Category: by journal

PLOS ONE has retracted a paper on pneumonia in people with Covid-19 after the authors could not allay concerns about the integrity of their data. 

The article, “Lung ultrasound score in establishing the timing of intubation in COVID-19 interstitial pneumonia: A preliminary retrospective observational study,” appeared in September and was written by a group from Zhejiang University School of Medicine, in Hangzhou, China. 

About three months after publication, PLOS ONE issued an expression of concern about the article, citing suspicious overlap with a 2018 paper in a different journal. It concluded:

A veterinary researcher at the University of Maryland has lost seven papers for problematic images and other issues, bringing his retraction total to 13. 

Siba Samal, who studies viruses and vaccines, lost four of his articles in March after journals determined that figures in the papers were unreliable. And he was a co-author on papers flagged in a U.S. Office of Research Integrity finding of misconduct by another researcher.

Some of those questions were raised — first, it seems — by Elisabeth Bik, who in November 2015 reported her concerns to PLOS ONE about a different one of Samal’s articles, which she also flagged on PubPeer. 

The journal is now retracting that article, titled “Evaluation of the replication, pathogenicity, and immunogenicity of Avian Paramyxovirus (APMV) serotypes 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 in Rhesus macaques.” According to the retraction notice: 

Researchers in China have received an expression of concern for a recent paper on COVID-19 pneumonia after editors were alerted to suspicious similarities between the tables in the article and those in a 2018 study by members of the same group.

In case you missed that: The pandemic started long after 2018.

PLOS ONE has issued an expression of concern for a paper it published last month suggesting that vitamin D might protect against severe COVID-19. 

Central to the concerns is that the authors seem to have been too far out over their skis in asserting a link between the vitamin and the response to the infection. But as the EoC reveals, many of the potential problems can fairly be attributed to porous peer review as much as over-ambitious authors. 

The article, “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection,” came from a group at Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran and Boston University in the United States. According to the authors: 

In July 2014, Elisabeth Bik notified PLOS ONE that she’d found three papers in the journal by a group of researchers who had clearly manipulated figures in the articles. 

More than six years later, the journal has finally retracted the publications. 

The authors were affiliated with the Fourth Military Medical University in Shaanxi, China. The notice for 2013’s “Hyperthermia-induced NDRG2 upregulation inhibits the invasion of human hepatocellular carcinoma via suppressing ERK1/2 signaling pathway” refers to overlapping data in Figure 1A, similarities between data in Figure 1B and Figure 6C despite the fact that lanes “represent samples exposed to different experimental conditions,” and more: