Dalmeet Singh Chawla

‘Stealth corrections’: when journals quietly fix papers

Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. So he took to PubPeer, an online site where scientists often discuss papers, to raise his concerns.

An author of the study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure out the problem. A month later, when Aquarius, a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, revisited the paper, the figure had been replaced without any note that the publisher had fixed the issue.

Aquarius once again took to PubPeer to express his concerns. “I don’t see any notification when looking at the landing site for the paper: no erratum, corrigendum or a simple log-entry that something has been changed,” he wrote, noting that he had informed Elsevier, the journal’s publisher about the issue. In July, the journal issued a corrigendum for the paper.

“I was quite a bit upset about it,” Aquarius told Retraction Watch. “It takes away one of the key elements for any reader to be critical, namely that you know what has happened.”

Pakistan university’s pharmacy department chair notches two retractions

Kashif Barkat, who heads the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Lahore in Punjab, Pakistan, has had two of his studies retracted and two more corrected, all for issues related to images in the papers. Several more of his studies are flagged on PubPeer for similar reasons.

According to the retraction notice for one of the retracted articles, which appeared in Polymer Bulletin in 2020, Barkat does not agree with the journal’s decision to pull the paper.

The paper, “Understanding mechanical characteristics of pH-responsive PEG 4000-based polymeric network for colorectal carcinoma: its acute oral toxicity study,” has been cited three times so far, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction note, issued in June, reads:

Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct

One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.

The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.

Researchers found only 8,515 articles published the figure captions and the image’s metadata banners, both of which are needed to determine whether the correct microscope is listed in papers. Metadata banners usually contain important information about the experiments conducted, including the operating voltage of the microscope and the instrument’s model and parameters.

Of these papers, 2,400 (28%) listed the wrong microscope manufacturer or model, raising questions about the integrity of the conducted research.

Journal taking ‘corrective actions’ after learning author used ChatGPT to update references

An interdisciplinary journal says it will take “corrective actions” on a paper following a thorough investigation on a paper for which one author used ChatGPT to update the references.

Krithika Srinivasan, an editor of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space and a geographer at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, confirmed to Retraction Watch her journal is finalizing what actions need to be taken. After the probe concluded, Srinivasan says she submitted her recommendations to Sage, the journal’s publisher, who will take actions in line with their policy.

What’s clear from the probe, she says, is that “none of the incorrect references in this paper were ‘fabricated’ in the sense of being made up or false.” She notes that the original manuscript was submitted to the journal with the correct references but “the errors were generated when one of the other authors (without the knowledge of the submitting author) used chatGPT (instead of regular referencing software) to insert the citations and reference list.”

Norway university committee recommends probe into the country’s most productive researcher

Filippo Berto, by ONOLO – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2019, Filippo Berto was hailed as Norway’s most productive researcher, publishing a new study on average every two to three days.

Five years on, a committee appointed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where Berto, a mechanical engineer, was based until last year, is recommending that the institution carries out an in-depth investigation into his work following a complaint by Per Steineide Refseth, a librarian at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences in Rena.

Rune Nydal, a philosopher at NTNU who leads the independent research integrity committee that met May 14 partly to discuss the complaint about Berto’s work, told Retraction Watch it is recommending NTNU’s rector conduct an in-depth probe into Berto’s papers and release a public statement on the outcome.

How thousands of invisible citations sneak into papers and make for fake metrics

In 2022, Guillaume Cabanac noticed something unusual: a study had attracted more than 100 citations in a short span of less than two months of being published.

Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, initially flagged the study on PubPeer after it was highlighted by the Problematic Paper Screener, which automatically identifies research papers with certain issues.

The screener flagged this particular paper — which has since been retracted — for containing so-called tortured phrases, strange twists on established terms that were probably introduced by translation software or humans looking to circumvent plagiarism checkers.

But Cabanac noticed something weird: The study had been cited 107 times according to the ‘Altmetrics donut,’ an indicator of an article’s potential impact, yet it had been downloaded just 62 times.

Prominent nanoscientist retracts paper after PhD students flagged error

The authors of a 2018 nanoscience paper have retracted the article after three doctoral students highlighted a problem with its methods.

The 2018 study attracted media attention for suggesting that nanospears, microscopic structures similar to splinters, may be useful in delivering gene therapies.

Paul Weiss, a nanoscientist and a corresponding author of the paper, announced the retraction on Twitter April 5, the same day the retraction notice appeared. Weiss holds several academic positions, including Presidential Chair of Chemistry and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Chemist in India loses seven papers, blames outsourcing of images

A chemistry researcher in India has had seven of his papers retracted after the publisher concluded that some images in the papers showed “unexpected similarities” or had been duplicated.

The retraction notices, issued in late March by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in the U.K., all state that:

The authors informed the Editor that the characterization of the original samples was outsourced, and they do not have the original raw data for the published results.

Given the significance of the concerns about the validity of the data, and the lack of raw data, the findings presented in this paper are not reliable.

The corresponding author, Dhanaraj Gopi of Periyar University in Tamil Nadu, had several papers flagged on PubPeer starting in 2019, including some that have not been retracted.

Earthquake destroyed data, claims Japanese prof found to have faked results

A professor of cell biology in Japan faked data in an influential cancer study published in Nature Neuroscience in 2019, according to an investigation by Okayama University.

The school, which released a report with its findings last month (in Japanese), found no fewer than 113 instances of fabrication as well as problems with several images in the paper, titled “Genetic manipulation of autonomic nerve fiber innervation and activity and its effect on breast cancer progression.”

The report identified Okayama’s Atsunori Kamiya as being involved in the misconduct and recommended retracting the article, which has been cited 134 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The paper has yet to be retracted, but an editor from the journal said they are looking into the case.

Five years after saying it won’t retract Macchiarini paper, journal does so

In 2018, the journal Respiration was adamant that it wouldn’t retract a 2015 paper co-authored by once-respected transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. Now, the editors at Respiration seem to have changed their mind.

Macchiarini is most well known for his controversial artificial windpipe implants. Seven out of the eight patients who had artificial windpipes implanted from Macchiarini suffered complications after the surgery.

Five years ago, the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden found that Macchiarini and three co-authors of his were guilty of misconduct in the 2015 study, and recommended that it should be pulled.

Thomas Nold, then the editor-in-chief of Respiration, previously told Retraction Watch, however, that the journal decided against retraction:

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