by country – Page 12 – Retraction Watch

Nanotech group up to nine retractions

A group of nanotechnology researchers in Iran is up to nine retractions after losing four papers in a go for problematic figures.

The work was led by Abolfazl Akbarzadeh, a medicinal chemist at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, who has spent time as a visiting professor at Boston University and UCLA. Commenters on PubPeer including Elisabeth Bik and “Hoya camphorifolia” have raised questions about the papers, with posts dating back to November 2020.

The latest retractions involve articles that appeared in Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology, a Taylor & Francis title. Evidently, the papers appear to have had…artificial data.

Misconduct, failure to supervise earn researchers years-long funding bans

Two professors and two former graduate students are banned from funding by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) following findings by Nagoya University of misconduct and lack of supervision.

As we reported last month, Nagoya found that Yuuta Yano, a graduate student in Kenichiro Itami’s lab, had forged large swaths of data and had thrown away lab notebooks to escape detection. Itami, along with Hideto Ito, had asked for an investigation into the team’s work after retracting papers in Nature and ACS Applied Nano Materials on which Yano was an author.

Nanotech researchers cleared of fraud but failed to supervise cheating grad student: University

An institutional investigation of a group of nanotechnology researchers in Japan has concluded that a former graduate student in the lab began his cheating ways “on a daily basis from a very early stage” after joining the team in 2015.

According to a Google translation of the report, Yuuta Yano – whom the document identifies as “former graduate student A” and with other oblique references, committed sweeping fabrication of data and other misdeeds:

over a period of four years or more, the number of forged data is extremely large, and even concealment work is performed, so it is evaluated that the maliciousness of the act is high. … The impact is great. In addition, it was published in a wide range of academic journals and has a large social impact.

Yano also was found to have thrown away lab notebooks in order to hide his culpability.

KCL investigation finds misconduct in Lancet Neurology paper

A Lancet journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2019 paper by a group in the United Kingdom whose work was found to have included fabricated data and other misconduct.

The article, “Serotonergic pathology and disease burden in the premotor and motor phase of A53T α-synuclein parkinsonism: a cross-sectional study,” came from a team at King’s College London led by researchers at the school’s Neurodegeneration Imaging Group. The senior author on the paper, which appeared in Lancet Neurology, was Marios Politis, who has since left KCL for the University of Exeter.

The study earned press coverage in The Guardian – “Parkinson’s disease ‘could be detected early on by brain changes‘” – and the BBC: “Early brain ‘signs of Parkinson’s’ found.”

Here’s the expression of concern:

University president in Japan self-plagiarized and will forfeit some pay

The head of a Japanese university has been found guilty of research misconduct for self-plagiarism – technically, duplication – and has agreed to pay a one-time cash penalty for his transgressions.

According to the University of Aizu, a computer science and engineering school in Aizuwakamatsu, Toshiaki Miyazaki, the president and CEO, failed to appropriately cite his own work in four papers:

Vice chancellor in Pakistan sues researcher whose work he plagiarized – and says he was the victim

In response to allegations of plagiarism, the vice chancellor of a university in Pakistan has brought a 500 million rupee (~$2,800,000USD) defamation suit against his accuser.

As we reported last July, Farukh Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, had discovered that a paper in the journal Fuel had lifted text from his master’s thesis.

Among the authors was Muhammad Suleman Tahir, the vice chancellor at Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, in Rahim Yar Khan.

Should residents and fellows be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses?

The ‘publish or perish’ culture is no longer reserved for academic faculty and post-doctoral fellows. The paradigm has spilled over (or bled into) medical training, aided by the digital revolution. The widespread availability of online library catalogs and referencing software has enabled the mass production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

In short, medical research no longer requires original ideas, just access to the internet, which is perhaps why, as one 2018 editorial put it, there is “Replication, Duplication, and Waste in a Quarter Million Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses.”

With all of that in mind, the orthopaedic surgery residents at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, gathered virtually for their annual research day to debate whether they supported or rejected the status quo that residents be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses. At the start of the debate, following an opening Visiting Professor Presentation on trends in retractions by Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky, 58% of the residents opposed the status quo, while 42% supported it.

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.

University of Rochester cancer researchers included ‘incorrect images’ in 13 papers, committee finds

A group of cancer researchers at the University of Rochester have now lost three papers over concerns about the data in the articles – issues that evidently did not rise to the level of misconduct, according to the institution.

The work came from the lab of Yuhchyau Chen, of the university’s Wilmot Cancer Institute. A common co-author was Soo Ok Lee, who is no longer affiliated with the University of Rochester. In addition to the three retractions, Lee has several corrections and an expression of concern.

The most recent retraction involves a 2019 article in the Journal of Molecular Medicine titled “Radiation-induced glucocorticoid receptor promotes CD44 + prostate cancer stem cell growth through activation of SGK1-Wnt/β-catenin signaling” for which Chen and Lee were corresponding authors. The paper has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the retraction notice, dated December 10:

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