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.
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:
The Images in Clinical Medicine section of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is prime real estate for physicians and others wanting to share a compelling picture with their colleagues. But earlier this month, an eye specialist in Michigan saw double when he looked at the Dec. 5, 2019, installment of the feature.
Depicted was a picture from a pair of eye specialists in India who claimed to have seen a case of a person who’d suffered retinal bleeding after having been struck in the eye by a tennis ball:
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:
More than five years after comments appeared on PubPeer about a 2012 paper in PLoS ONE with a raft of problematic images — and a deceased member of the group whom the corresponding author suggests might have been able to support the validity of the data — the journal has retracted the article.
The article, “Placental expression of CD100, CD72 and CD45 is dysregulated in human miscarriage,” was written by a team of researchers at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, in Ancona, Italy. The first, and corresponding, author of the paper was Teresa Lorenzi, of the school’s Division of Neuroscience and Cell Biology.
The paper has 19 citations, including two in 2019, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The lengthy notice begins with a rundown of 14 questions about three of the paper’s figures. We’ll spare you the entire catalog of ships, but here are a few examples:
With that in mind, six librarians from institutions in Wisconsin had a question: ” What are the characteristics of citations of the retracted 1998 article by Wakefield et al that purported to show an association between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism?” A paper describing their findings was published on Friday in JAMA Network Open.
We asked corresponding author Elizabeth Suelzer, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, to answer several questions about the paper.
Retraction Watch (RW): Why did you decide to focus on the Wakefield paper, and what were your findings?
A group of dentistry researchers in Japan, whose work on stem cells has been the subject of an institutional investigation, have now lost two papers in PLOS ONE for image problems.
The authors, from Aichi Gakuin University in Nagoya, were led by Makio Mogi, a medicinal biochemist at the school. Mogi asked for at least one of the retractions.
The first article, published in 2013, was titled “Matrix metalloproteinase-3 in odontoblastic cells derived from Ips cells: unique proliferation response as odontoblastic cells derived from ES cells.” It has been cited 18 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. According to the notice:
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.
Anyone who lives near or has ever driven past a cattle ranch knows this much: No amount of perfume can mask the smell of bullshit. If you want proof, and you don’t have a car, just ask the editors of Frontiers in Public Health.
In 2014, the journalpublished a paper by a researcher in Texas, Patricia Goodson, who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS. In response to the predictable outcry, the journal blinked, sort of.