulent authorship, she thought she’d stumbled on something bizarre.

She didn’t know how right she was.

As we reported in early February, the problems arose during an audit the research activities of the L’Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (iFREMER), which the organization was conducting to satisfy a request from the French High Council for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education – a bureaucratic headache, to be sure, but one which in this case proved well worthwhile.

The bibliographic deep-dive turned up two curious articles bearing the name of Bertrand Chapron. That part wasn’t unusual. Chapron, a wave researcher, is prolific. Odd was the nature of the two papers. Neither was in Chapron’s fields of interest. Chapron disavowed any involvement in the work, and insisted that he’d never met the two main authors of the articles: Tim Chen and C.Y.J. Chen.

Harvard eye researchers have eight papers retracted for lack of ethical approval

A group of eye researchers is up to eight retractions for problems with the ethics approval for their studies.

The studies appeared in three journals, although one, Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science (IOVS), is pulling six studies.

The senior author on all eight publications was Jorge G. Arroyo, a former faculty member at Harvard. Arroyo’s LinkedIn page now lists him as being with Boston Vision, a private medical practice.

Here’s the notice for the six retractions in IOVS, which covers abstracts submitted to the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology between 2019 and 2021:

The 21-year-old apology – and retraction from JAMA

Contrary to what Toscanini famously said, it’s never too late to apologize.

Ask Shetal Shah. In 2000, Shah, now a professor of pediatrics at New York Medical College’s Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital, in Valhalla, published an essay in JAMA about a young medic providing care to indigenous people in Alaska.

Titled “Five Miles From Tomorrow,” the piece focused on the narrator’s encounter with a wizened 97-year-old Yupik man

Nanotech researchers cleared of fraud but failed to supervise cheating grad student: University

An institutional investigation of a group of nanotechnology researchers in Japan has concluded that a former graduate student in the lab began his cheating ways “on a daily basis from a very early stage” after joining the team in 2015.

According to a Google translation of the report, Yuuta Yano – whom the document identifies as “former graduate student A” and with other oblique references, committed sweeping fabrication of data and other misdeeds:

over a period of four years or more, the number of forged data is extremely large, and even concealment work is performed, so it is evaluated that the maliciousness of the act is high. … The impact is great. In addition, it was published in a wide range of academic journals and has a large social impact.

Yano also was found to have thrown away lab notebooks in order to hide his culpability.

Psych journal in revolt as it publishes paper saying masturbation and gay sex are harmful

Several psychiatry researchers have been unsuccessfully seeking distance from a dodgy journal with which they’re affiliated – and which has now published an article claiming homosexuality and masturbation deserve to be considered (or reconsidered, as the case may be) mental illnesses.

The 2021 paper, “Review of Removing Homosexuality and Masturbation from the List of Sexual Dysfunctions in DSM,” was written by Sayed Ali Marashi, of the Department of Psychology at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in Iran It appeared in Clinical Schizophrenia & Related Psychoses.

Oddly, the header text on the paper reads “Metallurgical Investigation of Tie Rod used for lifting Ferro-Alloy during Steel Making: A Safety Issues.”

According to the article:

Study of cryotherapy for COVID-19 anosmia fails the sniff test

The authors of a study suggesting that a deep freeze might help reverse one of the curious complications of COVID-19 have put their paper on ice after determining that they lacked adequate ethics approval for the research.

“Whole-Body Cryotherapy as an Innovative Treatment for COVID 19-Induced Anosmia-Hyposmia: A Feasibility Study,” was written by a group in France led by Fabien D. Legrand, of the University of Reims. The article appeared online this January in the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine.

The randomized study looked at the effect of cryotherapy in 45 people whose sense of smell had been disrupted by COVID. Two-thirds received either high- or low-dose cryotherapy – which Legrand’s team defined as exposure to “extremely low temperatures (−60°C to −110°C) in a double Cryoair chamber (MECOTEC, Pforzheim, Germany) for 3 min” – while a third were assigned to a control group.

According to the investigators, whose affiliations included the French Society of Whole-Body Cryotherapy — and who nonetheless registered their protocol in the Iranian Registry of Clinical Trials:

Study on teen pot use goes up in smoke, then reappears

A JAMA journal has retracted and replaced a widely circulated 2021 paper which purported to find that pot use among adolescents drops when states make the drug legal.

The article, “Association of Marijuana Legalization With Marijuana Use Among US High School Students, 1993-2019,” appeared in JAMA Network Open and received a bale of attention in mainstream and social media. As GreenEntrepreneur reported:

A September 2021 study of high school use between 1993 and 2019 used the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to determine that adult-use laws did not increase teen use. After two years, states with adult-use laws saw decreases in usage.

But as readers soon pointed out, the findings were schwag. According to the notice:

Lancet journal retracts, replaces paper on treatment for pancreatic cancer

A Lancet journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 paper on the treatment of pancreatic cancer over an error that prompted an institutional investigation.

The article, “Stereotactic body radiotherapy plus pembrolizumab and trametinib versus stereotactic body radiotherapy plus gemcitabine for locally recurrent pancreatic cancer after surgical resection: an open-label, randomised, controlled, phase 2 trial,” appeared last July in Lancet Oncology and received a significant amount of attention on social media. It has already been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the journal, after publication readers notified the editors about potential problems with the data – in particular, apparent issues with the survival curves in study. In October 2021, the journal published a letter to the editor by a group in Japan detailing the concerns and stating that:

Often, retractions take years. This one took three days.

“The retraction that took years” is a common enough refrain on Retraction Watch that it might as be its own genre. Here’s one that didn’t.

A journal wasted no time pouncing on a suspect paper, retracting the 2016 article just three days after a commenter flagged concerns about the images in the work on PubPeer.

As the commenter, Actinopolyspora biskrensis, wrote:

Engineers’ research starts to look shaky as retractions mount

A group of structural engineering researchers based in Iran has lost at least five papers for problems with the data – and a data sleuth says more look shaky, too.

Four of the articles appeared in Construction and Building Materials between 2018 and 2020 and were written by a changing cast of characters with two constants: Mansour Ghalehnovi and Arash Karimipour, both of the Department of Civil Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Karimipour’s LinkedIn profile lists an affiliation with the University of Texas at El Paso from 2019 to January of this year.

The journal, an Elsevier title, says it began investigating the papers after a whistleblower raised questions about the integrity of the data. In some cases, for example, data in one article were found in other papers but were represented as demonstrating different materials. The authors also used images from other researchers or the internet without proper attribution.

Here’s the notice for “Experimental study on the flexural behaviour and ductility ratio of steel fibres coarse recycled aggregate concrete beams,” from 2018:

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