Lori Youmshajekian

A cardiac surgeon’s tortuous efforts – including three lawsuits – to get the scientific record corrected

For the past 14 years, a cardiac surgeon in Italy has been trying to blow the whistle on a study written by his former colleagues that has been the subject of several investigations – with two of them finding problems with the data. And despite defeating three defamation lawsuits, two which were brought by authors of the paper, he’s not giving up yet.

The 2006 paper, ‘Relationship between atrial histopathology and atrial fibrillation after coronary bypass surgery’, written by several of cardiac surgeon Vittorio Mantovani’s colleagues at the Ospedale di Circolo in Varese, was published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. To date, the paper – which has been cited 57 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – has been investigated by at least two institutions as well as the journal. None have resulted in a retraction, despite one university finding that only a little more than half of the patients in the dataset could be matched unambiguously with biopsy samples. One university is also waiting on the journal to act before it considers reopening its own investigation.

For Mantovani, the red flags started appearing in 2010, when he came across a minor discrepancy between two other papers written by him and his colleagues. He thought it was odd that in one dataset, patients were identified by name, but in the other, they were identified using numbers.

Highly cited scientist published dozens of papers after his death

One of the most highly cited authors in engineering has continued publishing after his death more than a year ago.

Jiří Jaromír Klemeš, a researcher at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic and a top editor at an Elsevier journal that has come under fire for author self-citation, is listed as a coauthor of at least 49 papers published since his death in January 2023.

Most of the articles do not mention that Klemeš is deceased. Whether they should have is not entirely clear. Publishers and journals aren’t consistent about the protocol following the death of a research collaborator – a lack of consistency that has even stirred up some debate among our own readers in the past.

Of the 49 papers we found posthumously listing Klemeš as a coauthor, 27 fail to mention his death. Commenters on PubPeer have spotted several of these instances and queried them without a meaningful response from the surviving authors.

Gift authorship common in psychology, survey suggests

New findings from a survey of psychology researchers show nearly half of the respondents have encountered unethical authorship practices in studies they have been involved in.

Researchers in Belgium surveyed more than 800 people involved in psychological research about their experiences with gift and ghost authorship, as well as the use of explicit authorship guidelines at their institutions.

Almost half said they had witnessed gift authorship on more than one occasion – in other words, the respondents saw someone listed as an author when they had made little or no contribution to a paper. Ghost authorship – excluding someone from a paper when they have made a significant contribution – was far less common, with fewer than one in five of the respondents reporting that they had dealt with the phenomenon. Since the authors used a convenience sample, the data show signs of authorship misconduct in psychology, but don’t tell the whole story.

Third retraction imminent for Harvard-affiliated sports research group

Several sports physicians at Harvard have earned two retractions and await another after publishing work based on “unreliable” survey data that was misrepresented in the papers.

The articles, “Running-related injuries in middle school cross-country runners: Prevalence and characteristics of common injuries” and “Prevalence and factors associated with bone stress injury in middle school runners,” were published in the journal of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, PM&R, in 2021. The papers have been cited a total of 17 times since publication, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Identical retraction notices issued in November this year state the decision followed “a joint review by the authors’ institutions which identified the dataset of this article to be unreliable and not accurately represented in the paper.” The institutions did not find the authors to be responsible for the problematic data, but recommended the papers be retracted, according to the notices. Several of the authors are affiliated with Harvard Medical School, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Archaeologists claimed old findings as their own, critic says

Around Christmas last year, Preston Sowell received an unpleasant delivery.

An archaeologist who knew about Sowell’s work in southeastern Peru sent him a paper about new findings in a particular part of the country Sowell, an independent environmental scientist, was familiar with. The paper, written by several of Sowell’s former colleagues, contained a “shocking” surprise.

“I almost immediately recognized there were errors in the paper,” Sowell said. “I recognised, literally with my first read, some of those artifacts.”

Exclusive: How a dean went about correcting the scientific record even when at least one journal said he didn’t need to

Less than a year after he became dean of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Dentistry, an uncomfortable email landed in Russell Taichman’s inbox.

Overlapping and duplicated panels in one of Taichman’s 2005 papers were among a list of complaints relayed by the publisher of Cellular Signalling in the April 2020 correspondence – complaints which were publicly posted on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik.

“The substance of the complaint is image manipulation, which if true, would violate our publishing policies,” the email stated. “Please note that if we do not have an adequate and timely response, we may be forced to conclude that the allegations are truthful.”

The paper, “Diverse signaling pathways through the SDF-1/CXCR4 chemokine axis in prostate cancer cell lines leads to altered patterns of cytokine secretion and angiogenesis”, eventually became the first of five of Taichman’s papers to be retracted. We first reported on the retractions last September. Since then, following a public records request, we’ve obtained 20 pages of redacted emails that reveal the story behind the retractions.

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.

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