Ellie Kincaid

‘Mugged by stealth’: Team finds their paper has been plagiarized not once, but twice

In his career as a psychologist, Andrew Colman had only experienced being plagiarized once: In the early 1970s, an acquaintance tried to take credit in print for a psychometric scale that Colman had developed. Colman wrote to the journal, which quickly confirmed the plagiarism and printed a corrigendum in the next issue.

And in the past year, Colman has learned of two more instances of his work – a 2004 paper on game theory in medical consultation – being stolen. He isn’t finding the journals so responsive this time around.

In 1987, the NIH found a paper contained fake data. It was just retracted.

Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues.

Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted.

A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.

The recent retraction came through the efforts of psychologist Russell Warne, who unearthed the report with the help of a couple librarians, posted it on his blog, and contacted journals about its findings.

In a blog post about the report, Warne summed up the case:

Concussion researcher Paul McCrory earns nine more retractions, nearly 40 expressions of concern

A prominent sports medicine researcher who earlier this year had an editorial from his time as the top editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted for plagiarism has lost nine more articles for stealing and recycling text and misrepresenting a reference.

The British Journal of Sports Medicine has also placed expressions of concern on all other articles on which Paul McCrory, who was the journal’s editor-in-chief from 2001-2008, is the sole author, totalling 38 articles, according to a press release from the journal. (We count 78 single author papers for McCrory in BJSM.)

McCrory is a widely cited expert on concussions, and has worked with major sporting agencies and leagues as a consultant.

Paper by gene therapy Zolgensma developer retracted because of discrepancies in mouse survival rates

A paper describing preclinical work that was foundational for the gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy now sold as Zolgensma has been retracted for data inaccuracies.

The article, “Rescue of the spinal muscular atrophy phenotype in a mouse model by early postnatal delivery of SMN,” was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2010. Its corresponding author, Brian Kaspar, was at The Ohio State University at the time. Kaspar went on to become the scientific founder and chief scientific officer of AveXis, which created Zolgensma and was acquired by Novartis in 2018 for $8.7 billion.

The paper has been cited 557 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and referenced in at least 59 patents, according to Altmetric.

According to the retraction notice, the authors contacted the journal last year about “inaccuracies” in the data. After the journal’s investigation, the editors decided to retract the article over the author’s objections. The notice explained:

Med school vice dean says he’s correcting paper amid negative misconduct inquiry

A gastroenterology research group led by a vice dean at a medical school has requested that a journal correct a paper with an image duplicated from an earlier study by the same group, Retraction Watch has learned. The journal has not yet determined what kind of notice to place on the article.

The group’s leader informed us of the correction request in emails asking us to remove a comment on a post from June pointing out the duplicated image. He also told us that he requested the correction before his employer received an allegation of research misconduct and started an inquiry, which found he and his group had not committed research misconduct.

Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va. and chair of the department of clinical and translational science, is corresponding author on both of the papers that share an image. Sundaram also has a dual appointment at a VA medical center in Huntington.

When emails asking to withdraw manuscripts started repeating themselves, an editor got suspicious

In late 2021, editors at Laboratory Investigation noticed something strange. The journal was receiving far more emails than usual asking to withdraw manuscripts that were already being peer reviewed. And some of the emails were strikingly similar, even using the same unusual language.

A total of five identical emails said that the authors had new results to add to the manuscript:

Exclusive: Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings

After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.

The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.

Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.

Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?

The Internet of Things. Computer science. Botany. COVID-19.

All worthwhile subjects, to be sure. But what do they have to do with materials science?

That’s what James Heathers, who will be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch as a “data thug,” found himself wondering after he spent a weekend looking into articles published by Materials Today: Proceedings. He found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing “tortured phrases” that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.

He detailed his findings in a blog post today, and says that the journal – an Elsevier title – has published many articles that look like the work of a paper mill.

Dental school dean up to five retractions for cancer research papers

A dental school dean with a history of publishing cancer research papers is up to five retractions.

Russell Taichman, the dean of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s school of dentistry, lost two papers in Cancer Research earlier this month, after losing three others since 2020. Most of the retractions came after PubPeer comments about duplicated images in some of the papers.

In April of 2020, Elisabeth Bik commented on two of Taichman’s papers that would later be retracted, pointing out potentially recycled images between the articles.

None of the authors responded on PubPeer, but Taichman apparently took her comments to heart, and credited her in a retraction notice.

Fired postdoc faked recommendation letters from supervisor, OSU alleges

A major research institution has accused a former postdoc of forging letters of recommendation from a supervisor, according to a court complaint.

Georgios Laliotis was terminated by The Ohio State University on Nov. 30, 2021, according to the complaint filed in Franklin County Municipal Court, which we’ve made available here. Earlier that month, his PI, cancer researcher Philip Tsichlis, had uncovered manipulated data in two papers on which Laliotis was the first author, and emailed journal editors to retract them, as we previously reported.

Emails released to us by OSU following a public records request indicated that Laliotis had been working at Johns Hopkins at the time, but OSU staffers had been told he had resigned his position effective November 24 and would go back to Greece. Whether he was employed by both universities simultaneously is unclear.

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