As Retraction Watch readers may recall, that’s a question we ask often. In 2018, for example, we wrote a post noting that nearly two years after the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had requested retractions, the journals had done nothing. Some of the papers have since been retracted.
We have occasion to ask the question again, about a different case at the University of Maryland.
We have an update on a post we published late last month.
We reported on March 31 that Tissue Engineering had retracted a paper by Xing Wei, of the, National Engineering Research Center of Genetic Medicine at Jinan University, in Guangzhou, China, because of image manipulation. The retraction notice for that paper, “Use of Decellularized Scaffolds Combined with Hyaluronic Acid and Basic Fibroblast Growth Factor for Skin Tissue Engineering, referred to another paper in the journal that was being retracted, but had not yet been. It also referred to a paper in a different journal that showed signs of misconduct, but that had yet to be retracted, either.
We were checking this week to see if the other papers had been retracted, mostly just to make sure our database was up to date. The second paper, Promoting the Recovery of Injured Liver with Poly (3-Hydroxybutyrate-Co-3-Hydroxyvalerate-Co-3-Hydroxyhexanoate) Scaffolds Loaded with Umbilical Cord-Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells, has indeed been retracted, although the one in Tissue Engineering Constructs and Cell Substrates has not.
What was far more interesting, however, was that when we looked at a retraction notice for the first paper, we saw something we hadn’t seen in it before: Wei had earned an “indefinite ban” from publishing in the journal:
Journals have retracted 30 papers, and added expressions of concern to 13 more, because the research likely involved organs from executed prisoners in China.
The issue surfaced as early as 2016, and two of the retractions occurred in 2017, but all of the other retractions, and all of the expressions of concern, happened after a February 2019 paper by Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues calling for the retraction of more than 400 papers
Christos Damalas, an agriculture researcher at Democritus University of Thrace, has had more papers retracted from Elsevier journals for fake peer review reports, giving him a total of 15.
The three most recent retractions appear, as did some previously, in Science of the Total Environment. Damalas also had papers retracted from Chemosphere and Land Use Policy in October. We reported on nine of his retractions last October. (For background on how fake peer review works, read this.)
Here’s a typical notice (the repeated “request of” appears in the three from Science of the Total Environment):
Kang Zhang, a formerly high-profile geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who resigned his post last July amidst an investigation into undisclosed ties to China, has retracted a paper because some of its images were taken from other researchers’ work.
The paper, “Impaired lipid metabolism by age-dependent DNA methylation alterations accelerates aging,” was submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last fall, months after Zhang’s resignation. One of Zhang’s fellow corresponding authors, Jian-Kang Zhu, used the journal’s “Contributed Submissions” process, in which “An NAS member may contribute up to two of her or his own manuscripts for publication in PNAS each year.”
PNAS published the paper on February 6 of this year. But on February 18, authors of a different paper, in Aging Cell, sent the editors of PNAS a letter, writing:
Even after close to 10 years of writing about retractions every day, some days we read retraction notices that make us say, “huh?”
Today is one of those days.
Take this retraction notice for “High-resolution ultrasound images in gouty arthritis to evaluate relationship between tophi and bone erosion,” a paper first published in Future Generation Computer Systems last year:
