Ellie Kincaid

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.

Former Iranian government official up to two retractions, five corrections

A lung specialist who has held positions in Iran’s Ministry of Health and National Medical Council now has two retractions and five corrections of his published papers for re-using text.

In the case of the retractions, the re-used text was an entire paper.

Esmaeil Idani (who also spells his last name “Eidani”), now affiliated with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, is a middle author on two papers retracted for republication, and corrections to two of his papers acknowledge duplicated text with each other and a third paper.

According to an online CV, Idani has worked as “Deputy Secretary of the Medical Education and Training Council” for Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education, and from 2013-2017 was chairman of the Supreme Medical Council of Iran. He has not responded to our request for comment.

How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions

In July of 2017, Mohamed Rezk, of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Menoufia University in Egypt, submitted a manuscript to the journal Anesthesia with a colleague.

The manuscript, “Analgesic and antiemetic effect of Intraperitoneal magnesium sulfate in laparoscopic salpingectomy: a randomized controlled trial,” caught the attention of John Carlisle, an editor at the journal whose name will be familiar to Retraction Watch readers as the sleuth whose statistical analyses have identified hundreds of papers with implausible clinical trial data.

The baseline data appeared unremarkable, Carlisle told us, but the same wasn’t true of the outcomes data. Of 24 values that could have been odd or even numbers, all of them were even.

The probability of that was “0.000000000000000000000 something,” Carlisle said.

Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids

StellaLife’s Vega Oral Care Recovery Kit

Stephen Barrett, a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatch, makes a point of calling out homeopathy and other health products and practices that lack evidence.

In that vein, earlier this year he emailed the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery to critique a 2019 article by Walter Tatch titled “Opioid Prescribing Can Be Reduced in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Practice,” which has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Exclusive: NIH researcher resigned amid retractions, including Nature paper

A tenure-track investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a division of the National Institutes of Health, resigned in March, as questions mounted about her work, Retraction Watch has learned.

Jennifer Martinez has retracted at least two papers, including a 2016 Nature paper with the chair of the immunology department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., and has another marked with an expression of concern.

The retraction is the first for Douglas R. Green of St. Jude, although he’s had a handful of corrections and two other papers he published in Nature have been questioned by scientists who couldn’t replicate the results.

After a postdoc at St. Jude, Martinez led an independent research program at NIEHS in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina since 2015, according to an online CV. She resigned from NIEHS in March and a federal research watchdog is looking into her work, a spokesperson told us:

Brain tumor researchers retract paper from Science journal

A detail from Fig. 6 of the now-retracted paper

A brain tumor researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has retracted a paper from Science Translational Medicine, and is a co-author on an article that another journal is examining.

The problems in both papers, and several others with shared authors, came to light via comments on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik and a pseudonymous commenter.

The Science Translational Medicine paper, “A subset of PARP inhibitors induces lethal telomere fusion in ALT-dependent tumor cells,” was published last May by a group led by Russell O. Pieper, director of basic science in the UCSF Brain Tumor Center and vice-chairman of the UCSF department of neurological surgery. The paper has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Former NCI postdoc faked data, says federal watchdog

A former postdoc at the National Cancer Institute faked 15 figures and a movie in grant applications, presentations, a paper, and an unpublished manuscript, according to a federal watchdog.

The finding from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) comes more than a year after PLOS Biology retracted a 2016 paper and noted that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had found that the postdoc, Ritankar Majumdar, committed misconduct and faked data in two figures.

The same day, the journal republished a revised version without the faked data. The retracted paper has been cited 107 times, 13 of those after it was retracted, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The revised paper — which included Majumdar as a first author — has been cited eight times.

The retraction notice stated that Majumdar agreed with the retraction but that he “disputes the NIH’s finding of misconduct.”

Veterinary researcher banned from journal after fourth forthcoming retraction

A veterinary researcher with three retracted papers and one marked with an expression of concern has another retraction on the way, Retraction Watch has learned.

The first retraction for Tereza Cristina Cardoso da Silva, of the University of São Paulo State in Brazil, came in 2019. As we reported at the time, the retracted paper, about herpesvirus infections in cattle, had reused an image from an earlier paper describing experiments with chicken cells. (We would apologize for the headline of that post, but we just couldn’t resist.)

Since then, Cardoso has lost two more papers for similarly reusing images of different species of animals, and had another article flagged with an expression of concern that mentions an institutional investigation into her work which culminated in a “Disciplinary Administrative Procedure.” A fourth retraction is in the works, per an email we were copied on from a journal editor to the whistleblower who identified another image reused between species.

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