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.
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.
A civil engineering researcher will soon have 12 retractions to his name after a data sleuth notified journals of issues with image reuse in the papers.
Jorge de Brito, a professor at the University of Lisbon, has lost four papers in Construction and Building Materials, two in the Journal of Building Engineering, of which he had been editor-in-chief, and another in Engineering Structures since we reported in March on retractions for a pair of researchers in Iran with whom de Brito had coauthored papers.
Kyoto University is recommending retraction for five papers by a former botany researcher there after an institutional inquiry turned up evidence of fraud.
The investigation of Lianwei Peng, who left the school in May 2011, found 11 images had been manipulated in the papers, according to a press release. The corresponding author on all five papers, Toshiharu Shikanai, may face disciplinary action, the university’s statement said.
Shikanai’s faculty page at Kyoto University, shown here in an archived snapshot from November 2020, now bears a message that “the requested page cannot be found.”
A journal has retracted 30 papers that “could be linked to a criminal paper mill.” The move comes six and a half months after Retraction Watch published an investigation into the operation.
The investigation, by Brian Perron of the University of Michigan, high school student Oliver Hiltz-Perron, and Bryan Victor of Wayne State University, identified nearly 200 published papers with apparent links to a Russian company named International Publisher. Many of those articles were published in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, or iJET, and the researchers notified the journal of their findings.
In an announcement about the retractions and each retraction notice, iJET editors specifically cite the investigation and Perron’s communications.
The Lancet has overtaken the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, according to Clarivate’s 2022 update to its Journal Citation Reports. And the jump wasn’t subtle: The Lancet’s impact factor – a controversial measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited on average – more than doubled from last year.
Lancet can thank the COVID-19 pandemic for its surge.
In separate news, Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation, and warned a half dozen others.
As we’ve written in posts on previous years’ reports:
A postdoc at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine who the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found engaged in research misconduct while a postdoc at another institution has been awarded an NIH grant just months after being sanctioned.
The postdoc, Shuo Chen, didn’t admit or deny the ORI’s findings, but agreed to one year of supervision for any research funded by the U.S. Public Health Service, which includes the NIH, as we’ve previously reported.
That year began on Feb. 28, 2022, and less than four months later Chen was awarded a coveted and competitive K99 “pathway to independence” grant for “Elucidating circuit mechanisms of brain rhythms in the aging brain” on June 15, according to NIH RePORTER. The $135,945 grant is from the National Institute on Aging.
Chen is listed as a postdoc on the lab website of NYU School of Medicine neuroscientist Zhe Sage Chen (no relation), and also appears in a 2021 photo of members of György Buzsáki’s NYU lab. The grant abstract mentions training in the labs of Zhe Sage Chen, Buzsáki, and Thomas Wisniewski, director of NYU Langone’s Pearl I. Barlow Center for Memory Evaluation and Treatment and its Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
We emailed Shuo Chen for comment but have not heard back. NYU Langone Health media relations sent us this statement after we reached out to Zhe Sage Chen for comment:
An Elsevier journal has sat for two years on its decision to retract 10 papers by researchers with known misconduct issues, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.
The Journal of the Neurological Sciences had decided by June 2020 to retract the articles by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who are currently in positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions, according to the emails. But the papers still haven’t been retracted, to the disappointment of one of the data sleuths who raised concerns about the work – and in the meantime have been cited more than a dozen times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
As Andrew Grey, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, wrote to a staffer at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) who became involved in the case:
A pharmacology researcher with four retractions appears to have left the University of Pennsylvania, where he had worked for at least 30 years and won more than $7 million in NIH grants.
The school’s faculty page for William Armstead, who held a research professorship in Anesthesiology and Critical Care, now bears only the statement that “Dr. Armstead may no longer be affiliated with the Perelman School of Medicine.” Penn Medicine has not responded to our request for comment.
In May, we reported that Armstead was up to four retractions after the Journal of Neurotrauma had retracted three articles at the researcher’s request.
Elsevier plans to remove the introduction from a book on mineralogy after investigating allegations of plagiarism, including from another Elsevier publication, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.
Photo Atlas of Mineral Pseudomorphism by J. Theo Kloprogge and Robert Lavinsky, was published in 2017 and still appears to be for sale for $100 for a hardcover and ebook bundle. (The usual price is $200, but there is a sale on at the time of this writing.) Its listing on ScienceDirect includes the introduction with no note about removal.
As we’ve previously reported, Elsevier last year retracted an entire book by Kloprogge, an adjunct professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas and honorary senior fellow at the University of Queensland, that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia.
According to the emails we obtained, Gloria Staebler, of mineralogical publisher Lithographie, Ltd., noticed the plagiarism in the book in May while preparing to formally publish a manuscript by Si and Ann Frazier that had been circulated in a mineral club newsletter in 2005. In a May 31st email to an editor at Elsevier, Staebler laid out her evidence:
