Frederik Joelving

Urologist blames Big Pharma as concerns mount over his research

With retractions piling up and more than a dozen expressions of concern now added to the list of his publishing woes, a urologist in Iran claims his research is being targeted by American drugmaker Johnson & Johnson.

Mohammad Reza Safarinejad, who offered no evidence for his allegations, says he retired from academia about 10 years ago and now runs a private clinic in Tehran. He has published scores of studies on topics ranging from treatments for premature ejaculation to saffron’s effect on semen, some of which have garnered hundreds of citations.

Starting in 2011, however, journals began pulling his papers over such issues as failure to verify data and inappropriate statistical analyses. The latest retraction, from August 2022, brings the tally up to 15, according to the Retraction Watch Database. And on January 10, The Journal of Urology issued expressions of concern for 14 of his papers, which have been cited a total of nearly 800 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal states:

Ob-gyn who called criticism ‘racist’ and ‘hate speech’ earns retraction, several expressions of concern

There shouldn’t have been many differences between the women recruited for the three clinical trials: All of them gave birth at the same two Cairo hospitals over a period of less than three years, and all of them were treated to prevent or manage postpartum bleeding. Three samples from this pool of patients, Ben Mol felt, should have had largely similar baseline characteristics.

Yet, mysteriously, the women’s mean age and BMI varied markedly across the studies—from 25 to 34 years and from 25 to 29 kg/m2, respectively—as did the birthweight of their babies.

So the researcher turned data sleuth began digging. His worries only grew. Eventually, he would come to question the integrity of nearly two dozen randomized controlled trials led by Ahmed Maged, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Egypt’s top medical school, Kasr AlAiny at Cairo University.

Now, based in part on Mol’s findings, two journals published by Taylor & Francis have issued a retraction and nine expressions of concern for the following papers:

Japanese university asks surgeon to retract eight ‘fraudulent’ papers

An oral surgeon in Japan falsified images in several papers, granted authorship to whomever he saw fit and stored experimental data sloppily, according to an investigation by Showa University in Tokyo, where the physician was a lecturer at the time of the misconduct.

As a result of the findings, the university has recommended retracting eight papers by the surgeon, Masayasu Iwase, according to a translation commissioned by Retraction Watch of a December report from the committee that investigated the case.

The university also is discussing revoking the graduate degrees of two of Iwase’s former students whose dissertations were based on the “fraudulent” papers, the report explains.

Tadashi Hisamitsu, Showa’s president, wrote on the university’s website:

Police investigating after Polish journal accuses authors of ‘crime of plagiarism’

Polish police are investigating alleged plagiarism in a series of articles by a group of researchers at the University of Life Sciences in Lublin, Retraction Watch has learned.

A university commission also is looking into the allegations, which one of the authors told Retraction Watch had “greatly damaged” his career. While plagiarism is not usually considered a crime, it can be prosecuted under national copyright laws in Poland and elsewhere.

The alleged plagiarism was first discovered by a reviewer for Postępy Mikrobiologii – Advancements of Microbiology, a quarterly of the Polish Society of Microbiologists, said Radosław Stachowiak, who worked as the journal’s deputy editor-in-chief until the end of last year.

President of Iranian university in ‘serious breach of ethical standards’

The president of an Iranian university and a colleague appear to have published the same microelectronics paper twice, according to allegations seen by Retraction Watch.

The articles, by Bahram Azizollah Ganji and Kamran Delfan Hemmati of Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, deal with the design of a new capacitive accelerometer with a high dynamic range and sensitivity. Both appeared online in 2020, first in the Slovenia-based Journal of Microelectronics, Electronic Components and Materials and later in the higher-impact Springer journal Microsystem Technologies. The former version has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, while the latter has been cited twice.

The editors of Microsystem Technologies were made aware of the allegations on November 16 in an email that cited “significantly identical content” in the two papers. “Pretty much the entire introduction section and almost all figures are an exact copy from” the authors’ previous article, the email stated.

Cell Press investigating possible image manipulation in influential yeast genetics paper

Cell Press is looking into anonymous allegations that a pair of influential papers on gene activation in yeast may contain more than two dozen instances of image manipulation, according to a spokesperson for the journal.

The accusations first appeared in March on PubPeer, where they triggered a small avalanche of comments, including one asserting “unambiguous and repeated examples of data re-use.”

The concerns raised on PubPeer have even sparked an investigation by an institution in Spain, which found no evidence to support the allegations. But not everyone agrees with that verdict.

Continue reading Cell Press investigating possible image manipulation in influential yeast genetics paper

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