Ellie Kincaid

Leading primate researcher demoted after admitting he faked data

The former director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio has been removed from the post after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found he had faked data.

Last August, ORI found that Deepak Kaushal, who remains a professor at Texas Biomed, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, and/or recklessly falsifying and fabricating the experimental methodology to demonstrate results obtained under different experimental conditions.”

Citing Kaushal’s admission, ORI said that he had engaged in research misconduct in work supported by 8 grants from the National Institutes of Health, and faked data in two grant applications and one published paper that has since been retracted.

Hindawi shuttering four journals overrun by paper mills

Hindawi will cease publishing four journals that it identified as “heavily compromised by paper mills.”

The open access publisher announced today in a blog post that it will continue to retract articles from the closed titles, which are Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, the Journal of Healthcare Engineering, and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

The closures follow reporting by Retraction Watch in February that a professor used the identity and email account of a former student to edit special issues of two of the journals, Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.

Former cancer research center director plagiarized and faked data, feds say

The former director of a cancer research center faked data and presented others’ published data and text as his own in four grant applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and one research record, according to a U.S. government watchdog.

Johnny J. He, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (RFUMS) in Chicago, Ill., “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying, fabricating, and plagiarizing experimental data and text” published by other scientists, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said today.

He did not immediately respond to an email or phone call seeking comment.

‘Frankly abusive’: More questions about the journal that stole an author’s identity

Last week, we brought you the story of a professor who found her name on an article she didn’t write, which also seemed to have been plagiarized.

Since our story was published, we’ve learned a little more about the journal that published the article, the African Journal of Political Science.

Jephias Mapuva, a professor at the Bindura University of Science Education in Zimbabwe, who is listed as the editor in chief of the journal, told us in an email that he is “not associated with the journal in any way.”

“It came to me as a surprise that I am listed as an Editor-In-Chief,” he wrote. He also copied an email address for the journal publisher, International Scholars Journal, and asked for his name to be removed from the website:

A response to a public records request that raised more questions than it answered

Last August, a U.S. federal research misconduct watchdog announced findings that a longtime researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles named Janina Jiang faked data in 11 grant applications.

More than a month later, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) issued a rare correction to its announcement, saying “additional information” from UCLA indicated that one of the grants “did not fund or contain falsified/fabricated data.” The watchdog agency said it would remove the application in question from its findings of research misconduct.

The grant, UL1 TR000124, helped fund the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) with $57 million from 2012-2015. The listed principal investigator, Steven M. Dubinett, is the interim dean for UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

At the time of the correction, we wondered how a report that would have had to be reviewed by multiple officials – and lawyers – at both institutions could include such a mistake, and filed public records requests to find out.

A professor found her name on an article she didn’t write. Then it got worse

Anca Turcu was going over her publication stats a few weeks ago, as she does every year to apply for research awards and update her CV, when she found an “unpleasant surprise.”

Turcu, a senior lecturer in the University of Central Florida’s School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, was listed as the sole author of an article entitled “Impact of government intervention measures on recycling of waste equipment in China,” which had been published in the African Journal of Political Science in February 2022.

She hadn’t written the paper, which had nothing to do with her research on diasporas and voting. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Journal hasn’t retracted ‘Super Size Me’ paper six months after authors’ request

Six months after the authors of a 2012 paper requested its retraction, a marketing journal is still investigating the concerns, Retraction Watch has learned. Other researchers had failed to replicate the findings – that consumers choose portion sizes based on their desire to signal higher social status – and discovered anomalies in the data.

The paper, “Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status,” appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research and attracted media attention from The New York Times and NPR, among other outlets. The lay media interpreted the findings as helping to explain the rise in obesity in the United States. The article has been cited 180 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The same authors requested the retraction of another paper, “Dynamics of Communicator and Audience Power: The Persuasiveness of Competence versus Warmth, published in 2016 and cited 61 times, which the journal is also still investigating.

“Unapproved euthanasia” of rats in neuroscience study leads to retraction

A 2017 paper describing neuroscience research with rats has been retracted after “data mis-management,” including the mistreatment of the animals, came to light.

The retracted paper was the second by Subimal Datta, a professor of psychology and anesthesiology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to receive a flag for data problems.

The article, “BNDF heterozygosity is associated with memory deficits and alterations in cortical and hippocampal EEG power,” was published in Behavioural Brain Research and has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, published March 31, stated:

High-profile paper that used AI to identify suicide risk from brain scans retracted for flawed methods

In 2017, a paper published in Nature Human Behavior made international headlines for the authors’ claim they had developed a way to analyze brain scans using machine learning to identify youth at risk for suicide.

“It was a big, splashy finding,” said Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. But at a neuroimaging conference soon after the publication, other researchers discussed the study “in kind of a sense of disbelief,” he said.

The 91% accuracy for identifying suicidality that the researchers reported, from a sample size of just a few dozen participants, he said, “kind of went against what we as a field were starting to understand about the nature of these brain phenotype markers based off of neuroimaging data.”

After six years of scrutiny, during which Verstynen attempted to replicate the work but found a key problem, the authors of the 2017 paper have retracted the article.

Wiley and Hindawi to retract 1,200 more papers for compromised peer review

Hindawi and Wiley, its parent company, have identified approximately 1,200 articles with compromised peer review that the publishers will begin retracting this month.

Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of the research division at Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, wrote about the forthcoming retractions in a blog post at Scholarly Kitchen yesterday.

The plan to retract 1,200 articles, which the publisher expects to take a few months, follows Hindawi’s announcement last September that it would retract 511 articles across 16 journals for manipulated peer review. (We’ve tracked 501 retractions from 23 Hindawi journals since the announcement.)

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