Lori Youmshajekian

Chemist in Japan up to 40 retractions

A chemistry journal has retracted a 2020 review article by a nanotube researcher who fabricated and falsified data in dozens of studies.

The latest retraction for Naohiro Kameta brings his total to 40, earning him a place on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

In a 2020 review article in Chemical Reviews, 24 of the 610 works Kameta and his coauthors cited had themselves been retracted following the publication of the paper, according to the retraction notice. Because these references were “important components” of the review article, “the narrative and claims presented can no longer be upheld,” the notice reads. The review has been cited 164 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Top education researcher goes to court over plagiarism claims, university review

A prominent education researcher in Australia is demanding compensation from a critic whose claims of plagiarism triggered the university to look into his work. Although the resulting examination of work by John Hattie, director of an education research institute at the University of Melbourne, ended without a finding of misconduct, the critic, Stephen Vainker, insists Hattie’s publications are rife with data errors and insufficient attribution.

Vainker came across “strange” citations in a paper by Hattie while studying for his doctorate in education management seven years ago. At first, he found 12 sentences lifted word-for-word, he said, from the original source about workplace management without proper citation. Among them were seven instances in which words such as “people” or “individuals” were changed to education-related words, such as “students.”

Then Vainker looked through Hattie’s most popular and influential text, Visible Learning, and its sequel, as well as his doctoral thesis, finding what he claimed were hundreds of data errors and examples of plagiarism.

Harvard researcher’s work faces scrutiny after private equity deal

Just as a Harvard lab brought in tens of millions of dollars in private equity funding to pursue new treatments for obesity, past research from its lead investigator has come under fresh scrutiny.

Last month, the lab of Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor of genetics and metabolism at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, secured a $39 million dollar investment from İş Private Equity, an Istanbul-based firm. The partnership centers on FABP4, a protein associated with obesity and other metabolic conditions.

But over the past decades, two of Hotamışlıgil’s papers have been corrected for image duplications, and since the announcement, renewed scrutiny of Hotamışlıgil’s work appeared on PubPeer, including for issues with statistical analyses.

Swedish regulators drop investigations into Chalmers’ prosthetics lab

Two Swedish agencies have closed their investigations into a high-profile research center at Chalmers University of Technology that was suspended last year for “shortcomings in the operations.”

The Center for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR), known for its work on restoring limb function, was scrutinized and ultimately shut down after a university investigation last April found scientists at the center conducted research without sufficient permits, had inadequate quality assurance processes and handled sensitive personal data poorly, and found “shortcomings” in legal agreements for the center’s operations.

Now, subsequent investigations by the country’s Medical Products Agency, which regulates medical devices and clinical trials, and the Ethics Review Appeal Board have ended, with both agencies declining to pursue further action.

Dozens of Elsevier papers retracted over fake companies and suspicious authorship changes

One of several retraction notices noting “the existence and nature” of a company couldn’t be confirmed.

Since March of last year, Elsevier has pulled around 60 papers connected to companies in the Caucasus region that don’t seem to exist. The retraction notices attribute the decision to suspicious changes in authorship and the authors being unable to verify the existence of their employers. Online sleuths have also flagged potentially manipulated citations among the articles.

Each of the retracted papers appears to follow an identical pattern, based on the details given in the retraction notices. First, a solo author submits a paper and claims to be affiliated with a company that doesn’t appear in any business registries. During the revision process, the author adds several other authors to the paper — including new first and corresponding authors, despite no clear contribution to the original work. This behavior is typical of paper mills and authorship-for-sale schemes.

When asked by the editors, the original authors are unable to explain why they added the additional authors, nor validate the “nature” or “existence” of the companies they were claiming an affiliation with, according to the retraction notices.

Former Italian university head faces retractions and criminal investigations

A prominent Italian pharmacologist under investigation for embezzlement and rigging university contracts has garnered a dozen and a half retractions in the last year for image alterations and duplications.

But Salvatore Cuzzocrea, the former rector of the University of Messina, told us he did not agree with the retractions because they were decided “without clear communication,” and that none of the papers had problems that he wasn’t able to reply to.

Cuzzocrea, a professor of pharmacology at Messina, is set to face an Italian court over rigging bids for university contracts and is under investigation for allegedly embezzling more than 2 million euros worth of reimbursements.

Seven years after ‘noncompliance’ finding, whistleblowers push for retractions

Seven years after investigations uncovered “serious noncompliance” in the collection of biological samples at a California VA hospital, the original whistleblowers say several papers related to the work use these problematic samples and should be retracted. But the principal investigator of the work says there’s no reason to question the findings.

The VA San Diego Health Care System was one of 12 institutions involved in the InTeam Consortium, a research initiative between 2013 and 2019 focused on alcohol-related liver inflammation. In 2016, two whistleblowers — Mario Chojkier and Martina Buck — alleged staff at the VA hadn’t obtained proper consent to perform biopsies on critically ill patients and use the samples for research related to the project.

Subsequent investigations — including one by VA San Diego’s institutional review board — have confirmed violations of policies, primarily related to a lack of informed consent. Ramon Bataller, the principal investigator of the InTeam Consortium, told local media outlet inewsource in 2019 the samples collected at the VA would be “banished” from any academic papers.

‘The fraud was not subtle’: Chemist blames students after ten papers retracted

While reviewing a manuscript for the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Caroline Kervarc-Genre and her colleague, Thibault Cantat, researchers at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, noticed something unusual.

The nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra buried in the supplementary information had striking irregularities: The baseline was interrupted in some parts, and the noise was the same from one spectrum to the next. “Noise being inherently random, repeating noise is only possible if the spectra are altered [or] fake,” Kervarc-Genre told Retraction Watch.

Starting to suspect something was wrong, she and Cantat, examined other papers by the lead author. They discovered data appeared to have been edited in several of the author’s latest publications. “The fraud was not subtle,” Kervarc-Genre said.

She had never come across such blatant fraud, she said, and was unsure about what to do, so turned to PubPeer to report the findings. Others soon joined, uncovering more troubling patterns in the work.

Journals investigating dozens of papers by leading Canadian urologists

A high-profile Canadian urologist received an editorial expression of concern for one of his papers this month, after anonymous comments on PubPeer flagged suspected data duplication in dozens of his articles.

By our count, sleuths have flagged 30 papers co-authored by Martin Gleave, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada and co-founder of the Vancouver Prostate Centre. According to the posts on PubPeer, images in these studies appear “much more similar than expected” based on analyses using the similarity detection software ImageTwin. The issues include similarities within individual papers and across multiple publications, with some comments suggesting the alleged reuse of tumor specimens.

Gleave, an appointee to the Order of Canada for his work developing treatments for prostate cancer, has received more than $120 million (approximately $84 million USD) in funding throughout his career, according to his profile on the Vancouver Prostate Centre website. He is also a co-founder of OncoGenex Pharmaceuticals, with several of the findings from the flagged papers connected to the company and related patents.

Former Harvard researcher, now at Moderna, loses paper following postdoc’s report

PLOS Pathogens has retracted a paper by a former group at Harvard following a postdoc’s allegations the work contained manipulated data.

The retracted paper, “Pseudomonas aeruginosa–induced nociceptor activation increases susceptibility to infection,” appeared in 2021 from the lab of Mihaela Gadjeva, an immunologist previously based at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Gadjeva had been employed at Brigham and Women’s hospital for 16 years until her departure at some point in 2022. Since then, she has been an associate director of bacteriology at Moderna.

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