by country – Page 2 – Retraction Watch

How a sleuth’s email turned a correction into a retraction

On Sept. 2, 2021, a professor at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, emailed a biochemistry journal asking to correct a paper she had published the previous year. An experiment had “unintentionally” been omitted from a figure, Isabella Grumbach explained, and a comparison of experimental groups contained “a minor error in the degree of statistical significance.” A correction ensued.

But the problems with the article, “Inhibition of CaMKII in mitochondria preserves endothelial barrier function after irradiation,” appear to have been more deep-rooted than the email suggested. An anonymous commenter on PubPeer had first raised concerns about the article, which had appeared in Free Radical Biology and Medicine (FRBM), in July 2021, more than a year after it was published. The commenter claimed error bars between two figures were vastly different, even though they were meant to be related data points.

Iran COVID-vaccine paper with ‘serious flaws’ retracted

Following criticism from scientists around the world, a virology journal has retracted a paper describing the first test in humans of an Iran-made vaccine against COVID-19.

Iran licensed the home-grown Noora vaccine for emergency use in 2022 and has reportedly administered millions of doses to its citizens. The country’s health authorities say the shot is 94% effective.

The now-retracted paper, published in 2022 in the Journal of Medical Virology, was the only report on the clinical development of the vaccine to have appeared in an international journal. The article has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Cancer paper earns expression of concern nearly two years after investigation report is revealed

A Springer Nature journal has issued an expression of concern for a 16-year-old paper by Carlo Croce, the cancer researcher – and noted art collector – at The Ohio State University three years after the publication had received a correction for problematic images and roughly 20 months after the news division at Nature reported on a pair of institutional investigations into problems with Croce’s work.

As we and others have reported, those investigations concluded Croce had not committed misconduct but had overlooked the misdeeds of others in his lab.

Here’s the notice for the paper, “MicroRNA signatures of TRAIL resistance in human non-small cell lung cancer,” which Oncogene published in 2008:

Saudi university dean has 20 retractions in two years

A prolific Saudi pharmacy professor published over 200 papers in the last four years, but in recent months the quality of these papers has come into question.

Nabil Alhakamy, a dean of research and higher education at King AbdulAziz University’s Faculty of Pharmacy, has had more than 20 articles retracted — the most recent of which came on January 30 in AAPS PharmSciTech.

The journal analyzed the images and figures in the article and found three had been published previously and that an outside lab used to collect some of the data had “made a mistake by sending images of other work in the service lab,” according to the retraction notice.

Indian paper mill disbands WhatsApp community following investigation

An Indian paper mill featuring prominently in our recent investigation in Science and a companion piece on our website shut down its WhatsApp community six days after the stories ran, Retraction Watch has learned.

The company, called iTrilon, used the messaging platform to hawk authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals.” It claimed to have connections at journals that allowed the mill to guarantee acceptance of most of its papers.

But on January 24, Sarath Ranganathan, iTrilon’s scientific director, deactivated the WhatsApp community he had been curating.

Book retraction surfaces long-standing feud between South African academics

In October, a South African political scientist published a book on how scholars in Africa can improve their standing in the larger academic world. Three months later, after heated emails from several sources alleging ethics breaches, the publisher retracted the book.

The retraction notice, posted Jan. 12, 2024, states that UJ Press retracted and removed the book from its catalog “due to concerns arising from the publication.” Publisher Wilkus van Zyl told us the press had asked the peer reviewers of the manuscript to re-examine the volume with an additional set of questions after they received emails questioning the work’s legitimacy. The reviewers determined the book lacked scholarly rigor and contained “inappropriate criticisms that appear to be based on personal grievances rather than legitimate scholarly discourse.”

The retraction is the latest bout in a years-long quarrel between two feuding academics. Kgothatso Shai is a professor at the University of Limpopo, who writes about African politics and international relations. Several chapters of his book, “An Afrocentric Idea on Contested Knowledge: Selected Cases,” critiqued Facebook posts from Shepherd Mpofu, a media studies professor at the University of South Africa in Pretoria. Over the last few years, Mpofu has routinely criticized Shai’s works as “pathetic scholarship” in Facebook posts seen by Retraction Watch.

Paper about clergy sexual abuses in South Korean churches retracted over ‘citation irregularities’

A year after writing an article about a movement in South Korea to hold clergymembers accountable for sexual abuse, a theology professor has asked for the paper to be retracted after acknowledging “citation irregularities” in the work. The specific problems remain unclear.

The paper’s retraction notice, dated December 21, 2023, states that the editors of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics supported the request to pull the article. Asked for more details about which “irregularities” or other factors might have contributed to the retraction, Maria Teresa Dávila, one of the journal’s editors and an associate professor of religious studies at Merrimack College, in North Andover, Massachusetts, confirmed the retraction and referenced the society’s publishing guidelines and ethics statement, but did not highlight specific passages that would pertain to this specific case. She also refused to answer further questions about the retraction.

Journal takes 3 years to pull papers by researcher who committed misconduct

Nearly three years after a university investigation committee recommended retracting several papers by a cancer researcher found guilty of research misconduct, the journal Cancer Research has pulled three of the offending articles.

The journal also retracted a fourth paper by the researcher, Samson Jacob, a former emeritus professor at The Ohio State University, which had been flagged on PubPeer.

In 2021, the OSU committee reviewed dozens of allegations against Jacob’s work, and found 14 of them met at least one of two evidence standards for research misconduct, as we reported in 2022. The allegations mainly centered on figures that appeared to be spliced together from different experimental runs, which was not acknowledged in the studies – a concern the new retraction notices also mention.

Journal retracts more than 50 studies from Saudi Arabia for faked authorship

The journal Cureus has retracted 56 papers nearly two years after it first began to suspect the works were of dubious lineage.

Cureus – an open access journal founded in 2009 and acquired by Springer Nature in 2022 – slapped 55 of the papers with expressions of concern in April 2022. At that time, at least one author said they didn’t know anything about the work and Cureus noted the “articles were submitted and subsequently published purportedly as an effort coordinated by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University to ensure all medical interns publish at least one peer-reviewed article in order to qualify for enrollment in a postgraduate residency program as stipulated by The Saudi Commission for Health Specialties (SCFHS).”

At the time, Cureus’ founding editor in chief John Adler told us “The investigation has been frustratingly slow due to the relative unresponsiveness of Saudi gov officials.” Apparently, that remained the case. This week, the journal retracted 56 studies. All of the retraction notices read the same way:

Sociology journal’s entire editorial board resigns after Springer Nature appointed new leadership

The entire editorial board of a sociology journal has resigned after they say that the publisher, Springer Nature, installed new editors-in-chief without consulting the board — but Springer Nature says they tried unsuccessfully to engage the board on planning going back at least five years.

In December 2023, senior editors of the journal, Theory and Society, learned Springer Nature “had opted for a ‘completely different view’ of the journal going forward,” according to a message shared on a listserv for the American Sociological Association and published on the blog Scatterplot. The 10 senior editors subsequently resigned, they told their colleagues, but didn’t offer additional details.

On January 4, the journal’s corresponding editors also resigned, according to a resignation letter shared with the sociology listserv. The corresponding editors cited Springer Nature’s decision to replace Janet Gouldner, the former executive editor (and widow of the journal’s founding editor, Alvin Gouldner), without consulting the rest of the editorial board. They wrote:

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