by country – Page 20 – Retraction Watch

A journal has its version of an NBA moment

Authors are calling “no traveling” on Liver Research for changing their affiliation without permission.

Editors at the publication changed the affiliation of a group of researchers from several institutions in Taiwan– including the Taipei Veterans General Hospital and the National Yang-Ming University School of Medicine, also in Taipei — to mainland China.

The notice for the article, “Do different bariatric surgery procedures impact hepassocin plasma levels in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus?,” reads:

A researcher with 30 retractions and counting: The whistleblower speaks

Via U.S. SEC Office of the Whistleblower

Retraction Watch readers who have been following our coverage of retractions by Ali Nazari may have noticed that an anonymous whistleblower was the person who flagged the issues for journals and publishers. That whistleblower uses the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta, and we’re pleased to present a guest post written by him or her.

Something is seriously out of place with the roughly 200 publications by Ali Nazari, a scientist at Swinburne University who studies structural materials. Some of these problems have been known by journals and publishers for years — some since 2012 — yet their response has been mixed. Some have retracted papers. Some have decided not to, so far. And others have been mum.

In 2014, a study claimed high heels made women more attractive. Now it’s been retracted.

Perhaps you saw the headlines back in 2014, ones like “Science Proves It: Men Really Do Find High Heels Sexier,” from TIME.

Or maybe this quote, from the author of a study in Archives of Sexual Behavior, on CNBC:

Wanted: Lawyer to take case of Ohio cancer researcher with retraction-rich CV

Carlo Croce, the embattled and litigious cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, may be on the market for a new attorney.

Croce, who unsuccessfully sued the New York Times for libel after the newspaper reported on misconduct allegations against him, has been waging a second legal front against his institution. The grounds: Croce wants Ohio State to restore him to his position as chair of the Department of Cancer Biology and Genetics — a demand OSU has so far rejected.

Court documents suggest that the case has proceeded to depositions. But we’ve learned that Croce’s attorneys in the academic matter have dropped him as a client. In a motion approved earlier this month, the lawyers, from the Columbus firm James E. Arnold & Associates, petitioned to be removed from the case.

Fishy data doom paper by USDA aquaculture researcher

A scientist for the U.S. government has lost a 2017 paper on spawning in catfish for problems with the data.

The paper, “Effective dose of salmon GnRHa for induction of ovulation in channel catfish,” was written by Nagaraj G. Chatakondi and appeared in the North American Journal of Aquaculture. Chatakondi is a geneticist with the Stoneville, Miss., office of the Agricultural Research Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

According to the notice:

‘The problem is that there is no IL-26 gene in the mouse’ — an exasperated letter leads to a retraction

A group of ophthalmology researchers in China got caught trying to pull the wool over the eyes of readers by falsely claiming to have used a therapy that doesn’t exist.

As its title would indicate, the article, “Anti-angiogenic effect of Interleukin-26 in oxygen-induced retinopathy mice via inhibiting NFATc1-VEGF pathway,” by a team from Jinhua Municipal Central Hospital in Zhejiang, purported to show that IL-26 could prevent the growth of new blood vessels in mice with damaged retinas.

Per the abstract of the paper, which appeared in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC):

“Highly unusual and unfortunate error” delays retraction two years in high-profile Duke case

As we’ve noted before, “the wheels of scientific publishing turn slowly … but they do (sometimes) turn.”

More than six years after the first retraction for Erin Potts-Kant, who was part of a group at Duke whose work would unravel amid misconduct allegations and lead to a $112.5 million settlement earlier this year with the U.S. government — and two years after a journal says it first became aware of the issues — a retraction by the group has appeared in Pediatric Research, a Springer Nature title.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Intra-amniotic LPS amplifies hyperoxia-induced airway hyperreactivity in neonatal rats”:

“Unjustified authorship” spikes paper by daughter of South Korea official

Following weeks of scrutiny, the daughter of a high-profile official in South Korea has had a paper she wrote as a high school student retracted, in part because the journal determined she had made no intellectual contributions to the study.

Cho Kuk, who was officially appointed yesterday (September 9) as the top justice official in South Korea, is embroiled in a controversy over undeserved academic advantages his daughter, Cho Min, obtained.

According to a story by Reuters about the larger controversy last week:

Criminology saga leads to an expression of concern, and a correction

Earlier this year, Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the University of Albany at the State University of New York, asked journals to look into potentially problematic data in five papers — including one on which he had been a co-author.

As we reported in July, Pickett’s request came after he’d received an anonymous email pointing out issues with the data — concerns ranging from “Anomalies in standard errors, coefficients, and p-values” to “Unlikely survey design and data structure.”

At the time, one of the five articles had already received a correction for a “coding error” that changed the results. Pickett requested that the journal retract the paper entirely, but was rebuffed.

Now, two other journals have taken action on the articles on the list.

“Questioned as implausible:” Journal retracts paper because a researcher claimed to perform a large clinical trial single-handedly

Is it possible for just one researcher to perform a clinical trial of more than 200 participants?

According to the editorial board of the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, an Elsevier title, the answer would seem to be no. The journal has decided to retract a 2016 paper in which the author claimed to have conducted such a large trial on their own.

Here’s the notice for “Calcium versus oral contraceptive pills containing drospirenone for the treatment of mild to moderate premenstrual syndrome: A double blind randomized placebo controlled trial:”

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