by country – Retraction Watch

High-profile anesthesiologists earning retractions for data, image problems

In July 2021, John Loadsman received a manuscript about a clinical trial that immediately roused his suspicion. Then the editor-in-chief of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, Loadsman asked the authors for the raw data.

They weren’t pretty. “When I looked carefully at the spreadsheet, I could see entire blocks of data that were repeated,” recalled Loadsman, an anesthesiologist and scientific sleuth at the University of Sydney. “It was obvious that this was cooked.”

He rejected the manuscript, informing both the corresponding author, Reyhan Polat of the University of Health Sciences in Ankara and Etlik City Hospital, in Turkey, and her institution about his concerns. He also made a mental note to have a look at the researcher’s published work. Over the following years, that effort drew in another sleuth and eventually prompted inquiries into more than two dozen papers by a network of researchers in Turkey.

Retraction Watch story exposing research factory fuels investigations, preprint withdrawals, termination

Raghabendra Kumar Mahato

A preprint server has withdrawn three papers by an author at the center of a Retraction Watch story revealing a prolific research factory operated through the WhatsApp messaging system.

Last week, we reported on Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, a second-year medical student in Nepal, who runs an international research network that churns out conference abstracts and journal papers at a rapid-fire pace. Mahato’s network includes nearly 1,000 members connected through WhatsApp and produces suspected fast-churn science, while recruiting authorship for the works. Papers by the network have been accepted by major journals and presented at conferences by leading medical societies.

On July 24, Research Square, a preprint server owned by Springer Nature, withdrew three manuscripts by Mahato due to concerns “regarding integrity arising from the submitting author’s involvement in a paper mill network,” according to notices placed on the work. The notices include a link to Retraction Watch’s investigation.

Kaggle removes problematic stroke dataset for copyright infringement

Images from the now-deleted dataset on Kaggle purportedly showed people who had a stroke, but the folder included stock images and photos of politicians and celebrities, as seen in this screenshot.

The online data repository Kaggle has removed a problematic dataset for violating intellectual property rights months after it was flagged by sleuths for containing celebrity photos and lacking information on data provenance or confirmed medical diagnoses.

Researchers had used the images to train machine learning algorithms to detect stroke, but the dataset instead contained images of people with Bell’s palsy — as well as pictures of celebrities from movies and on the red carpet, as we reported in May. Adrian Barnett, a medical statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, flagged the dataset after discovering two others he and his colleagues investigated in a February preprint that showed signs of being fabricated.

Using a reverse image search, Barnett matched four of the photos in the dataset, called “Facial droop and facial paralysis image,” to a paper published years earlier in the Journal of the Canadian Dental Association (JCDA). Only after prompting the journal to complain to Kaggle did the company take down the dataset.

Exclusive: Medical student in Nepal behind busy research factory

A second-year medical student in Nepal is at the center of an international research network churning out everything from systematic reviews and meta-analyses to case reports and database studies, Retraction Watch has learned.

The student, Raghabendra Kumar Mahato, leverages this network, which includes nearly 1,000 members connected through the WhatsApp messaging platform, to produce large numbers of conference abstracts and journal papers at breakneck speed, according to posts and messages we have reviewed. The work has been presented or accepted for presentation at conferences organized by the American Heart Association (AHA), the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) and many other medical societies and has appeared in journals from major publishers.

But a review of dozens of WhatsApp messages we obtained and an interview with a disillusioned member of the community, called the “Global Clinical Research Consortium,” suggests the network produces fast-churn science, includes a known paper miller and treats authorship as a tradable commodity.

Sage retracts eight papers by former Radboud ‘rising star’ for compromised peer-review process

The publisher Sage has retracted eight papers by a former “rising star” from a Dutch university for a “compromised” peer-review process at a journal he edited.

Last week, Retraction Watch obtained an email from an editor at Sage to the editorial board of Group & Organization Management, stating that, following a “thorough investigation,” the publisher would retract “a subset of articles” by the journal’s former editor-in-chief Yannick Griep. The retraction applies to eight of the 25 papers Griep coauthored in the journal, according to the July 14 retraction notice. The papers were retracted for a “compromised” peer-review process, the notice states.

“As the peer-review process was administered by the former Editor in Chief, who is also the co-author of the articles, the objectivity of the peer-review process has been compromised,” reads a publisher’s note published alongside the retractions. The move “relates to the underlying review process and no determination has been made regarding the scientific content of the articles.”

Exclusive: Sage to retract multiple articles by dismissed rising star for “compromised” peer-review process

Yannick Griep, a former rising star in management research at Radboud University in the Netherlands, is set to lose an undisclosed number of articles from a journal he once edited, Retraction Watch has learned.

In an email we obtained, Sage’s Isabella Austin told editorial board members of Group & Organization Management that following “a thorough investigation into the concerns about peer-review on this journal,” the publisher found the “objectivity of the peer-review process administered by the former Editor in Chief on a subset of articles where they are co-author was compromised.” Those articles, wrote Austin, would be retracted.

Former acting director of national research lab in India adds another retraction

A cancer journal has retracted a paper by a former acting director of an institute in India, bringing her retraction total to nine.

Chitra Mandal, a former senior researcher at the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (CSIR-IIC) at Kolkata, served as acting director in 2014-15. She also headed the CSIR’s Innovation complex between 2010 and 2015. She received multiple awards, and was also appointed a Science and Engineering Research Board Distinguished Fellow in 2018.

Mandal has now lost nine articles to retraction and more than two dozen of her papers have been flagged on PubPeer, most for image irregularities or data issues in graphs. In March, Wiley’s Molecular Biology International retracted a 2011 article Mandal coauthored, also for image issues. We previously wrote about an expression of concern on a 2016 paper in which Mandal was a co-author.

The latest retraction involves a 2011 paper in Leukemia Research about the movement of lymphoblasts from the bone marrow to peripheral blood in childhood leukemia. The journal retracted the paper on May 30, citing concerns that some of the data in figures appear to have been manipulated.

Sex pay ban paper earns a retraction after a long and winding road for an unhappy author

In March 2024, Riccardo Ciacci, an economist at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain, published a paper claiming Sweden’s ban on buying sex had increased reported rapes by as much as 62%. The finding gained attention on social media, and quickly drew criticism from others in the field.

In particular, a group of three economists took their concerns to social media and to the journal editors, and eventually published a critique of Ciacci’s work. They claimed his analysis reports a statistical relationship not relevant to the finding described in the paper. They concluded there was no large or statistically significant finding.

What followed was a year-long effort to fix the paper, and then ultimately, a decision to retract it. Ciacci, who was not accused of misconduct, said the retraction, which he disagrees with, has cost him a promotion and funding for future research. He also alleges he experienced an onslaught of harassment on social media. In the end, Ciacci maintains the retraction was unjustified, and critics say it came far too late.

Physicist in Iraq fired over publishing scam claims fake Columbia affiliation in new paper

Five months after he was fired by ministerial order, an Iraqi professor of physics at the center of a massive publishing scam submitted a manuscript to a Wiley chemistry journal claiming affiliation with Columbia University in New York City.

The paper also stated the physicist, Oday A. Al-Owaedi, was affiliated with the University of Babylon in Hilla, Iraq, although he was permanently dismissed from his position last year.

As we reported at the time, Al-Owaedi defrauded “researchers by collecting money from them under the pretext of publishing their papers in reputable international journals as promised, while in fact falsifying and forging publication in fake websites,” according to a ministerial order we obtained.

A prolific evolutionary biologist caught faking data decades ago notches a new retraction

A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted.
*shanecotee / iStock*

Anders Møller, an influential evolutionary biologist from Denmark, somehow survived the blow to his reputation after a high-profile retraction and a finding of scientific misconduct more than 20 years ago.

But a new retraction is once again raising the question of whether that fraud was just a blip in his impressive publication record or further proof, as some claim, that much of Møller’s work rests on a shaky foundation.

The latest paper to fall: Møller’s 2019 study in the journal Ecology and Evolution that reported a tenfold decline in the bugs splattered on his car windshield over two decades. The journal’s editors wrote in their retraction notice that the dataset contained “duplications” and “inconsistencies” that invalidate its conclusions.

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