by country – Page 6 – Retraction Watch

Overturning a dubious retraction proves difficult for education professor

For the past eight years, an education researcher in Spain has been waging an unsuccessful battle – including legal action – to quash a retraction she argues should never have happened.

Her paper, about the use of digital tools in early childhood education, was pulled by Computers & Education just months after it was published in 2015. According to the retraction notice, the article was submitted for publication while it was still under review at another journal, violating editorial policies against duplicate submission.

But according to the researcher, Elena Ramírez Orellana of the University of Salamanca, her paper had already been rejected by the first journal before it was sent to the other. She had the documents to prove it, she said, but that didn’t matter.

Former Stanford president retracts 1999 Cell paper

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the former president of Stanford University who resigned following scrutiny of his published papers and an institutional research misconduct investigation, has retracted a third paper, this one from Cell.

Last week, Tessier-Lavigne retracted two articles from Science that had been published in 2001.

The Cell paper, A Ligand-Gated Association between Cytoplasmic Domains of UNC5 and DCC Family Receptors Converts Netrin-Induced Growth Cone Attraction to Repulsion, was published in 1999. It has been cited 577 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice was posted Monday. It states:

Exclusive: UCSF and VA found “pervasive” manipulation in lab of former center director

Two institutional investigations that concluded in 2016 and 2019 found scientific misconduct in multiple publications from the lab of a leading urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Retraction Watch has learned.

The investigations could not determine who had manipulated the published images of experimental data, but the 2019 report concluded that Rajvir Dahiya, also director of the urology research center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “was senior/last author on all these publications and therefore responsible for the results.” Dahiya retired in 2020.

The two investigation reports, which we obtained through a public records request, along with the reports from the preliminary inquiries preceding the investigations, recommend notifying the journals that published eight papers of the issues identified. Four have so far been retracted, one corrected, and two marked with expressions of concern. One of those expressions of concern was published last month.

In comments to Retraction Watch, Dahiya blamed the findings that research misconduct occurred in his lab on the age of the papers. He said the VA destroyed notebooks with original data that had been stored in a central facility after the required data retention period had lapsed:

Exclusive: World-renowned biologist accused of bullying student, stealing his work

One of the world’s foremost conservation biologists is being accused of plagiarism and bullying by a former PhD student, Retraction Watch has learned.

The biologist, Stuart Pimm of Duke University, strongly denies the charges, but he and his colleagues have acknowledged the existence of “closely related” work following an internal investigation by Duke.

The allegations surfaced late last month on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a thread that quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and drawing comments from a broad swath of scientists.

In the thread, Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke” to make him work faster. Palacio decided to change labs due to the alleged “bullying and harassment,” he said, and three months later, in April 2020, published his research as a preprint. The article appeared in the journal Diversity and Distributions in October 2021.

Colombia drug regulator halts clinical research at US-funded facility

Following an inspection earlier this month, Colombia’s FDA has suspended all human research at a facility that until this summer had been receiving U.S. funding to develop a malaria vaccine.

The Malaria Vaccine and Development Center, in the city of Cali in western Colombia, is part of the Caucaseco Scientific Research Consortium, which is run by husband-and-wife team Myriam Arévalo-Herrera and Sócrates Herrera. The couple has secured more than $17 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2003.

As we reported in April, an investigation by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) exposed a host of serious problems at the facilities, including widespread animal abuse and falsified research approvals. The NIH defunded the facilities in June, as first reported by STAT.

According to a statement released on August 5 (in Spanish), the Colombian National Institute of Drug and Food Surveillance (Invima) made the following findings during its inspection of the Malaria Vaccine and Development Center:

President of Japanese university resigns after findings of ‘self-plagiarism’

The president of Aizu University in Japan has resigned after two investigations found he had self-plagiarized or double-submitted a dozen papers.

Toshiaki Miyazaki was also found to have “filed an application for a project subsidized by the national government without going through the university official procedures,” which “caused confusion,” according to Aizu. He resigned effective today [July 31].

The move comes more than a year after the first investigation, as we reported, which concluded in February 2022 and found that Miyazaki had self-plagiarized four papers. At that time, he had to forfeit 20% of one month’s salary.

A month later, according to a report issued last week by the university, Miyazaki “self-reported that there were 12 papers suspected of self-plagiarism.” A preliminary investigation then began, with a full investigation starting in April and lasting until February of this year.

Exclusive: Public health journal says it will retract vaping paper for questions authors say were addressed in peer review

The journal BMC Public Health plans to retract an article that found smoking rates fell faster than expected in the US as use of e-cigarettes increased, Retraction Watch has learned.

The authors contend that they addressed the issues cited in the retraction notice during the peer review process and say they addressed them even more extensively when the journal said they intended to retract.

The paper, “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults,” was published last October. The authors are all employees of Pinney Associates, a consulting firm that they disclosed “provide[s] consulting services on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc.” The article also disclosed that Juul Labs funded the research and reviewed and provided comments on a draft manuscript.

Some journals, including several in the BMJ family and the American Journal of Public Health, will not publish research funded by the tobacco industry, which has led to at least one retraction. But the planned BMC Public Health retraction notice does not refer to that conflict of interest.

Florida university fires criminology professor blemished by retractions

Florida State University last week terminated a criminology professor accused of research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned, capping a years-long, highly publicized saga the school says has caused almost “catastrophic” damage to its standing.

In a termination letter obtained by Retraction Watch, the university accused the former professor, Eric A. Stewart, of “extreme negligence and incompetence.” It also asserted that, due to Stewart’s actions, “decades of research” once believed “to be at the forefront of” criminology has “been shown to contain numerous erroneous and false narratives.”

“The details of problematic data management, false results, and the numerous publication retractions have negatively affected the discipline on a national level,” FSU Provost James J. Clark wrote in the letter, dated July 13.

Clark added that the debacle had also affected recruitment of faculty and students and caused the university’s researchers to worry about their chances of getting papers into top journals.

Journal to retract papers that cost its impact factor and spot in leading index

A journal that didn’t get an impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified unusual citations in several articles will retract the offending papers, according to its editor.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports due to citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations, also known as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.”

Specifically, Clarivate identified five papers published in Genetika in 2021 that had been cited by 22 papers published in the journal Bioscience Research in 2022, Snezana Mladenovic Drinic, the editor of Genetika, told Retraction Watch. Clarivate also suppressed Bioscience Research this year, meaning that the journal did not receive a new impact factor either.

University finds former lecturer with two retractions plagiarized in seven publications

A former lecturer in the modern languages department of the University of St Andrews in Scotland committed plagiarism in seven papers published between 2014 and 2022, according to the results of an institutional investigation.

The university posted a statement on its website about the outcome of the investigation that did not name the researcher, who Retraction Watch has learned is Ros Holmes.

Holmes has two retractions in our database, both for plagiarism.

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