Ellie Kincaid

Exclusive: Author threatened to sue publisher over retraction, then sued to block release of emails

An education researcher who had four papers flagged for plagiarism and citation issues threatened to sue the publisher and editors who decided to retract one of the articles, Retraction Watch has learned.

We obtained the emails containing legal threats by Constance Iloh, formerly an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, through a public records request. Iloh, who was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” top figures in education in 2016 and briefly taught at Azusa Pacific University after leaving Irvine, sued to prevent the university from giving us the emails, but after a two-year legal battle, a state appeals court affirmed the records should be released. That battle is described in more detail in this post.

Following our reporting in August 2020 on the retraction of one of Iloh’s articles for plagiarism, the disappearance of another, and the correction of two more, we requested post-publication correspondence between UCI, Iloh, and the journals where the papers had appeared.

The emails UCI released to us in May of this year shed light on the processes three journals took after concerns were raised about Iloh’s work, and how she responded.

Our two-year fight for the release of public records

In September 2020, we requested records from the University of California, Irvine, regarding four papers by an assistant professor of education that had been retracted, corrected, or taken down.

The retraction and correction notices for the articles, written by Constance Iloh, mentioned plagiarism and misuse of references. After our initial reporting, we wanted to see if we could learn more about what happened.

It took approximately two and a half years for us to obtain the records, detailed in this post. The emails we obtained shed light on the processes three journals took after concerns were raised about Iloh’s work, and how she responded – including with legal threats.

Here, we tell the story of how we fought in court to get the records, represented by Kelly Aviles, who specializes in cases involving the California Public Records Act and has successfully sued on behalf of the Los Angeles Times.

Authors file complaint with publisher as journal retracts vaping paper

A paper that found smoking rates in the United States fell faster than expected as more people started using e-cigarettes has been retracted over the objections of its authors, who have filed a complaint with the journal’s publisher.

As we reported in July, BMC Public Health informed the authors of “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults” that the editors had decided to retract the article after receiving a critical letter. We reported:

The letter did not request retraction of the paper, but argued that its analyses “were flawed and therefore potentially produced misleading findings that would benefit tobacco industry profits and interests.”

The authors of the retracted paper are employees of Pinney Associates, a consulting firm that they disclosed “provide[s] consulting services on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc.” The article also disclosed that Juul Labs funded the research and reviewed and provided comments on a draft manuscript.

After we published our story about the pending retraction, 23 researchers wrote a letter to the journal expressing concern about the decision. They wrote:

Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction

It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.

A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images.

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”

The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020.

After resigning en masse, math journal editors launch new publication

The editor in chief, managing editors, and entire editorial board of a mathematics journal all resigned earlier this year following a dispute with their publisher over special issues and article volume.

Changes the publisher wanted to make to the journal “would have the effect of jeopardizing scientific integrity for the sake of financial gain,” the editors wrote in their announcement of their resignations, which took place on January 11.

The mass resignation at the Journal of Geometric Mechanics, previously published by the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), is one of at least five such collective actions journal editors took in 2023, according to a list Retraction Watch has compiled.

The former editors have started a new journal named Geometric Mechanics with World Scientific.

Anthropology groups cancel conference panel on why biological sex is “necessary” for research

Two anthropology organizations co-hosting a conference this fall have removed from the program a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.”

The panel had been slated for the joint annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), to be held in Toronto in November.

In a letter informing the panelists of the decision, Ramona Pérez and Monica Heller, presidents of the AAA and CASCA, respectively, wrote that the executive boards of the two groups had reviewed the submission “at the request of numerous members” and decided to remove it from the conference program. They wrote:

Yale professor’s book ‘systematically misrepresents’ sources, review claims

The first book of a Yale professor of Chinese history contains a “multitude of problems,” according to a no-holds-barred review published last month.

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State appeared last August from Harvard University Press. Its author, Maura Dykstra, is now an assistant professor of history at Yale.

In an extensive review that appeared in the Journal of Chinese History on August 31, George Qiao, an assistant professor of history and Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College in Massachusetts, wrote that Dykstra’s book “fails to meet basic academic standards” and is “filled with misinformation.”

The book’s problems, according to Qiao, include typos, as well as:

Turmoil at Sage journal as retractions mount

In the midst of a tumultuous year, the journal Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications, a Sage title, is retracting 21 papers after an investigation identified signs of “compromised” peer review.

Clarivate delisted the journal from its Web of Science index in March for failing to meet editorial quality criteria. Founding editor Biren Prasad, who managed the journal since 1992, also retired earlier this year, and the publisher took over management of peer review.

The journal’s online presence also needs attention: Neither of the associate editors listed on its website have been involved for many years, both told Retraction Watch – and one has threatened to sue the journal if she isn’t removed.

Frontiers retracts nearly 40 papers linked to ‘authorship-for-sale’

The publisher Frontiers has retracted nearly 40 papers across multiple journals linked to “the unethical practice of buying or selling authorship on research papers,” according to a press release posted to a company website Monday.

The release also states Frontiers is adopting new policies to prevent the sale of authorships on papers it publishes.

The publisher’s old policy simply stated that “Requests to modify the author list after submission should be made to the editorial office using the authorship change form.”

Now, such requests “will only be granted under exceptional circumstances and after in-depth assessment by the Frontiers’ research integrity unit,” according to the release. The publisher will also keep track of the requests “to identify suspicious patterns and trends.”

Weill Cornell cancer researchers committed research misconduct, feds say

Two cancer researchers who formerly worked at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City published 12 papers with fake data that amounts to research misconduct, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

ORI found that Andrew Dannenberg “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly reporting falsified and/or fabricated data” in the papers, and Kotha Subbaramaiah “reused Western blot images from the same source and falsely relabeled them to represent different proteins and/or experimental results.”

The published findings for both scientists include the same extensive list of duplicated images in a dozen papers, all retracted.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: