Frederik Joelving

Publisher looking into COVID vaccine paper with ‘serious flaws’

A controversial paper on the safety and immunogenicity of an Iran-made COVID-19 vaccine is being investigated by the U.S.-based publisher Wiley, Retraction Watch has learned.

Iran reportedly has already administered 3 million doses of the vaccine, dubbed Noora, which the country licensed for emergency use last year.

The paper describes the vaccine’s first test in humans, marking the only time results from the clinical development of the homegrown shot have been reported in international journals.

“Safety and immunogenicity of a recombinant receptor-binding domain-based protein subunit vaccine (Noora vaccine™) against COVID-19 in adults: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, Phase 1 trial” was published in 2022 in the Journal of Medical Virology, an achievement highlighted in Iranian news media. One report said the study showed a dose of 80 micrograms of the vaccine was “safe” and provided “adequate immunity in adults.”

Professor who blamed plagiarism on ghostwriter to earn first retraction

A professor in France who plagiarized extensively in a review article and then blamed the offense on an undisclosed medical writer will lose the publication, Retraction Watch has learned.

“We have decided to retract this paper,” Yi-Xiang Wang, editor-in-chief of Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery, told us by email.

The move comes one day after a Retraction Watch exclusive describing how the professor, Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne, claimed he had not written the offending paper despite being listed as its first and corresponding author. Instead, Loffroy put the blame on an alleged medical writer.

The retraction will be Loffroy’s first. He did not immediately respond to our request for comments.

Exclusive: Professor in France blames alleged ghostwriter for plagiarism

A professor of interventional radiology in France pointed the finger at an alleged ghostwriter after he was caught plagiarizing large portions of text in a review article, Retraction Watch has learned.

“After careful checking, I noticed that I am not the author of this paper despite my first authorship since it has been written by our previous medical writter [sic],” Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch.

Loffroy also toned down the offense, saying he wouldn’t care if others had plagiarized his work.

Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting

Last week, an environmental journal published a paper on the use of renewable energy in cleaning up contaminated land. To read it, you would have to pay 40 euros. But you still wouldn’t know for sure who wrote it.

Ostensibly authored by researchers in China, “Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in soil remediation for a sustainable future” includes the extraneous phrase “Regenerate response” at the end of a methods section. For those unfamiliar, “Regenerate response” is a button in OpenAI’s ChatGPT that prompts the chatbot to rework an unsatisfactory answer.

“Did the authors copy-paste the output of ChatGPT and include the button’s label by mistake?” wondered Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse, in France, in a comment on PubPeer.

And, he added, “How come this meaningless wording survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”

Nature flags doubts over Google AI study, pulls commentary

A new editor’s note in Nature highlights concerns about a paper by Google researchers who claimed computer chips designed in just a few hours using artificial intelligence beat chip plans that human experts took months to develop.

In the note, published September 20, the journal stated:

Readers are alerted that the performance claims in this article have been called into question. The Editors are investigating these concerns, and, if appropriate, editorial action will be taken once this investigation is complete.

Nature pulls study that found climate fears were overblown

It was that rarest of things: a sliver of good news about climate change.

According to calculations published last year in Nature, our planet was keeping pace, and then some, with rising emissions from tropical forest clearance by gobbling up more and more atmospheric carbon.

“What we can mainly prove is that the worst nightmare scenarios of an impaired carbon sink have not yet materialised and that the news is not quite as bad,” Guido van der Werf, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a press release at the time.

His coauthor Dave van Wees added:

Exclusive: Probe suggests new retraction awaiting embattled Korean heart doctor

A prominent physician-scientist in South Korea may soon be facing his fourth retraction. Last month, Hui-Nam Pak of Yonsei University was found guilty of duplicate publication, a form of academic misconduct, according to a report from the school’s committee on research integrity Retraction Watch has obtained.

Pak, a cardiologist, has had dozens of papers flagged on PubPeer. As we reported in February, journals pulled two of his papers the previous month after a whistleblower pointed out problems with the articles. One was retracted for “a number of issues related to scientific misconduct,” while the other was a duplicate publication. A third paper by Pak was retracted years earlier after mistakenly being published twice by the same journal.

Our February story triggered a flood of comments, many of them malicious. Some likened whistleblowing to “academic vandalism.” Others asserted that “whistleblowers deserve strong legal penalties” and that “immoral whistleblowers” seemed bent on ruining Pak’s “outstanding career.” Many comments were rejected for not adhering to our commenting policies, in particular making unsubstantiated claims.

The September 12 report from Yonsei University (in Korean) explains that an “informant” reported two of Pak’s papers to the school’s Research Ethics Integrity Committee on March 7.

Swedish beauty study that sparked ‘storm of criticism’ is cleared

The economist behind a controversial study showing attractive female students got lower grades after classes moved online during the pandemic has been acquitted of research misconduct, according to a report from his former institution.

But the researcher, Adrian Mehic, did not get off without reproof: Even if the work kept to the letter of the law, it may still have had “unethical consequences,” Erik Renström, vice-chancellor of Lund University in Sweden, wrote in the June 8 report (in Swedish).

In the study, a jury made up largely of final-year high schoolers rated the looks of university students based on pictures taken from social media accounts. The ratings were then linked to other publicly available data about the students, including academic performance. The findings, published in the journal Economics Letters in August 2022, made headlines across the globe.

But the students had not consented to the research, nor were they informed about it. The revelation unleashed “a storm of criticism at the university,” according to local media.

Overturning a dubious retraction proves difficult for education professor

For the past eight years, an education researcher in Spain has been waging an unsuccessful battle – including legal action – to quash a retraction she argues should never have happened.

Her paper, about the use of digital tools in early childhood education, was pulled by Computers & Education just months after it was published in 2015. According to the retraction notice, the article was submitted for publication while it was still under review at another journal, violating editorial policies against duplicate submission.

But according to the researcher, Elena Ramírez Orellana of the University of Salamanca, her paper had already been rejected by the first journal before it was sent to the other. She had the documents to prove it, she said, but that didn’t matter.

Withdrawn AI-written preprint on millipedes resurfaces, causing alarm

A preprint about millipedes that was written using OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT is back online after being withdrawn for including made-up references, Retraction Watch has learned.

The paper, fake references and all, is also under review by a journal specializing in tropical insects.

“This undermines trust in the scientific literature,” said Henrik Enghoff, a millipede researcher at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, who first spotted problems with the preprint, as we reported last month.

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