china retractions – Retraction Watch

Author blames retraction on ‘Chinese censorship’

A former assistant professor of international relations at Yibin University in Sichuan, China, said he was fired from his job and “forced” to retract a paper on COVID-19 because the article did not “paint a good picture of the Chinese government.”

In the 2021 paper, Thomas Ameyaw-Brobbey, now an adjunct lecturer at Accra Business School in Ghana and an adjunct research fellow at the Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College, discussed the negative effects of the pandemic on the global public opinion of Chinese leadership and how the outbreak fostered an “unfavorable image” of China.

After the article appeared in the Journal of International Studies, authorities at Yibin University held several meetings with Ameyaw-Brobbey asking him to explain the paper and why he used a dataset of public opinion in the United States that was “likely to be biased towards China,” he said.

University cuts anesthesiology researcher’s funding amid four retractions

An anesthesiologist who had his funding revoked for fabricating data has earned a fourth retraction for publishing the same data in two Springer Nature journals.

Wen-fei Tan, an anesthesiologist at The First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, is the first author of the recently retracted paper “Changes in the first postoperative night bispectral index of patients after thyroidectomy with different types of primary anesthetic management: a randomized controlled trial,” published in the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (JCMC), a Springer Nature journal, in 2017. It has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice states:

Author denies Chinese censorship prompted COVID-19 retraction

The corresponding author of a recently published – and then quickly retracted – letter in The Lancet decrying the failure of the Chinese Ministry of Health to pay doctors and other health care workers says authorities did not pressure him to withdraw the piece.

The letter begins:

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end in China, medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to fight the omicron (B.1.1.529) variant are now facing a new challenge. Despite their heroic efforts, many of them are now struggling to receive the financial compensation they deserve.

The second sentence cites a blog post on Weixin.

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:

Frontiers retracts a dozen papers, many more expected

The publisher Frontiers has retracted at least a dozen papers in the last month, after announcing an “extensive internal investigation” into “potentially falsified research.”

Here’s an example of a notice, this one from Frontiers in Endocrinology for “Overexpression of microRNA-216a-3p Accelerates the Inflammatory Response in Cardiomyocytes in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Targeting IFN-α2,” which was originally published in November 2020:

Cancer journal with hefty retraction record retracts another 15

A cancer journal with a history of batch retractions has pulled 15 articles dating back to 2014 after concluding that they contained manipulated or misused images.

As we reported in 2017, Tumor Biology was forced to retract 107 papers that had been corrupted by fake peer review – a record at the time. That move had followed a similar, if smaller, sweep in 2016 by the journal, which was owned by Springer but purchased by SAGE in December 2016 after the more massive cleanse.

Researcher loses medical degree for using paper mill to write his dissertation

A university in China has revoked the medical degree of a researcher found guilty of having produced his dissertation with the help of a prodigious paper mill.

As Elisabeth Bik noted last year in a post on PubPeer, the thesis by Bin Chen, a lung specialist at Soochow University, was one of 121 articles produced by the paper mill that:

Stem cell researchers lose two more papers, making three

A Hindawi journal has retracted two 2013 papers by a group of stem cell researchers in China over issues with the images in the articles, bringing their count to three.

Here’s the notice for “Side-by-Side comparison of the biological characteristics of human umbilical cord and adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem cells,” by Lili Chen and colleagues from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan:

Study of China’s ethnic minorities retracted as dozens of papers come under scrutiny for ethical violations

A legal journal has retracted a 2019 article on the facial genetics of ethnic minorities in China for ethics violations, and the publisher, Springer Nature, is investigating more than two dozen other articles for similar concerns.

The article, “Y Chromosomal STR haplotypes in Chinese Uyghur, Kazakh and Hui ethnic groups and genetic features of DYS448 null allele and DYS19 duplicated allele,” appeared in the International Journal of Legal Medicine.

Three of the authors were affiliated with the notorious Karamay Municipal Public Security Bureau, which the U.S. government hit with sanctions in October 2019 for being:

Whistleblowers bring receipts, journal retracts swiftly

A group of researchers in China have lost a 2018 paper after whistleblowers informed the journal that the authors had misreported their data.

The paper, “Long‐term outcomes of 530 esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients with minimally invasive Ivor Lewis esophagectomy,” appeared in the Journal of Surgical Oncology, a Wiley publication. It has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The researchers were affiliated with Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou.

According to the abstract:

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