by country – Retraction Watch

Lawsuit fails to block retraction of paper claiming to link heart-related deaths to COVID-19 vaccines

*Greg J. Marchand in a photo from his research institute’s website.*

A Taylor & Francis journal has retracted a widely-read paper linking cardiac-related mortality to COVID-19 vaccines after an unsuccessful legal attempt by the lead author to block the withdrawal. That author says he is considering further legal action against the publisher.

The article, “Risk of all-cause and cardiac-related mortality after vaccination against COVID-19: A meta-analysis of self-controlled case series studies,” drew swift criticism when it was published in Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics in August 2023. At the time, critics and sleuths were quick to challenge the data and methods used in the paper, which now has more than 143,000 views on the Taylor & Francis website and has been cited 15 times, including by two letters to the editor of the journal and a response from the authors, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, posted online January 16, states the retraction resulted from concerns that arose about the methodology of the study and the integrity and availability of the data. The authors provided a full response to the queries; however, the publisher determined the validity of the findings remained in question, the notice states. It continues:

Fed up, author issues her own retraction after journal ghosts her

At wit’s end after a publisher ignored her repeated requests for a correction, Ursula Bellut-Staeck took the extreme step of issuing her own retraction. But is that even a thing?

Bellut-Staeck, an independent researcher from Berlin, Germany, submitted a paper to SCIREA Journal of Clinical Medicine last spring after receiving an invitation from the journal. The article, about mechanotransduction and the impact of infrasound and vibrations, was published June 16.

But when Bellut-Staeck realized her affiliation as listed on the article needed changing, she contacted the journal to request a correction. The problem, she said, was linguistic. Because she didn’t realize “affiliation” has a different meaning in German than English, she had mistakenly listed herself as being at an institution she has since left.

Corrections, biases, and humility in science: Q&A with Tuan V. Nguyen

In a new memoir, Kangaroo Dreams, Tuan V. Nguyen, D.Sc., Ph.D., provides a unique perspective on medical research. Nguyen escaped Vietnam in 1981 as part of the mass “boat people” exodus of refugees, taking to dangerous waters just a few months after his older brother attempted the same and disappeared. Making his way to Australia through grit and luck in 1982, Nguyen started his new life as a dishwasher before steadily building a career in science, ultimately specializing in bone research.

Nguyen is now distinguished professor of predictive medicine and director of the Center for Health Technologies at the University of Technology Sydney and adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of New South Wales. He’s also a Leadership Fellow of the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council and a member of the Order of Australia. Dedicated to the memory of his lost brother, Kangaroo Dreams weaves Nguyen’s personal journey with a thoughtful examination of contemporary medical research. We interviewed him in writing to learn more. (Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Retraction Watch: You were co-author on a 1994 Nature paper subsequently corrected in 1997 which reported individuals with a particular vitamin D receptor gene benefitted from relatively high bone mineral density. When the research team made this finding, you write, “A nagging unease, however, bothered me. The results, while undeniably impressive, seemed almost too good to be true.” The team published the findings only to discover – after a Nature reader challenged the results – that a lab member who was ill likely contaminated samples, skewing the results. Did you regret not having pushed harder on your initial doubts? What held you back?

Professor suspended after Japanese university finds fishy results in sushi paper

A university in Japan has suspended a fishery science professor for a month after its investigation found fabrication in a retracted paper on fish freezing.

According to the investigatory report, Iwate University scrutinized a retracted paper coauthored by six researchers at the school, including Chunhong Yuan, a professor of fishery systems science. Following the researchers’ inability to provide the investigating committee with appropriate records of the reported experiment, the inquiry found Yuan and two unnamed coauthors – a graduate student and an individual now retired – fabricated claims about the experimental conditions.

Yuan has been suspended for one month starting December 25, according to a press release. The university plans to administer additional training on research integrity for laboratory leaders, according to the report.

Dogged by retractions, Iraqi researcher and publisher uses a different name

Researchers change the name they publish under for many reasons, most of which aren’t fodder for a Retraction Watch story. Trying to skirt a publishing ban is one that is. And another case that recently caught our attention may be in a similar category.

Researcher Abduladheem Turki Jalil is currently affiliated with the University of Thi-Qar in Nasiriyah, Iraq. His first published paper appears to be a survey on breast cancer from 2019. Jalil’s publications then took off, rising exponentially to more than 100 in 2022. According to Elsevier’s Scopus database, Jalil has an h-index of 44, and on his Instagram profile, he claims to be among the world’s top 2% scientists (he no longer is).

Jalil’s massive output has not failed to attract attention. In 2022, then-sleuth Nick Wise began flagging the researcher’s papers on PubPeer, providing screenshots of Facebook ads selling authorship of articles that matched several of Jalil’s publications. Wise also wrote a blog post about authorship-for-sale networks that mentioned Jalil and his extraordinary productivity.

Exclusive: In reversal, former vice chancellor in Pakistan who was let off hook for plagiarism faces sanctions

Three years after he was let off the hook by a government commission, a former university vice chancellor in Pakistan is facing sanctions for plagiarizing a student thesis in a paper from 2020, Retraction Watch has learned.

Muhammad Suleman Tahir, previously of Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, is now professor and chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Gujrat. According to a report issued on November 20 by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Islamabad, Tahir and his coauthors have been barred from supervising graduate students for three years and also have received a warning for their offense.

Meanwhile, the University of Gujrat removed Tahir from his position as director of the institution’s Advanced Study & Research Board on December 3, according to a notification we obtained.

One of Kazakhstan’s top nuclear physicists also leads his nation in retractions

The head of a nuclear physics institute in Kazakhstan now has 21 retractions to his name — most of them logged in the past year — following dozens of his papers being flagged on PubPeer for data reuse and images showing suspiciously similar patterns of background noise, suggesting manipulation.

Maxim Zdorovets, director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Astana, has written or coauthored 480 papers indexed on Scopus, and one analysis puts him as the third most cited researcher in Kazakhstan. His prolific publication record has been linked to Russian paper mills, though those claims are unverified. Zdorovets has defended his work in a series of online posts, arguing the imaging similarities come from technical issues and that his own analyses prove image manipulation did not occur. He did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.

The latest retraction for Zdorovets came last month when Crystallography Reports retracted a study containing electron microscope images “highly similar” to those published a year earlier in a now-retracted paper in the Russian Journal of Electrochemistry by a similar group of authors. Both papers also included images that closely resemble ones Zdorovets and his colleagues presented at a nanomaterials conference in Ukraine in 2017. In each instance, the images were meant to be showing different materials.

Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change

The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated.

“The economic commitment of climate change,” which appeared April 17, 2024, in Nature, looked at how changes in temperature and precipitation could affect economic growth. Forbes, the San Diego Union-Tribune and other outlets covered the paper, which has been accessed over 300,000 times. It has been cited 168 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But after two commentaries published this August raised questions about the study’s data and methodology, the researchers revisited their findings. “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction,” the retraction notice, published today, states.

Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases

The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications. One of the titles, which was included in Clarivate’s Web of Science, was dropped from that index as well.

Last month we reported on allegations that one of the delisted journals, the Medical Journal of Babylon, a publication of the University of Babylon in Hilla, was coercing authors to cite its articles. Citation manipulation is widespread in Iraq and elsewhere, but is considered a form of scientific misconduct.

“The Medical Journal of Babylon was flagged for re-evaluation at the end of September when we received concerns, and because we observed outlier publication performance,” said a spokesperson from Elsevier, which owns Scopus. The publisher marked the journal as delisted in its October update of indexed and delisted titles.

Meet the researcher aiming to halt use of ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality

Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence.

To maintain the integrity of scientific literature, the professor of psychology at Brunel University of London and her colleagues are writing to journals that are publishing papers that rely on the so-called National IQ database, which aims to rank countries based on intelligence. It has drawn criticism for the way the data were collected. Sear’s efforts have so far led to two retractions.

“There is absolutely no scientific merit whatsoever in the National IQ database,” Sear told Retraction Watch. “That means that any conclusions drawn from the database will be faulty and worthless.”

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