Rebecca Sohn

‘Prompt and decisive’: Editor says obesity study will be retracted after critique

In February, David Allison came across a study with a familiar problem.

The authors of the study purported to show an educational program helped women lose weight, but they had not directly compared the treatment and control groups. Instead, they’d used a statistically invalid method to compare changes within the groups.

Allison, the dean at Indiana University’s School of Public Health in Bloomington, along with researcher Luis-Enrique Becerra-Garcia and other colleagues, in July submitted a critique of the study to the journal that had published it. Four days later, Nauman Khalid, the journal’s editor in chief, wrote to the study’s lead author.

“I got excellent feedback from Dr. Becerra-Garcia,” Khalid wrote. “According to their analysis, the statistical tool that you used in your research is wrong and not well-validated.”

Now, after a lack of adequate response from the authors, the study will be retracted, according to Khalid.

One year later, bioinformatics journal with unclear leadership yet to retract plagiarized article

Nicki Tiffin

On Aug. 17, 2022, Nicki Tiffin received a notification that she had published a new study. The problem? She had never submitted an article to the journal in which the paper appeared.

A year later, despite efforts by Tiffin and others, the journal has not responded to retraction requests, and the article remains online. Further investigation by Retraction Watch has revealed other dysfunction at the journal, including falsely representing its editors and a schism from its founders and original sponsor.

The article, “Triumphs and improvement of Computational Bioinformatics in South Africa,” was published in June 2022 in the European Journal of Biomedical Informatics (EJBI).

Tiffin, a professor at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape, discovered that the new paper was a plagiarized version of an article she had published in 2016. That paper, “The Development of Computational Biology in South Africa: Successes Achieved and Lessons Learnt,” appeared in the journal PLOS Computational Biology and has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In 2016, Tiffin was a professor at the University of Cape Town. Although she had no role in publishing the EJBI article, it lists her name as the sole author of the paper, as well as her University of Cape Town affiliation.

Eight papers retracted after author found to be fictional

Elsevier journals are retracting eight studies after learning that one of the authors on the papers was “fictitious” – as in a similar case we reported on recently.

The ostensible author, Toshiyuki Bangi, was listed as affiliated with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The eight studies, which were cited a collective 47 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, were published in three different journals — Construction and Building Materials, the Journal of Building Engineering, and Case Studies in Construction Materials.

The retraction notice is the same for each paper, and states:

‘Unethical and misleading’: Researcher finds his name on editorial boards of journals he’s never heard of

On July 21, Derek Woollins received an email asking that an article be withdrawn from a journal he supposedly helped edit.

But although Woollins was listed on the journal’s website as a member of its editorial board, he had never even heard of the publication.

Woollins, a professor of synthetic chemistry at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, later learned that he is also listed on the editorial board of other journals from the same publisher – Scholars Research Library – again, with no involvement in any of them. (Some academics have even found themselves listed as editors in chief of journals they have nothing to do with.)

Woollins told us:

Who are you, Dragan Rodriguez? Fifteen studies have the same fake author, sleuth finds

Talk about artificial intelligence. Fifteen studies published in various journals name a mysterious computer scientist as an author.

The problem? He doesn’t seem to exist.

Dragan Rodriguez is listed as being affiliated with Case Western Reserve University, but an official at the Cleveland institution told a sleuth no one of that name has been associated with the university.

The studies on which Rodriguez’s name appears range in topic from cancer detection to “renewable energy systems optimization.” The papers were published since 2018 in 10 journals from four major scientific publishers since 2018, including the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and the Journal of Building Engineering, which have both historically had impact factors above 7, and Applied Energy, whose impact factor has been above 11. They have been cited a total of 232 times.

Outcry over ‘terminal anorexia’ response letter prompts retraction

The authors of a response to an article critiquing the use of the term “terminal anorexia” retracted their letter last month after receiving major backlash from researchers, healthcare providers, and people with eating disorders.

“Regardless of inequities in care, terminal anorexia nervosa exists: a response to Sharpe et. al,” which defended the use of the term, was published May 20 in the Journal of Eating Disorders.

The letter was a response to “Inaccessibility of care and inequitable conceptions of suffering: a collective response to the construction of “terminal” anorexia nervosa,” an article published earlier in the month in the same journal by researchers with lived experiences of eating disorders. The article outlined methodological problems with the criteria for diagnosis of a “terminal eating disorder” put forward in “Terminal anorexia nervosa: three cases and proposed clinical characteristics,” a previous paper by two of the authors of the response letter.

The response was retracted on July 17. Its retraction note reads:

Econ study retracted after researchers find ‘undocumented alterations in the code’

An economics study has been retracted after other researchers identified several inconsistencies in the study’s code and submitted a comment to the journal.

Those critics say the flaws drove the paper’s main findings, but an author of the study says they had no major effect and stands by the results.

The original paper, “Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital,” was published in the American Economic Review in September 2022. It examined the impact of a 2013 increase in the tax rate on dividends in France, concluding an increased rate can encourage the accumulation of capital. The study has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction is only the second in the journal’s history. As Retraction Watch has previously reported, research shows that it is less common for economics papers to be retracted than research in other fields.

‘Shocked and flabbergasted’: Journal updates duplicate article it had said was “sufficiently” different from original

A journal for conference proceedings which published a duplicate article has updated the later version, after originally telling the researcher who noticed the duplication that the articles were different enough to warrant publishing both.

The article, titled “Production and storage of polarized H2, D2, and HD molecules,” was published twice in the journal Proceedings of Science, in 2018 and in 2019. The first version represented proceedings from a talk given at the 2017 XVII International Workshop on Polarized Sources, Targets & Polarimetry in Kaist, South Korea; the second was from the 23rd International Spin Physics Symposium in Ferrara, Italy, held in 2018.

The later version has minor differences from the first, including more technical details about the study’s methods.

PoS, which is run by the International School for Advanced Studies based in Trieste, Italy, functions as a repository for various conference proceedings. It is run by a small staff, and each submission is reviewed by an individual conference’s editorial board.

A researcher, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted PoS after coming across the two nearly identical versions of “Production and storage of polarized H2, D2, and HD molecules.” A journal representative first told the researcher that the journal would investigate the situation, then that “the contributions differ sufficiently in order to warrant both their publication,” according to an email seen by Retraction Watch.

Paper retracted more than eight months after author admitted to plagiarism

Last September, a researcher at a university in Bangladesh emailed a journal about a paper he had published in 2019. He made a stark admission: the paper contained plagiarism, said Sorif Hossain, a lecturer in statistics at Noakhali Science and Technology University, who called for the article to be promptly retracted.

But the paper remained in place. Only after Retraction Watch contacted the European Journal of Environment and Public Health (EJEPH) last week did it issue a retraction.

“Flagrant and frankly, inexcusable” data duplication leads to retraction

Bardia Askari, who flagged the duplication

A biochemistry study has been retracted nearly a year after a whistleblower found significant overlap between the article and one published in a different journal by the same research group.

The study, “Berberine ameliorates renal injury in diabetic C57BL/6 mice: Involvement of suppression of SphK–S1P signaling pathway,” appeared in the journal Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics in July 2010. It has been cited 76 times.

The study examines how berberine, a compound found in plants such as tree turmeric, might improve kidney injury in diabetic mice. People sometimes take berberine supplements to help treat diabetes, but the evidence for its effectiveness is mixed. The authors of the paper are researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

The study was retracted on May 23 at the request of the journal’s editor-in-chief, according to the retraction notice. It states, in part:

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