by country – Page 20 – Retraction Watch

PLOS ONE retracts a paper first flagged in 2015 — and breaks the 100 retraction barrier for 2019

A team of researchers in Saudi Arabia, led by an ex-pat from Johns Hopkins University, has lost three papers for problems with the images in their articles.

The three retractions pushed the journal — which has become a “major retraction engine” for reasons we explain here and here — over 100 for 2019.

In December, PLOS ONE retrcated three papers by the group, led by Michael DeNiro, of the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. First, the journal retracted a 2011 article, “Inhibition of reactive gliosis prevents neovascular growth in the mouse model of oxygen-induced retinopathy,” the co-authors were Falah H Al-Mohanna and Futwan A Al-Mohanna. According to the retraction notice:

‘A satisfactory explanation was not provided’: Physicists in India lose third paper

A team of physicists in India has notched their third retraction for problematic images and other issues that also have prompted at least four corrections of their work.

The authors, Sk. Shahenoor Basha, of the Solid State Ionics Laboratory at KL University in Guntur, and M.C. Rao, of Andhra Loyola College in Vijayawada, have lost a 2018 article in the International Journal of Polymer Science titled ““Spectroscopic and electrochemical properties of [PVA/PVP]:[MgCl2{6H2O}] blend polymer electrolyte films.”

According to the retraction notice:

Award-winning researcher in India retracts two papers, corrects three

Kithiganahalli Narayanaswamy Balaji, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has retracted two papers and corrected three for duplication of images.

Balaji, who won the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize from India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) “for outstanding contributions to science and technology,” is last author of the five papers, which were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) from 2008 to 2015.

The authors take responsibility for what they call “inadvertent mistakes.” The retraction notice for “Pathogen-specific TLR2 protein activation programs macrophages to induce Wnt-β-catenin signaling,” for example, concludes as follows:

‘We badly need to change processes’: How ‘slow, opaque and inconsistent’ journals’ responses to misconduct can be

Two researchers from Japan — Jun Iwamoto and the late Yoshihiro Sato — have slowly crept up our leaderboard of retractions to positions 3 and 4. They have that dubious distinction because a group of researchers from the University of Auckland the University of Aberdeen, who have spent years analyzing the work. As their efforts continue, those researchers have been analyzing how journals respond to allegations, and what effect Sato and Iwamoto’s misconduct has had on the clinical literature. We asked three of the common authors of two recently published papers to answer some questions.

Retraction Watch (RW): Tell us a bit about the case you analyzed in these two papers, and what you found.

Political science prof up to five retractions after she “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources”

A professor of political science at the University of Porto in Portugal has had at least five papers retracted for plagiarism.

Or, as one journal put it, Teresa Cierco “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources.”

Cierco’s areas of research include Kosovo, Macedonia, and Timor-Leste. The retractions, for papers published in 2013 and 2014, began in 2013, with three happening this year.

Cierco told Retraction Watch that she now realizes that she “did things wrong and tried to correct them.”

Criminologist to have four papers retracted following months of scrutiny

A criminology professor at Florida State University whose work has been under the microscope for six months will have four papers retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

We first reported on the case of Eric Stewart, the FSU professor, in July, after Justin Pickett, one of the co-authors on one of the papers, posted a 27-page explanation of why he thought the article should be retracted. That followed a May 5 letter from a “John Smith” outlining problems with five papers by Stewart. Four of those papers are being retracted.

The paper Pickett co-authored, which was first published in 2011, is now being retracted by Criminology. The notice will read:

Former Johns Hopkins postdoc sanctioned by Feds for data fabrication

A former postdoc at Johns Hopkins University has been hit by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) with a four-year ban on receiving federal research funding after being found guilty of misconduct in several studies and her doctoral dissertation.

We covered problems with several of Deepti Malhotra’s papers in February of 2016. At the time, Hopkins refused to tell us if the issues stemmed from misconduct. But nearly four years later, the ORI has announced that Deepti Malhotra, while at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:

PLOS ONE realizes an academic editor had a conflict of interest that the publisher says it now tries harder to avoid

A group of genetics researchers in Italy has lost a 2014 paper in PLOS ONE for a range of image problems and a glaring conflict of interest.

The article, titled “Neuronal differentiation dictates estrogen-dependent survival and ERK1/2 kinetic by means of caveolin-1,” came from a team led by Luca Colucci-D’Amato, of the Second University of Naples.

The retraction notice in PLOS ONE lays out a raft of issues with the paper, for example:

No ‘possible fraudulent explanation’: Frequent co-author tasked with clearing colleagues of image manipulation

A journal has allowed a group of researchers in Italy to correct a 2016 paper with questionable images after a faculty member in their institution — and a frequent co-author of the group’s — said his investigation found no reason to doubt their integrity.

The article, “Arg tyrosine kinase modulates TGF-β1 production in human renal tubular cells under high-glucose conditions,” appeared in the Journal of Cell Science. Earlier this year, a poster on PubPeer pointed out “problematic similarities” with figures in the article.

The similarities evidently didn’t trouble Fulvio Magni, a professor of biochemistry at Milano-Bicocca who was tasked with investigating the case. Magni, we think we should note, has also been a co-author with members of the research group (see here, here, here and here, for a few examples).

According to the correction:

Former Northwestern psychology prof has paper subjected to an expression of concern

A paper by Ping Dong, a former researcher at Northwestern who left her post less than a year after having a paper retracted from Psychological Science, has been subjected to an expression of concern.

The 2017 paper, in the Journal of Consumer Research, claimed to show that “Witnessing Moral Violations Increases Conformity in Consumption.” It has been cited just twice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Knowledge.

The expression of concern reads:

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