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Pulp fiction: Japanese university revokes two dentistry PhDs in case involving two dozen retractions

The misconduct case of an endodontics researcher in Japan who already has lost at least 24 papers for data problems has claimed two more casualties: the PhD theses of a pair of scientists he once helped train.

As we reported last year, Nobuaki Ozeki, who retired from Aichi Gakuin University in 2018, was found to have misused images, fabricated data and recycled text in 22 papers, 21 of which by our count have now been retracted. Ozeki’s total retraction count is 24, as three papers not identified in the investigation have also been retracted.

Now, we’ve learned that the university has revoked the doctoral degrees of two of Ozeki’s co-authors, Hideyuki Yamaguchi and Rie (Satoe) Kawai. Both researchers received their degrees in March 2016.

Widely covered paper on ranitidine-cancer link retracted

A paper linking the use of a wildly popular drug for heartburn to cancer has been retracted after the authors concluded that their widely touted finding appears to have resulted from a hiccup in the way they conducted their testing.

The 2016 article, in Carcinogenesis, has played a minor role in an ongoing class action lawsuit against the makers of ranitidine (sold as Zantac, among other brand names) claiming that use of the medication has caused cancer in more than 100,000 plaintiffs. And it was a key citation in a 2019 petition to the FDA urging that such drugs be recalled.

The FDA has been investigating contamination of ranitidine and a related drug with NDMA, a known human carcinogen at high doses. On April 1, 2020, the agency announced that, although its tests did not find concerning levels of NDMA in “many” of the samples it tested, it was recalling all products that contain ranitidine:

Kentucky professor resigns ahead of vote that could have stripped him of tenure

A former endowed professor at the University of Kentucky has resigned from the faculty days before a committee at the institution was scheduled to vote on whether to fire him for misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

In 2018, the university began investigating Xianglin Shi, a toxicologist and cancer biologist who that year, as we reported then, lost three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry for image manipulation. At the time, Shi was the principal investigator of a 5-year, $7.4 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES).

In the wake of the retractions, Shi was stripped of his title as the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and his role as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine.

Imperial College London researcher fired for research misconduct

Eric Lam, a highly-published cancer specialist, has been fired from his post at Imperial College London following a university investigation that found misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

Lam’s work has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for some three years, dating back to a 2018 post pointing out suspicious images in a 2003 paper by him and his colleagues in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. In 2019, his group corrected a 2011 paper in Oncogene, a Springer Nature title, for image problems.

However, the new retraction marks the first such retraction for the researcher, whose LinkedIn page states that he is now affiliated with Sun Yat-Sen University, in China. According to an Imperial College London spokesperson:

Two Japanese universities revoke PhDs, one for plagiarism and one because of cell line contamination

A scientist in Japan has lost her doctoral degree from Kyoto University after an investigation determined that she had plagiarized in her thesis.

According to the university, Jin Jing, who received her degree in September 2012 in human and environmental studies, has become the first person at the institution to have a doctorate revoked. In a statement about the move, Kyoto University president Nagahiro Minato said:

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:

Who owns your thesis data? We do, says one university, prompting retraction

The University of Pavia, Yamada via Flickr

Here’s a story that’s likely to strike a sour chord with graduate students.

A researcher in Italy has lost his 2020 paper, based on work he conducted for his doctoral thesis, after the university claimed that he didn’t have the right to publish the data.

The paper, “Musical practice and BDNF plasma levels as a potential marker of synaptic plasticity: an instrument of rehabilitative processes,” was written by Alessandro Minutillo, now of the Department of Pathophysiology and Transplantation at the University of Milan and appeared in Neurological Sciences. His two co-authors included Massimo Carlo Mauri, a prominent psychiatrist at the Department of Neurosciences and Mental Health, Fondazione IRCCS Ca’ Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico, also in Milan.

The study, which Minutillo conducted while a medical student at the University of Pavia, was based on data from 48 men and women, of whom 21 were musicians and 27 were non-musicians. (In case you’re wondering: “To be defined as a “musician,” the practice of any musical instrument or voice was required for at least 3 h a week. This practice had to be stable and continued for at least 5 years and the subject had to have been achieved a musical degree.”)

Per the authors:

The rector who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis

Lots of good stories are hiding behind retraction notices, and with the flood of retractions — 2,200 just in 2020 — we can’t always keep up. Here’s a story about one 2020 retraction that turns out to involve a rector in Poland who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis.

In 2014, Błażej Kochański defended his PhD thesis at Gdańsk University of Technology, where he is now an assistant professor. To pass the exam, two external reviewers — one of whom was Jerzy Gwizdała, an economist at the University of Gdańsk — evaluated his work.

The following year, Gwizdała published a study titled, “Wpływ systemowego ryzyka płynności na stabilność gospodarki polskiej,” or “The Impact of Systemic Liquidity Risk on Stability of the Polish Economy,” in Problemy Zarządzania (Management Issues). Entire sections of that paper, according to a note Kochański sent us through our database Google form, were “copy-and-paste” plagiarized from his PhD thesis.

Gwizdała also translated sections of Kochański’s PhD thesis to English in 2018, sent it to the University of Gdańsk Publishing House, and had it published as a book chapter.

Researcher charged with abusing his wife has third paper retracted

A researcher in Canada whose once-brilliant career in kinesiology went from plaudits from his peers to criminal charges of horrific abuse of his wife has notched his third retraction.

As we reported in 2018, Abdeel Safdar, formerly of McMaster University and Harvard, where he was a postdoc, was the subject of an institutional investigation over concerns about the integrity of the data in a pair of his published studies. At the time, journals had flagged only two of his articles, both written with a frequent co-author, Mark Tarnopolsky, of McMaster. Tarnopolsky is considered a leading figure in kinesiology, and together he and Safdar had written some 30 papers.

The newest retraction involves a 2016 article in Skeletal Muscle titled “Exercise-induced mitochondrial p53 repairs mtDNA mutations in mutator mice.” Safdar was first author and Tarnopolsky the senior and corresponding author.

According to the retraction notice:

University clears scientist of logging industry’s misconduct allegations

The University of Tasmania has cleared one of its scientists of wrongdoing after she was accused by the Australian logging industry of publishing flawed research linking logging to increased forest flammability and of having a conflict of interest with an environmental group.

The university then implemented mandatory research integrity training for its school of geography, which Jennifer Sanger, the researcher who worked in that school, suggests is due to the university’s “very strong ties with the forestry industry.”

In May 2020, Sanger published a study titled, “Propensities of Old Growth, Mature and Regrowth Wet Eucalypt Forest, and Eucalyptus Nitens Plantation, to Burn during Wildfire and Suffer Fire-Induced Crown Death,” in the journal Fire. The study found that logged forests were generally more flammable than those left unlogged, a finding that has been upheld in recent research.

On August 13, Sanger requested that Fire pull the study, according to Alistair Smith, the journal’s editor-in-chief. Sanger asked for a retraction after a reader went through the study’s dataset and found issues with its analysis, she explained in an email:

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