Dawn Attride

Brain tumor researchers lose second paper as UCSF investigates

A research group at the University of California, San Francisco, under investigation for potential misconduct has had a second paper retracted.

The group, led by Russell O. Pieper, director of basic science at the UCSF Brain Tumor Center and vice-chairman of the UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery, previously lost a 2021 paper in Science Translational Medicine after Elisabeth Bik and other commenters on PubPeer posted concerns about some of the images in the article.

The newly retracted paper, “Phosphoglycerate Mutase 1 Activates DNA Damage Repair via Regulation of WIP1 Activity,” appeared in Cell Reports in 2020. It has been cited 25 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Editor and authors refuse to share data of paper containing alleged statistical errors

Last July, David Allison and his students identified what they considered to be fatal errors in a paper that had appeared in Elsevier’s Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice.

The authors of the article, led by Sergio Di Molfetta, of University of Bari Aldo Moro in Bari, Italy, used a cluster randomized controlled trial, but did an improper statistical analysis, according to Allison’s group.

In August, Allison, dean of Indiana University’s School of Public Health in Bloomington, and his colleagues requested the authors’ data.

Then they hit a wall.

Elsevier journal issues 73 expressions of concern for manipulated peer review

An Elsevier journal has expressed concern over 73 papers with evidence of manipulated peer-review and rigged citations.

Last July, we reported that Masoud Afrand, a former member of the editorial board of Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements, had been linked to paper mill activity. At the time, Alexander Cheng, the journal’s editor in chief said Afrand had been asked to step down due to “unethical publication conduct.” (For other coverage of the journal since then, see this post by Maarten van Kampen and Alexander Magazinov.)

Cheng told Retraction Watch the journal is investigating the “temporary” expressions of concern. “Findings will be published, and actions will be taken, once investigations are completed,” he said.

Climate paper retracted from Science over miscalculations

The authors of a paper published in Science have retracted their article following the discovery of calculation errors.

The article,“Drought sensitivity in mesic forests heightens their vulnerability to climate change” by Robert Heilmayr of the University of California, Santa Barbara and colleagues found that in drier areas, trees are less sensitive to drought and in hotter regions with a wet climate, tree growth is expected to decrease.

It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Since its publication in December, the article has been downloaded 4,641 times, posted by 154 X users, and written about by 20 news outlets and press release sites.

MDPI backtracks on claim that a thesis can’t be plagiarized

The publisher MDPI has reversed itself on one reason it said a paper does not need to be retracted following allegations the authors had plagiarized a thesis.

As we reported earlier this week, the editorial office at Nutrients told Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, NH, in May that it didn’t consider apparent overlap between a 2023 paper and her 2020 thesis plagiarism “because thesis materials are not classified as prior publications.”

Yesterday, MDPI did a 180, blaming a “mismatch in their internal communications” for the responses Saxby received.

‘A disturbing experience’: Postdoc fights to have work that plagiarized her thesis retracted

In December, Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was notified by her friend of a paper published in the MDPI journal Nutrients that sounded similar to her dissertation. Saxby pulled up her 2020 dissertation, “The Potential of Taro (Colocasia esculenta) as a Dietary Prebiotic Source for the Prevention of Colorectal Cancer,” and compared it to the 2023 Nutrients article.

To her dismay, the paper “Taro Roots: An Underexploited Root Crop,” co-authored by researchers at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, overlaps significantly with Saxby’s work, including some passages of word-for-word copying with no citation.

While the corresponding author of the paper has called the omission of any citation to Saxby’s work “unfortunate” and said that she is working with Nutrients’ publisher – MDPI – to add one, the publisher said the behavior did not amount to plagiarism because the prior work was a thesis.

Neuroscience journal retracts eight articles for image distortion

Elsevier’s Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy has retracted eight articles for image manipulation and overlap, with more on the way, according to the sleuth who notified the publication of the issues.

Each retraction notice credits an “anonymous reader” with having raised concerns about manipulated or duplicated images, with the journal’s editor in chief determining a retraction was warranted.

That anonymous reader was Mu Yang, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Columbia University, in New York City, who started emailing the journal about problematic papers in January 2023.

On May 16th, the journal notified Yang of the following retractions:

‘Lab shenanigans’: TikTok influencer faked data, feds say

A well-known content creator and former lab technician at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas admitted taking “several shortcuts” in work that has been found to contain falsified data funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to a U.S. government watchdog.

Darrion Nguyen, who has more than a half-million followers on his TikTok account “lab_shenanigans,” engaged in research misconduct while working at Baylor by “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating experimental data and results” of several research records, two manuscript figures, a research progress report, a poster, and a presentation, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said.

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