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Dean in Indonesia resigns following Retraction Watch report

Kumba Digdowiseiso, the dean of the economics and business faculty at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia, resigned on Thursday after a firestorm of criticism over the past week.

The move, reported widely in the Indonesian media, came eight days after Retraction Watch reported that researchers at Universiti Malaysia Terengganu alleged that Digdowiseiso had added dozens of their colleagues’ names to papers without their permission.

“This resignation is a form of my academic responsibility to the Chancellor of Unas and the academic community so as not to burden the campus in carrying out investigations into the problems I am facing,” Digdowiseiso told Kompas yesterday.

The dean who came to visit – and added dozens of authors without their knowledge

Earlier this year, a group of lecturers in Malaysia received a WhatsApp message from a colleague who had made a disturbing discovery.

The colleague, who wished to remain anonymous for this story, was looking through Google Scholar and noticed their name, and many others from their department, repeatedly appeared alongside that of an unfamiliar author: Kumba Digdowiseiso, dean of the economics and business faculty at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“We didn’t even know who this person was,” said Safwan Mohd Nor, an associate professor of finance at the university, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, adding that he was “extremely angry” when he first found out his name had been used.

Chief researcher at national Japanese institute has paper retracted for faking data

An official journal of the Japanese government has retracted a 2021 paper over concerns about misconduct in the work, which was performed in a national research center.

Here’s the retraction notice for the paper, titled “Development and Evaluation of Fluorescence Immunochomatography for Rapid and Sensitive Detection of Thermophilic Campylobacter”:

Food Safety decided to retract this article in which the primary author misconducted as reported from the primary author’s affiliation.

Far more details are available in materials published last December by Japan’s National Institute of Health Sciences, where the first author of the article, Hiroshi Asakura, is chief researcher. According to a press release dated Dec. 26, 2023:

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.

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