Avery Orrall

‘Perplexed’ author’s identity forged on plagiarized paper in ‘probably fake’ journal

In February, Steffen Barra Googled his name. A clinician working in the field of forensic psychiatry, he was in the habit of periodically checking if anything negative had been written about him. What he didn’t expect to find was a plagiarized paper with his name attached to it.

Barra, a researcher at the University of Saarland in Germany, told us the 2023 article, “Introducing the Complexities of Forensic Psychology: Decoding the Mind Behind the Crime,” plagiarized from an information page from a company offering online courses. The article also resembles many college informational pages about the field, such as this one from the University of North Dakota, he said.

Concerned he might be blamed for the misconduct, Barra immediately contacted the publisher, Hilaris.

A company representative responded to Barra the same day, February 29, with one phrase: “We will remove the link.”

Two papers retracted for plagiarizing a 50-year-old thesis

A math professor in Poland has lost two papers because she plagiarized a doctoral thesis written before the United States had put a man on the moon.

The articles by Daria Michalik, “The decomposition uniqueness for infinite Cartesian products” and “Some remarks on the uniqueness of decomposition into Cartesian product,” published in 2017 and 2016, respectively, were retracted this year from Topology and its Applications over concerns they closely resembled an unpublished 1968 dissertation from Polish topologist Zbigniew Furdzik: “On the properties of certain decompositions of topological spaces into Cartesian products.”

Michalik has associations with the Institute of Mathematics, the same institution with which Furdzik, now deceased, earned his PhD. As of August of 2023, she was a researcher at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland.

The retraction statements for both papers read:

Pharmaceutical researcher faked data in two papers, says federal watchdog

A former professor and vice provost for research at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York, falsified data in two published papers, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Shaker Mousa, who was also chairman and executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute at Albany, already has at least 10 retractions and two corrections, by our count.

The falsified data appeared in “Tetraiodothyroacetic acid-conjugated PLGA nanoparticles: a nanomedicine approach to treat drug-resistant breast cancer,” which appeared in Nanomedicine in 2013, and “The proangiogenic action of thyroid hormone analogue GC-1 is initiated at an integrin,” which appeared in the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology in 2005 and was retracted last September. ORI called for Mousa to request a correction or retraction of the Nanomedicine paper as well.

University vice president for research contests retraction for image issues

A university vice president has received his first retraction – and disagrees with it, according to the journal.

The retraction for Jaydutt Vadgama, the Vice President for Research and Health Affairs at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, comes after a commenter on PubPeer noted similarities between data in two papers from the same group. Similar comments have led to corrections to two other papers by Vadgama, who is also professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles.

The retracted article, “A83-01 inhibits TGF-β-induced upregulation of Wnt3 and epithelial to mesenchymal transition in HER2-overexpressing breast cancer cells,” appeared in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in 2017. It has been cited 38 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, published this month, states:

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