by journal – Page 16 – Retraction Watch

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A whodunit: Journal retracts paper that copied from an unpublished manuscript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

Nature paper on cancer retracted after years of scrutiny

Following five years of criticism, a group of researchers based at Stanford and elsewhere have retracted a 2006 paper in Nature for “image anomalies.”

The notice for “Lysyl oxidase is essential for hypoxia-induced metastasis” reads:

Cleveland Clinic heart researchers earn two expressions of concern

A team of heart researchers at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio has received expressions of concern for two papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which says the images in the articles appear suspect.

The papers, both of which appeared in 2004, come from the lab of Subha Sen, a highly-funded scientist who has received millions in NIH grants over the past decade. Sen’s work also has drawn scrutiny on PubPeer, with comments cropping up on the site roughly three years ago for many of her papers.

In 2016, Sen’s group retracted a 2009 article in JBC titled “A unique microRNA profile in end-stage heart failure indicates alterations in specific cardiovascular signaling networks.” According to the notice:

Keeping coronavirus numbers straight: JAMA sounds an alarm

As Retraction Watch readers know, reporting on the same data more than once — without notifying editors and readers — is bad for the scientific record and can lead to a retraction. Apparently, in the rush to publish findings about the coronavirus pandemic, some researchers are doing just that.

According to an editorial in JAMA today by editor in chief Howard Bauchner and two deputy editors, Robert Golub and Jody Zylke:

Heavily criticized paper blaming the sun for global warming is retracted

A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move

a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.

The 2019 article, “Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale,” appeared in Scientific Reports and was written by a group of authors from the UK, Russia and Azerbaijan. The first author was Valentina Zharkova, a mathematician/astrophysicist at Northumbria University, whose group reported having received funding for the work from the U.S. Air Force and the Russian Science Foundation.

The paper purported to find that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field are making the earth hotter:

Letter on vaping science paper earns expression of concern because author made up a degree

Leonard Zelig, meet Zvi Herzig.

The journal Circulation has issued an expression of concern about a 2015 letter, putatively written by Herzig, in which the author poked holes in a review article about e-cigarettes.

According to the EoC, however, Herzig, like Zelig, may be a bit of a chameleon.

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