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“Consistently unsurprised”: Nigerian vaccine study with no Nigerian authors retracted

Last month, PLOS ONE published a paper reporting on a trial to improve the uptake of the measles vaccine in Nigeria. The researchers were affiliated with IDinsight, a San Francisco-based “global advisory, data analytics, and research organization that helps development leaders maximize their social impact.”

San Francisco is about 7,800 miles from Lagos, and the list of authors — Sam Brownstone, Alison Connor and Daniel Stein, a former economist at the World Bank — seemed suspiciously devoid of Nigerian names.

That omission was even more strange given the title of the article: “Improving measles vaccine uptake rates in Nigeria: An RCT evaluating the impact of incentive sizes and reminder calls on vaccine uptake.” Almost immediately after publication, Ejemai Eboreime, a physician and public health worker, pointed out on Twitter the implausibility of the implied claim that no local scientists were involved in a randomized controlled trial covering nine clinics throughout the country — which he alleged also was a violation of local research ethics provisions.

Authors of study on race and police killings ask for its retraction, citing “continued misuse” in the media

The authors of a controversial paper on race and police shootings say they are retracting the article, which became a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, and now amid protests following the murder of George Floyd.

[See an update on this post.]

The 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.” It has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “hot paper” designation.

Joseph Cesario, a researcher at Michigan State University, told Retraction Watch that he and David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author, have submitted a request for retraction to PNAS. In the request, they write:

Drug delivery study with duplicated images is retracted

A study that found a way to deliver certain kinds of drugs more effectively in mice is being retracted today.

The study, “Molecular targeting of FATP4 transporter for oral delivery of therapeutic peptide” was overseen by Haifa Shen at the Houston Methodist Research Institute and published in Science Advances on April 1.

Several readers, including scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik, posted concerns about the article’s images on PubPeer within weeks of the paper’s publication. The concerns involved overlapping and duplicate images, and this gem:

Could the authors clarify if some of the mice had two sets of major organs, please?

The retraction notice says:

Figure “anomalies” prompt Harvard group to retract Nature paper

A group of researchers based at Harvard Medical School have retracted their 2019 paper in Nature after a data sleuth detected evidence of suspect images in the article.

The move comes ten months after the journal first heard from the sleuth, Elisabeth Bik.

The paper, “Fatty acids and cancer-amplified ZDHHC19 promote STAT3 activation through S-palmitoylation,” came from the lab of Xu Wu, of the Cutaneous Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues. It appeared last August — and immediately caught the attention of Rune Linding, who flagged it for Bik, who in turn noticed several regions of concerning duplications in a few of the Western blots that appeared in the paper.

On August 29 of last year, Bik tweeted:

JAMA journal retracts well-publicized paper linking doctor burnout to patient safety

A JAMA journal has retracted a 2018 paper linking physician burnout to poor patient care, after a misconduct inquiry found evidence of shoddy work but not data fabrication.

The article, “Association between physician burnout and patient safety, professionalism, and patient satisfaction: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” was published in JAMA Internal Medicine by a group based at the National Institute for Health Research Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, in England. The journal also published a commentary on the article and three letters to the editor, which have been flagged to indicate the new retraction.

The paper — which concluded that burned-out doctors might be jeopardizing the well-being of their patients — received a significant amount of coverage in the media, with stories trumpeting the take-home message that:

Associate VP for research at Georgia State is up to 10 retractions

The associate vice president for research at Georgia State University and founding director of the university’s Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine has had his tenth paper retracted.

Like the nine previous retractions for Ming-Hui Zou, the work underlying the newly retracted paper in PLOS ONE was performed while Zou was at Oklahoma State University.

The extensive retraction notice for “Activation of the AMP-Activated Protein Kinase (AMPK) by Nitrated Lipids in Endothelial Cells” refers to problems in six of the paper’s figures, including unexpected similarities and likely splicing. It concludes:

A whodunit: Journal retracts paper that copied from an unpublished manuscript

A journal has retracted a 2015 paper because it apparently plagiarized a manuscript submitted two years earlier — but we’re scratching our heads about how it all happened.

The paper, “Chattering-free variable structure controller design via fractional calculus approach and its application,” was published in Nonlinear Dynamics and has been cited 15 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Here’s the notice:

A study finding no evidence of racial bias in police shootings earns a correction that critics call an “opaque half measure”

A group of researchers who published a controversial study that found no evidence of racial bias in deadly police shootings have corrected their paper but are standing by their findings — to the displeasure of some scholars who say the article is too flawed to stand.

The 2019 study, “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” was written by David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and several co-authors from Michigan State University. According to the abstract:

Too hot to handle: Authors retract Science paper on electromagnetics

Sometimes scientific findings can be too hot to handle. Literally.

A team of researchers in India and Japan who reported breakthrough results in two papers about electromagnetics, including an article in Science, are retracting the articles because the exciting data resulted from experimental error. To be precise: unbeknownst to them, inadvertent heating of their samples had contaminated their data.

The first author of both articles is Chanchal Sow, of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. The last author on both is Yoshiteru Maeno, a professor of physics at Kyoto University.

Here’s the notice:

Former UCSD prof who resigned amid investigation into China ties retracts paper for ‘inadvertently misidentified’ images

Kang Zhang, a formerly high-profile geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who resigned his post last July amidst an investigation into undisclosed ties to China, has retracted a paper because some of its images were taken from other researchers’ work.

The paper, “Impaired lipid metabolism by age-dependent DNA methylation alterations accelerates aging,” was submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last fall, months after Zhang’s resignation. One of Zhang’s fellow corresponding authors, Jian-Kang Zhu, used the journal’s “Contributed Submissions” process, in which “An NAS member may contribute up to two of her or his own manuscripts for publication in PNAS each year.”

PNAS published the paper on February 6 of this year. But on February 18, authors of a different paper, in Aging Cell, sent the editors of PNAS a letter, writing:

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