Ellie Kincaid

In four years, a psychosocial counselor co-authored seven papers on disparate medical topics. How?

At the end of July, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan noticed something curious in the publications of Chulani Herath, a senior lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka in Nawala.

Herath is listed as a middle author on seven papers about various topics in medicine, including heart disease, stroke, and burnout among general practitioners in China.

That struck Sarvananthan, an economist in Sri Lanka, as odd. Herath is a psychosocial counselor, not a physician or expert in medicine. “How could she possibly co-author an article in medical sciences?” he wrote in one email to a journal editor, requesting the editor investigate Herath’s paper as a potential product of a paper mill.

Sarvananthan has written to the editors of the journals that published the following seven papers, requesting they investigate:

Exclusive: Cancer researcher sues med school for retaliation after research misconduct finding

A breast cancer researcher at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn has sued the university for sex discrimination and retaliation after an institutional investigation found she committed research misconduct.

Stacy Blain, an associate professor in the departments of pediatrics and cell biology at Downstate, has alleged that the university violated the Equal Pay Act by paying her less than her male colleagues; discriminated against her based on her sex since she joined the faculty in 2002, including by conducting multiple investigations into her lab’s work; and used the latest investigation and its finding that she committed research misconduct to retaliate against her for accusing the university of sex discrimination.

From the lawsuit:

How a tweet sparked an investigation that led to a PhD student leaving his program

Leslie McIntosh, like many other denizens of Science Twitter, saw a tweet from a pseudonymous account in mid-March that bemoaned a journal’s lack of action after the owner of the account reported “an obvious case of plagiarism.”

13 months since I reported an obvious case of plagiarism. The paper is still online. Journal gone silent and no longer replying to emails.

Ready to name and shame both authors and the journal.@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter #academictwitter #sciencetwitter pic.twitter.com/3j1hX9uCiR
— Dr Meming (@Dr_Meming) March 15, 2022

The owner of the account had found a paper that ripped off one by his or her own research group while browsing the literature. “It isnt just sentence copying, the whole structure and concept of the paper is THE SAME,” the account tweeted later in the thread.

McIntosh, CEO and cofounder of Ripeta, a tech company that offers automated tools to assess scientific papers, began looking into the paper and its corresponding author, Mohammed Sahab Uddin.

On second thought: journal reverses course on paper it agreed to retract last year

A Springer Nature journal has decided not to retract a paper it had been investigating for plagiarism since receiving allegations in January 2021. The decision came 1.5 years since the editor-in-chief apparently agreed the paper should be retracted, and just a few days after we reported on the case.

Systems engineer Paola Di Maio notified Springer Nature in January 2021 that the article, “Robotic Standard Development Life Cycle in Action,” published in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, described a methodology she had developed without crediting her work. As we wrote in our post on Friday, Aug. 5th:

Imagine learning you’re an author on a paper after it’s retracted for plagiarism

An education researcher whose colleague added his name without his knowledge to a paper he didn’t contribute to is now dealing with another problem: The paper has been retracted for plagiarism.

And now he’s suing the publisher – not over the retraction, but for allowing the authorship forgery.

Dragan Lambić, of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, only learned his name was on the article in question, published in a Serbian education journal in 2020, when he received an email this January informing him that the paper would be retracted.

More than a year ago, an editor agreed a paper should be retracted. It hasn’t been.

Eighteen months after the editor in chief of a Springer Nature journal received allegations of plagiarism – and more than a year after the editor apparently decided to retract it – the article remains intact and the journal’s investigation has not yet concluded.

The paper, “Robotic Standard Development Life Cycle in Action,” was published in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems in November 2019. It has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate Analytics, five of those since the journal received the allegations.

Its abstract states:

Doctor faces apparent retaliation after alleging data manipulation in published trial

A rheumatologist was suspended from a professional society and his license to practice medicine was threatened after he raised concerns about data manipulation in a published study for which he recruited patients, according to documents seen by Retraction Watch.

The study, “Added Value of Anti-CD74 Autoantibodies in Axial SpondyloArthritis in a Population With Low HLA-B27 Prevalence,” was published in Frontiers in Immunology in 2019 and has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. In its acknowledgements, it listed Fouad Fayad, a rheumatologist at the University of Saint Joseph and Hotel-Dieu de France University Medical Center in Beirut, as one of the researchers who recruited patients for the trial.

Fayad alleged that the researchers tested patient samples multiple times and used a mix of old and new values in their analysis. After he reported his concerns to the journal and then the university, which both concluded that they could not confirm or refute his allegations, he has faced apparent retaliation, including the suspension of his membership in the Lebanese Society of Rheumatology.

In comments to Retraction Watch, the corresponding author for the study noted that the two investigations did not find data manipulation, and said the issue was “based on a background of personal and professional conflicts.”

Exclusive: PLOS ONE to retract more than 100 papers for manipulated peer review

In March, an editor at PLOS ONE noticed something odd among a stack of agriculture manuscripts he was handling. One author had submitted at least 40 manuscripts over a 10-month period, much more than expected from any one person.

The editor told the ethics team at the journal about the anomaly, and they started an investigation. Looking at the author lists and academic editors who managed peer review for the papers, the team found that some names kept popping up repeatedly.

Within a month, the initial list of 50 papers under investigation expanded to more than 300 submissions received since 2020 – about 100 of them already published – with concerns about improper authorship and conflicts of interest that compromised peer review.

Crystallography database flags nearly 1000 structures linked to a paper mill

A chemistry database of crystal structures has marked nearly 1000 entries with expressions of concern after finding they were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill.

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) added notes to 992 structures in its database, according to a notice posted to its website in May. And a crystallography researcher tells us the impact on the field could be significant.

The notes state:

Papers in Croce case with “blatantly obvious” problems still aren’t retracted after misconduct investigation: sleuth

This week, Nature reported on two institutional reports that found scientists in Carlo Croce’s cancer research lab at The Ohio State University had committed research misconduct including plagiarism and data falsification.

Another institutional investigation directed at Croce did not find he committed research misconduct but did identify problems with how he managed his lab, according to Nature.

It’s the latest chapter in a years-long saga of mounting numbers of corrections and retractions for Croce, a 2017 article in the New York Times that brought him to widespread attention, a scientist sleuth trying to clean up the literature, and lots and lots of lawyers, some of whom may have a claim on Croce’s house after he didn’t pay his legal bills.

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