Lori Youmshajekian

Exclusive: One university’s three-year battle to retract papers with fake data

In 2021, the provost of the University of Maryland, Baltimore sounded the alarm about a troubling batch of papers from the lab of Richard Eckert, the former chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the institution.

The provost sent letters to the editors of seven journals calling out a string of serious issues. Based on the university’s investigation, the papers contained duplicated, fabricated and falsified data, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.

But more than three years later, the results of those alerts are mixed: Of the 11 papers the university flagged in 2021, editors corrected three and retracted two. Six still await resolution, with no apparent action taken by the journals.

First-time scientific sleuths prompt nine retractions for neurosurgery group

Two Dutch researchers were preparing a review of preclinical animal models for hemorrhagic stroke last July when they stumbled across a disturbing pattern in the literature.

First, they found many more papers on the topic than the 50 or so they expected based on their experience: more than 600.

Also, nearly every study proposed a different intervention, which was “very unusual,” said René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “Why would you show a very beneficial effect and then say, ‘let’s do something else?’”

Exclusive: Publisher to retract article for excessively citing one researcher after Retraction Watch inquiry

A paper that cited a single researcher’s work in 53 of 64 references will be retracted following our inquiries, the publisher of the journal has told Retraction Watch.

The article, ‘Culturally-informed for designing motorcycle fire rescue: Empirical study in developing country’, published in June in AIP Advances, overwhelmingly cites the work of Muhammed Imam Ammarullah, a lecturer at Universitas Pasundan in West Java, Indonesia, sometimes without obvious relevance to the text.

An anonymous tipster came across the soon-to-be retracted paper on Google Scholar, then alerted the editors at AIP Advances in June to the strange citation pattern. The journal investigated, but didn’t acknowledge a problem with the excessive citations to Ammarullah’s work in their initial response to the complaint. Instead, they identified issues with six other, unrelated citations, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

University president faces allegations of duplication, institution says no misconduct

The president of the Kyoto Institute of Technology (KIT) has corrected two of his papers and is set to correct another amid allegations of duplication – sometimes inelegantly referred to as “self-plagiarism” – despite a university committee clearing him of misconduct.

Employees at the university have accused president Masahiro Yoshimoto of duplication between 11 sets of his published papers – implicating 34 papers in total.

The employees submitted the allegations to the institution last October, backing their claims with an analysis by plagiarism detection software iThenticate. Two of these employees spoke to Retraction Watch on condition of anonymity, fearing a loss of support from their colleagues if they spoke publicly. Their concerns triggered an investigation at KIT, which cleared Yoshimoto of misconduct in January. However, the whistleblowers still believe the papers should be retracted.

Indonesian university dean dismissed, barred from teaching, asked to apologize

Kumba Digdowiseiso has been dismissed from his position as dean of the economics and business faculty at the Universitas Nasional (UNAS) in Jakarta, Indonesia, following an investigation into claims he used the names of other academics without consent on papers with which they were not involved.

Digdowiseiso had already announced his resignation from the university on April 19, a week after Retraction Watch reported several researchers from the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) were accusing Digdowiseiso of using their names on papers without permission.

At the time, the university’s official account on X had reposted Digdowiseiso’s response to our report in a now-deleted tweet from April 11. In the tweet, Digdowiseiso wrote that after an internal meeting with UMT, the institution decided the authorship allegations were “a personal issue” and therefore didn’t need “further intervention/action from both universities or even faculties.” Another UNAS tweet from April 14 that is still online does not include this paragraph.

Caught by a reviewer: A plagiarizing deep learning paper lingers

Last May, Devrim Çavuşoğlu, an engineer at Turkish software company OBSS, was looking at feedback from a conference reviewer of a paper he and his colleagues had submitted. One comment stood out to him: The reviewer had noticed a resemblance between Çavuşoğlu’s work and another paper accepted to a different conference on computational linguistics.

When Çavuşoğlu first skimmed through the other paper, he came across some sections containing an uncanny resemblance to his own ideas. “I thought, it’s like I wrote that,” he recalled. “How could it be so similar, did we think about the same thing?”

He checked the accompanying source code and found the authors of the other paper seemed to have directly copied and built upon his own publicly released code without any attribution – a violation of the license connected to the work. “I was shocked, to be honest,” Çavuşoğlu told Retraction Watch.

Lack of permits, ‘selective’ data halt research at Swedish prosthetics research center

In the late afternoon at a conference in Cartagena last year, a team of Swedish researchers presented their work on a technique that uses machine learning to translate the body’s own electric signals used to move a limb. They had tested it on a minor recovering from a stroke.

Documents from an internal investigation shared by Chalmers University have now revealed, however, that this case study was part of a series of regulatory lapses and suspicious research practices at the Centre for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR) where the clinical research was conducted. The researchers seem to have conducted the study before Max Ortiz-Catalán, the center’s founder and former manager, had secured regulatory approval from the relevant Swedish agency.

Chalmers, the Centre’s home, has now suspended it after also suspecting that its data and research participants seemed “systematically selected” so that treatments appeared effective, and excluded data when treatments caused health problems. The investigation also uncovered the center had no person responsible for compliance, which is a requirement under Swedish law, and that personal data had been handled poorly.

Exclusive: Psychology researcher loses PhD after allegedly using husband in study and making up data

A psychology researcher already under fire for several questionable studies has had her PhD revoked by a university tribunal that found it likely she fabricated data in her thesis.

Ping Dong, who was a doctoral student at the University of Toronto from 2012 to 2017, had already earned retractions for two papers based on her thesis before the tribunal’s decision to cancel her degree and give the thesis a failing grade. A summary of the case the school has made available online reveals those retractions, which we’ve previously reported on, arose from more serious misconduct than previously publicized and were also subject to an institutional investigation.

Dong’s research concerned how moral violations and unethical behavior, such as tax evasion or adultery, influence consumer choices.. According to the university’s report, her thesis had an “improbable level of duplication” in the answers research participants gave to open-ended questions. Dong also allegedly confessed to a former supervisor that her husband impersonated participants in her studies and that she had failed to properly randomize the results – although the supervisor contests that Dong ever admitted this to her.

The dean who came to visit – and added dozens of authors without their knowledge

Earlier this year, a group of lecturers in Malaysia received a WhatsApp message from a colleague who had made a disturbing discovery.

The colleague, who wished to remain anonymous for this story, was looking through Google Scholar and noticed their name, and many others from their department, repeatedly appeared alongside that of an unfamiliar author: Kumba Digdowiseiso, dean of the economics and business faculty at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“We didn’t even know who this person was,” said Safwan Mohd Nor, an associate professor of finance at the university, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, adding that he was “extremely angry” when he first found out his name had been used.

High-profile ob-gyn accused of duplicating data threatens to sue critic

Sometime last summer, Ben Mol, an obstetrician-gynecology researcher in Australia, and his colleagues were adapting a European guideline on unexplained infertility when they came across a 2006 paper from Maria Luisa Casini, a pharmacologist in Rome, that gave them pause because of results that were not statistically significant.

When they looked further, they ended in a rabbit hole. Casini’s previous work revealed identical patient data across papers published two years apart, despite purporting to come from different groups of patients. The similarities were striking: In the 2006 paper, the women’s mean height was 165.5 centimeters; in the study published two years earlier that reported having more than triple the number of participants, the women had the exact same mean height, with the same standard deviation.

The guideline update would eventually lead to half of the included trials being flagged for integrity issues, and as a result, left out of the Australian version of the guideline. From that one paper by Casini that had initially raised doubts, the team was able to unearth a trail of suspicious data connected to several ob-gyns in Italy. An Italian medical society and one of the implicated authors have threatened to sue over the allegations, claiming the complaints were made to interfere with a high-profile society election, but the papers are now part of a wider Elsevier investigation.

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