Marcus Banks

A journal did nothing about plagiarism allegations for a year. Then the tweets (and an email from Retraction Watch) came.

On August 10 of last year, Jim Stagge, an environmental engineering professor at The Ohio State University, emailed editors of Water Resources Management, a Springer Nature title, to let them know that a paper in the journal had taken significant blocks of his text without attribution.

The Water Resources Management paper in question, “Recommendations for Modifying the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) for Drought Monitoring in Arid and Semi-arid Regions,” was published July 16, 2021. Stagge said that it borrowed liberally from a paper of his, “Candidate Distributions for Climatological Drought Indices (SPI and SPEI),” that was published in the International Journal of Climatology in 2015.

The 2021 paper, with first author Peyman Mahmoudi from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan in Iran, did cite Stagge’s 2015 work, but didn’t indicate that large sections taken directly from Stagge and his co-authors were quotes.

One chiropractic manipulation patient injury. Two case reports. Two editor’s notes.

What happens when two different groups from two different medical specialties see a patient, and then write up separate case reports?

Ask teams of doctors in the neurology and rheumatology departments of the Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil. They both published case reports about a patient was injured after undergoing chiropractic spinal cord manipulation. And now both journals have editor’s notes acknowledging dual publication.

The patient’s case appeared in Neurology as “Spinal Cord Injury, Vertebral Artery Dissection, and Cerebellar Strokes After Chiropractic Manipulation” and as “Breaking the diagnosis: ankylosing spondylitis evidenced by cervical fracture following spine manipulation” in the journal Internal and Emergency Medicine. The two publications included the same figure and reported many of the same details about the patient with undiagnosed ankylosing spondylitis who experienced spinal cord injury and cerebellar strokes after experiencing spinal cord manipulation.

The editors of both journals published notes flagging the cases, an expression of concern in Internal and Emergency Medicine and a “notice of dual publication” in Neurology.

The notices are nearly identical, and state, in part:

Chinese hospital sanctioned at least 35 scientists for research misconduct

Retractions are rolling along for numerous scientists affiliated with the Jining First People’s Hospital in Shandong, China, who were sanctioned in December for research misconduct such as tampering with data and fabricating research.

For example, one article, “Lycium barbarum polysaccharides alleviates oxidative damage induced by H₂O2 through down-regulating microRNA-194 in PC-12 and SH-SY5Y cells,” which appeared in Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry in 2018, was retracted on August 31.

The retraction notice stated:

University of Fukui professor called out for fake peer review, loses “love hormone” paper

A researcher in Japan appears to have written laudatory comments about her articles that a colleague passed off as his own during peer review. This may have happened for as many as five papers, two of which have been retracted.

Akemi Tomoda, of the Child Development Research Center at the University of Fukui, collaborated with Kenji Hashimoto of Chiba University’s Center for Forensic Mental Health on multiple fraudulent peer reviews, the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported in June. Neither Tomoda nor Hashimoto has responded to requests for comment.

Tomoda is an established researcher with some articles that have hundreds of citations, such as a 2009 study in Neuroimage claiming that corporal punishment harms the mental capacity of children. She has also given a TED talk about the importance of bonding between parents and children to a child’s mental health.

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