Niko McCarty

Clinical trial paper that made anemia drug look safer than it is will be retracted

A study that a pharmaceutical company admitted last month included manipulated data will be retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

The paper, “Pooled Analysis of Roxadustat for Anemia in Patients With Kidney Failure Incident to Dialysis,” was published in Kidney International Reports in December 2020. The study analyzed data from a clinical trial for roxadustat, a drug intended to help anemic patients make more red blood cells. The medicine was tested in more than 1,500 patients with kidney failure that had been on dialysis for less than four months.

The paper compared roxadustat to a standard treatment, epoetin alfa. Epoetin alfa is not given to anemic patients who have kidney disease and are not dependent on dialysis, according to reporting in April by FiercePharma, because it can increase the risk of a cardiovascular event, including heart attacks.

In the study, roxadustat was as effective as epoetin alfa for these patients, but carried a 30 percent lower risk for death, heart attacks or strokes.

Then, on April 6th, Fibrogen announced, according to FiercePharma, that researchers had

Prominent Chinese scientist failed to disclose company ties in COVID-19 clinical trial paper

Nanshan Zhong, by 东方(美國之音記者) via Wikimedia

One of China’s leading scientists in the fight against COVID-19 failed to disclose ties to a pharmaceutical company in a paper stemming from a clinical trial, Retraction Watch has learned. A co-author on the paper is married to the daughter of that pharmaceutical company’s founder, who herself sits on the firm’s board of directors.

Nanshan Zhong first rose to prominence during the 2003 SARS outbreak for developing “a controversial steroid treatment that cured many SARS patients but left some with debilitating bone issues,” according to NPR. In 2020, TIME named him to the magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. He was appointed to lead China’s National Health Commission investigation into COVID-19 early last year, and in February 2020 Harvard announced that Zhong would share in a $115 million effort with university scientists to develop therapies for COVID-19.

Last May, Zhong published results from a clinical trial that tested whether a traditional Chinese medicine could be used to treat COVID-19 patients. That paper, titled “Efficacy and safety of Lianhuaqingwen capsules, a repurposed Chinese herb, in patients with coronavirus disease 2019: A multicenter, prospective, randomized controlled trial,” was published in Phytomedicine. It has been cited 67 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and has two corresponding authors: Zhong, of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health, and Zhen-hua Jia of Hebei Yiling Hospital, in China.

Ecologist who lost thesis awards earns expressions of concern after laptop stolen

Readers may roll their eyes at the various excuses authors use — including flooded labs and “my laptop was stolen” — when their data are unavailable for further scrutiny following questions. But here’s a case in which a stolen laptop is a real story.

On April 5, Daniel Bolnick, the editor-in-chief of The American Naturalist, posted an expression of concern for three studies published in 2018 and 2019:

This Editorial Expression of Concern serves to notify readers of The American Naturalist that the Editorial Board has identified data archiving and statistical concerns regarding three previously published papers.

The statement continues, noting that author Denon Start — who has had two awards from his PhD rescinded, and whose employment status is unclear — “no longer has access to these data:”

Editor declines to correct paper with duplicated image after earlier study disappears

*Figure 6b in a* *2015 paper* *(left) in Construction and Building Materials, showing a material with copper oxide nanoparticles. Figure 6 (right) is from a* *separate study, published in the Journal of American Science, showing a material with titanium dioxide nanoparticles.*

Possession is nine-tenths of the law — at least, it seems, for one journal editor, who is refusing to retract a study despite learning that one of its images previously appeared in another journal. The reason? The other study has been removed from the web.

The paper is among 40 articles in Construction and Building Materials flagged by a whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. The whistleblower says that most of the issues are serious, and are:

University in Japan revokes doctorate for plagiarism of text, image

A researcher in Japan has been stripped of his doctorate after a university investigation found that his thesis contained seven lines of plagiarized text and an image pulled from the internet without attribution.

Takuma Hara received his PhD in medical sciences from Tsukuba University in March 2019, writing a thesis about a genetic mutation’s role in certain brain tumors. Allegations of misconduct against Hara first emerged on April 6, 2020, according to a report released by the school.

The university launched an investigation, interviewed Hara and found that the thesis contained two plagiarized snippets: a microscopy image was pulled from the web without attribution and, on page 6, Hara took seven lines of text from a 2016 paper, titled “Clinicopathological features of craniopharyngioma and the endoscopic endonasal surgery,” published in a Japanese journal called Progress in Neuro-Oncology. The university revoked Hara’s degree last month.

The rector who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis

Lots of good stories are hiding behind retraction notices, and with the flood of retractions — 2,200 just in 2020 — we can’t always keep up. Here’s a story about one 2020 retraction that turns out to involve a rector in Poland who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis.

In 2014, Błażej Kochański defended his PhD thesis at Gdańsk University of Technology, where he is now an assistant professor. To pass the exam, two external reviewers — one of whom was Jerzy Gwizdała, an economist at the University of Gdańsk — evaluated his work.

The following year, Gwizdała published a study titled, “Wpływ systemowego ryzyka płynności na stabilność gospodarki polskiej,” or “The Impact of Systemic Liquidity Risk on Stability of the Polish Economy,” in Problemy Zarządzania (Management Issues). Entire sections of that paper, according to a note Kochański sent us through our database Google form, were “copy-and-paste” plagiarized from his PhD thesis.

Gwizdała also translated sections of Kochański’s PhD thesis to English in 2018, sent it to the University of Gdańsk Publishing House, and had it published as a book chapter.

An author asked for multiple corrections to a paper. PLOS ONE decided to retract it.

After an author requested a slew of changes to a published paper, journal editors reviewed the study and spotted “additional concerns” that led to its retraction.

The study, titled “Pressure regulated basis for gene transcription by delta-cell micro-compliance modeled in silico: Biphenyl, bisphenol and small molecule ligand models of cell contraction-expansion,” was published in PLOS ONE on Oct. 6th, 2020. Its sole author was Hemant Sarin, a “freelance investigator in translational science and medicine” from Charleston, W.Va.

The study was pulled on March 25th with the following notice:

Seven barred from research after plagiarism, duplications in eleven papers

A retired Nepali professor and six others have been barred from research after plagiarism and duplicated images were found in 11 of their papers.

Parashuram Mishra, a retired crystallographer at Tribhuvan University, in Nepal, is the lead author on all the studies. Most of the papers contain image duplications; the same figures were reused across multiple studies. But two figures that Mishra published, according to the university’s findings, were plagiarized from a 2010 study by a British team, and a 2020 study by researchers at the University of Monastir, in Tunisia.

Last December, Armel Le Bail, crystallographer at the Université du Maine in Les Mans, France, began flagging Mishra’s studies on PubPeer and his personal website. He reported his findings to the vice-chancellor of Tribhuvan University, Dharma Kant Baskota, on January 4th.

Paper claiming Muslim patients are “particularly sensitive” retracted

A paper about medical treatment for migrant patients in Germany has been retracted after the authors made unsupported claims that Muslims are “particularly sensitive” to pain.

The paper, titled “Diversität im klinischen Alltag der Augenheilkunde,” or “Diversity in everyday clinical practice in ophthalmology,” in English, was published in Der Ophthalmologe, a German medical journal, in November 2019. It has not yet been cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The original article, penned by ophthalmologists at the Cologne University Eye Clinic, is in German. We ran it through Google Translate to get a sense of its content. The paper begins with a case study of a 52 year-old Turkish migrant, explains how to use smartphone speech translators to overcome language barriers, and highlights cultural differences that physicians should consider while treating migrants.

Editor who opined on author excuses has paper subjected to an expression of concern

A study co-authored by an editor who has previously opined on common excuses by authors about research misconduct has received an expression of concern.

The paper’s first author defended the work, explaining that the experiments in question were repeated multiple times, and that the results are “valid and reproducible.”

The study, titled, “CK1δ modulates the transcriptional activity of ERα via AIB1 in an estrogen-dependent manner and regulates ERα–AIB1 interactions,” was published in Nucleic Acids Research in April 2009. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

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