Avery Orrall

First paper retracted in string of studies using the wrong medication name

A scientific sleuth and a mother who nearly lost her daughter to a hormonal condition teamed up in January to flag a series of papers that misnamed a medication for pregnant women. They have recently started to see the fruits of their labors: one retraction and three corrections.

In 2014, Tara Skopelitis, a lab manager at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was given weekly progesterone injections to prevent preterm birth for her daughter, as reported by STAT. Six years later, after her daughter showed symptoms of an unknown hormonal condition which still hasn’t been formally diagnosed, Skopelitis discovered she should have received synthetic progesterone variant 17α-hydroxyprogesterone caproate, often referred to as 17-OHPC, 17P, sold as Makena. When the drug wasn’t available, her doctor had ordered the wrong replacement from a compounding pharmacy. Skopelitis suspects her daughter’s condition could be a result of the mixup.

The confusion lies within the literature, Skopelitis says: Many clinical trials and papers refer to 17P as intramuscular progesterone, as if they are interchangeable or even the same compound.

Researcher whose work was plagiarized haunted by impostor emails

A researcher who posted on LinkedIn about a paper that plagiarized his work says he’s now the subject of an email campaign making false allegations about his articles.

In July, we reported that Sasan Sadrizadeh, researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, had his work plagiarized in a now-retracted paper.

“In what seems to be a direct response to our efforts,” as Sadrizadeh wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, his bosses, colleagues, and journals have been inundated with emails from impostors, accusing Sadrizadeh of misuse of funds and calling for the removal of his articles. At least one journal editor seems to have taken the allegations seriously.

Journal retracts article for plagiarized images after trying to gag researcher who complained

The journal Cureus retracted an article for plagiarized images after questioning the motives of the researcher who said her images were taken.

The researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, first emailed Cureus, an open-access journal Springer Nature acquired in 2022, on August 1. She said she noticed images in the October 2023 paper, “Pediatric Acute Dacryocystitis and Orbital Cellulitis With Concurrent COVID-19 Infection: A Case Report,” came from a lecture she posted online and later removed.

“The images used in this article were edited and presented under a fabricated clinical scenario” and had been used without her permission, the researcher wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch. She requested the journal retract the article. She also provided what she said were her original images, which were replicated in Figure 1 of the paper, and copied the corresponding author of the article.

Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting

A journal that lost its impact factor in June is in the midst of a cleanup operation, issuing nearly 140 retractions so far this year.

The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles.

Cabanac and Magazinov have now flagged 1,850 articles from the journal, Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research (ESPR), with the Problematic Paper Screener, which looks for evidence of bad practices in academic papers.

Paper claiming to discover new pain syndrome retracted

Researchers who said they discovered a new disease akin to rheumatoid arthritis, but caused by pollution, are standing by their claim despite the retraction of their paper last month.

The article, “Middle east pain syndrome is a pollution-induced new disease mimicking rheumatoid arthritis,” appeared in the Springer Nature journal Scientific Reports in November 2021. The paper has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and received limited press coverage.

According to the retraction notice, “post-publication peer review by an expert has confirmed the validity” of multiple concerns raised about the study. The paper did not present data to support its claims about the presumed cause for the syndrome, didn’t “conclusively” prove that MEPS is a new disease, and the bone erosions the study claimed were a hallmark of the disease weren’t backed by scans, the notice stated. Also, a figure of the paper featured a radiograph of a patient that wasn’t part of the study.

Journal republishes chiropractic paper it had retracted after legal threats

A journal has republished an edited version of a paper it retracted after a distributor of a chiropractic product the paper criticized wrote in to complain.

The distributor accused the publication of making “very serious, incorrect and libelous statements” and threatened legal action, Retraction Watch has learned.

Journal retracts paper on chiropractic product after distributor complains

An article about the overuse of spinal imaging has been retracted after the distributor of a chiropractic product it criticized in passing complained to the journal.

The paper, “An investigation into the chiropractic practice and communication of routine repetitive radiographic imaging for the location of postural misalignments,” was retracted in June from the Journal of Clinical Imaging Science after the editor-in-chief learned it contained “controversial statements regarding the commercial product Denneroll,” according to the statement.

Denneroll is a line of support products that purports to help with “spinal remodeling” for people whose spines aren’t curved in the normal way, according to a company brochure. The company’s website states that the Denneroll products are “second to none in spinal orthotics.”

The retraction notice said Deed Harrison, a chiropractor whose family distributes the Denneroll product line, “claimed that the data presented against this product lacks scientific backing.” Harrison’s father, Donald Harrison, originated a technique called Chiropractic BioPhysics (CBP) which is the basis of the Denneroll product line, according to the CBP website.

‘A proper editor would be horrified’: Why did a pediatric journal publish articles on the elderly?

In June, a scientist researching sarcopenia came across a relevant paper about treatment for elderly patients with complications from the disease as well as type 2 diabetes. The paper was “very bad,” he told us. “It looked like someone just copied two or three times the same text.”

The scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, became even more concerned when he realized the paper, which had the word “elderly” in its title, had been published in a pediatric journal.

“I started reading other issues of the same journal and noticed that this is a widespread problem: Chinese papers about older adults being published in pediatric journals!” he said.

Elsevier investigating geology journal after allegations of pal review

Elsevier is investigating the journal Geoscience Frontiers after a PubPeer thread flagged an editorial advisor whose articles in the journal were edited by his frequent co-authors.

The editorial advisor, M. Santosh, is a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia and a “Highly Cited Researcher” with more than 1,500 published articles, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The PubPeer commenter, “Desmococcus antarctica,” noted that two associate editors of the journal, Vinod O. Samuel of Yonsei University in Seoul and Erath Shaji of the University of Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram, India, are often listed as “Handling Editors” of Santosh’s articles published in Geoscience Frontiers — despite each frequently publishing other work with him.

‘Mistakes were made’: Paper by department chair earns expression of concern as more questioned

A 14-year-old paper has earned an expression of concern after an anonymous whistleblower found evidence of image duplication in the work.

The authors have had images from several more papers flagged on PubPeer. The corresponding author, Kelly McMasters, is chair of the Hiram C. Polk, Jr., MD Department of Surgery at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky.

The 2010 paper, “Adenovirus-mediated expression of truncated E2F-1 suppresses tumor growth in vitro and in vivo,” appeared in Cancer. It has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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