Lori Youmshajekian

University cuts anesthesiology researcher’s funding amid four retractions

An anesthesiologist who had his funding revoked for fabricating data has earned a fourth retraction for publishing the same data in two Springer Nature journals.

Wen-fei Tan, an anesthesiologist at The First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, is the first author of the recently retracted paper “Changes in the first postoperative night bispectral index of patients after thyroidectomy with different types of primary anesthetic management: a randomized controlled trial,” published in the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (JCMC), a Springer Nature journal, in 2017. It has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice states:

Exclusive: Researcher has “ceased employment” at university amid investigation and retraction

A neurology researcher in Australia is no longer employed at his former university in the midst of a research misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned. And the work of a co-author at another institution also is being assessed for possible research misconduct after sleuths alerted the university to comments on PubPeer about potential data issues in his papers.

The retracted article, “Changes in Cathepsin D and Beclin-1 mRNA and protein expression by the excitotoxin quinolinic acid in human astrocytes and neurons,” was published in Metabolic Brain Disease in 2014 and has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Gregory Konat, retracted the paper because several of the western blots appeared to be duplicated and he no longer had confidence in the results, according to the retraction notice. The six authors are researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Macquarie University and St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.

Data sleuth flags 30 randomized clinical trials from researcher in Egypt

Thirty randomized clinical trials involving a researcher in Egypt who has already had six papers retracted show signs of research misconduct and data fabrication, according to the authors of a recent preprint.

Ben Mol, one of the authors of the preprint and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Monash University in Australia, has spent several years investigating the work of Sherief Abd-Elsalam, a hepatologist and gastroenterologist at Tanta University in Egypt. Abd-Elsalam denies that his research is false or fabricated.

Mol has been exposing research misconduct in his own field for years. His work revealed dozens of dodgy obstetrics papers by Ahmed Badawy and Hatem Abu Hashim of Mansoura University, in Egypt, as well as serious problems with clinical trials led by Ahmed Maged at Cairo University, research about c-sections also from Cairo University, and urology research by Iranian researcher Mohammad Reza Safarinejad.

Abd-Elsalam said in an email that he disagrees with the allegations in the preprint. “Where is the problem? We don’t know,” he wrote.

Nature editors retract influential cancer paper with “unreliable” data

Editors at Nature have retracted a 2015 paper on breast cancer metastases citing trouble with the data in the supplementary materials.

The paper, “The hypoxic cancer secretome induces pre-metastatic bone lesions through lysyl oxidase,” was first published in May 2015 and has been cited 352 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

This marks the second retraction for corresponding author Janine Erler, a professor in cancer biology at the University of Copenhagen. As previously reported by Retraction Watch, Nature in 2020 pulled a 2006 paper on which she was first author because of “image anomalies” and the absence of original data. Two other papers co-authored by Erler have been corrected and one additional paper has an expression of concern.

‘Misleading’ and ‘false’ portrayal of racism-related experiences leads to retraction

A health services journal has retracted a recent commentary about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) activities at the University of Minnesota after the authors said they had unintentionally “mischaracterized the authenticity of experiences represented.”

The four-page commentary, titled “Transactional and transformative diversity, equity, and inclusion activities in health services research departments,” had appeared in the journal Health Services Research for almost three months before its retraction in March. It was co-authored by three employees at the University of Minnesota: professor Janette Dill, lecturer Stuart Grande and Tongtan Chantarat, a research scientist at the institution.

The article details the DEI-related activities within the school’s Division of Health Policy and Management that were implemented from 2020 onwards amid calls for racial equity. (Minneapolis, where the university’s main campus is based, was the site of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020.) They label some efforts as “performative”, but go on to outline hopes for “transformative change” in the division – referring to attempts to build trust and relationships with students and faculty belonging to racial and ethnic minority groups.

Journals dismiss claims that Harvard researcher’s work on race is ‘pseudoscience’

Two journals have dismissed allegations of research misconduct leveled against a political scientist at Harvard in an anonymous memo that labeled his work “pseudoscience.”

The 2018 memo signed by “Social Scientists for Research Integrity” – which does not have an internet presence that we could find – makes claims of academic misconduct against Ryan Enos, who denies any wrongdoing. The journals that published two of Enos’ papers singled out in the memo decided to let the articles stand after investigating the charges. A committee at Harvard University, where Enos is a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies, also reviewed the claims and dismissed them.

The allegations primarily concerned purported manipulation of data in Enos’ 2015 article, “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). The paper has been cited 120 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Former Harvard researchers lose PNAS paper for reusing data

A group of cancer researchers once all based at Harvard have earned a retraction after acknowledging data duplication “errors” in an article published more than eight years ago.

The paper, “Synthetic lethality of combined glutaminase and Hsp90 inhibition in mTORC1-driven tumor cells,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in December 2014. It has been cited 52 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study informed a clinical trial from Infinity Pharmaceuticals on a drug for people with lung cancer, according to Dimensions, a scientific research database.

Starting in November 2020, the paper drew scrutiny from commenters on PubPeer. The posts include claims of duplications in several of the paper’s figures; none of the authors has responded to the 10 comments on the site.

Springer Nature retracts chapter on sign language deaf scholars called “extremely offensive”

Springer Nature has retracted a book chapter which critics say was plagued with “extremely offensive and outdated” statements about the deaf community.

The chapter, “Literature Review on Sign Language Generation,” was published in September 2022 as part of Data Management, Analytics and Innovation: Proceedings of ICDMAI 2022 (International Conference on Data Management, Analytics and Innovation). The authors, five researchers at the Cummins College of Engineering for Women in Pune, India, attempted to review work on sign language translation – specifically with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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