Professor who sued employer for discrimination refiles after judge dismissed his suit

Moses Bility

A professor at the University of Pittsburgh who sued the institution for racial discrimination and retaliation has refiled his suit after a federal judge dismissed his claims. 

As we’ve previously reported, Moses Bility, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and microbiology in the university’s School of Public Health, sued the school earlier this year. 

Among many claims of racial discrimination, Bility alleged the school’s response to a 2020 paper he published and later withdrew that proposed jade amulets may prevent COVID-19 was discriminatory. (In the process of our previous reporting on the article, Bility accused Retraction Watch of racism.) 

According to Bility’s complaint, Pitt officials demanded an investigation of his research, which found he “did not violate any academic integrity standard.” However, at a departmental town hall meeting over Zoom, presenting the investigation’s findings, “students in Defendant Pitt’s School of Public Health called Dr. Bility derogatory names, such as stupid, retarded, unintelligent, etc.” Bility later received two emails “from anonymous individuals who Dr. Bility assumes came from the Defendant Pitt community” that included racial slurs.  

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Auburn PhD student faked data in grant application and published paper, feds say

A former PhD student at Auburn University in Alabama relabeled and reused images inappropriately in a grant application, published paper, and several presentations, a U.S. government watchdog has found. 

The Office of Research Integrity says Sarah Elizabeth Martin “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally or knowingly falsifying and/or fabricating experimental data and results obtained under different experimental conditions,” according to a case summary posted online. 

The published paper, “The m6A landscape of polyadenylated nuclear (PAN) RNA and its related methylome in the context of KSHV replication,” appeared online in advance of publication in RNA in June 2021. The journal retracted the article last year, with the following notice:

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Authors hire lawyer as journal plans to retract their article on pesticide poisoning

A public health journal intends to retract an article that estimated how many unintentional pesticide poisonings happen each year worldwide, Retraction Watch has learned. 

In response, the authors hired a lawyer to represent them in contesting the retraction, and maintain the journal’s decision “undermines the integrity of the scientific process.” This is the second time within a few months that the journal retracted an article through a process authors said was problematic.

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‘Super Size Me’: What happened when marketing researchers ordered a double retraction?

Gaurav Mishra via Flickr

A year after the authors of two papers contacted the marketing journal where they had been published requesting retraction, the journal has pulled one, but decided to issue a correction for the other. 

In April, we reported that the Journal of Consumer Research was investigating “Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status,” originally published in 2012, and “Dynamics of Communicator and Audience Power: The Persuasiveness of Competence versus Warmth,” published in 2016. 

The authors had asked to retract the papers in October 2022 after other researchers found inconsistencies in the statistical calculations of the “Super Size Me” paper and could not replicate the results. The article had been cited nearly 200 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. It attracted attention from The New York Times and NPR, among other outlets, which linked the findings to the rise in obesity in the United States. An analyst also found issues in the 2016 paper, which has been cited 71 times. 

When we published our previous story, Carolyn Yoon, the chair of the journal’s policy board and a professor of management and marketing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, told us the board was still waiting on a report from the special committee investigating the matter. “We hope to have a decision by the end of this month,” she said in April 2023. 

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Exclusive: Whistleblower fired after raising concerns about journal articles on LinkedIn

Muhammad Mohsin Butt

A business school in Pakistan has fired a marketing professor after finding he had “damaged the repute” of the university and its scholarly journal, Retraction Watch has learned. 

In a LinkedIn post, Muhammad Mohsin Butt, the now-fired professor, shared a picture of the table of contents of a 2015 issue of Business Review, published by the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), in Karachi. The contents listed seven case studies authored by two other professors at the school: 

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PLOS backs down from expression of concern after author’s lawsuit

Soudamani Singh

A researcher who sued the publisher PLOS to prevent it from posting an expression of concern for one of her papers has dropped her suit, and the publisher tells us it will add a correction to the article instead – but may “revisit this case” to deal with “unresolved issues.”

We’ve previously reported on the lawsuit Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., filed against PLOS in April, as well as signs of a pending settlement

According to an order filed November 2, Singh informed the court that she “voluntarily dismisses” the claims in her complaint, without the possibility of re-filing them, and the judge dismissed the case. 

In her complaint, Singh alleged that PLOS planned to place an expression of concern on one of her papers, “Cyclooxygenase pathway mediates the inhibition of Na-glutamine co-transporter B0AT1 in rabbit villus cells during chronic intestinal inflammation,” published in PLOS ONE in September 2018, after she and her co-authors had requested a correction of a duplicated image. The paper has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, but not since April 2021. 

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US VA scientist banned from agency research for faking data

Hee-Jeong Im Sampen

A research biologist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago faked images and inflated sample sizes in published papers and a grant application, the federal agency has determined. 

Hee-Jeong Im Sampen, also a research professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Illinois, Chicago, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly and/or recklessly falsifying/fabricating data” in three published papers, an unpublished manuscript, a poster presentation, and a grant application for VA funding, according to a Federal Register notice

Sampen, who publishes under the name Hee-Jeong Im, is corresponding author on all of the published papers the VA identified. The articles, which also list an affiliation with Rush University Medical Center, are: 

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Sage retracts more than 200 papers from journal for compromised peer review

The publisher Sage has retracted 209 articles from an engineering journal after an investigation found “compromised peer review or 3rd party involvement,” according to a company spokesperson.  

The retractions, all from the International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education, stem from an investigation that led Sage to retract 122 papers – as well as fire the editor-in-chief and purge the editorial board – in December 2021. 

At that time, the company marked 318 additional papers “with more complex issues” with expressions of concern as it continued investigating. All of the papers retracted today previously had expressions of concern. 

The 209 articles were retracted with five different notices. Some articles “contain indicators of third-party involvement” and the corresponding authors “were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation,” one read. 

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Paper on homeopathy for ADHD retracted for ‘deficiencies’

Michael Teut

A paper touted as “the first systematic review and meta-analysis” of research on the effects of homeopathy for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been retracted more than a year after critics first contacted the journal with concerns. 

The article, “Is homeopathy effective for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder? A meta-analysis,” appeared in Pediatric Research, a Springer Nature title, last June. It has not been cited in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, but Altmetric, which quantifies the online attention papers receive, ranks the paper in the top 5% of all articles ever tracked. 

The original paper concluded: 

Individualized homeopathy showed a clinically relevant and statistically robust effect in the treatment of ADHD.

However, the retraction notice, dated September 20, detailed four “concerns regarding the analysis of the articles included in the meta-analysis,” and concluded:

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Controversial French researcher loses two papers for ethics approval issues

Didier Raoult

Didier Raoult, the French infectious disease scientist who came to prominence for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, has lost two papers for ethics concerns after other scientists flagged issues with hundreds of publications from the institute he formerly led. 

Both papers, “Increased Gut Redox and Depletion of Anaerobic and Methanogenic Prokaryotes in Severe Acute Malnutrition,” and “Gut Microbiota Alteration is Characterized by a Proteobacteria and Fusobacteria Bloom in Kwashiorkor and a Bacteroidetes Paucity in Marasmus,” appeared in Scientific Reports in 2016 and 2019, respectively. They have been cited approximately 160 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The retraction notices, published Monday, were nearly identical. They stated: 

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