by journal – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

Cureus paper by dean and medical student retracted for mislabeled ECG

The ECG from the retracted paper, which the journal said was mislabeled.

A paper by a medical student and an associate professor in Florida has been retracted for errors with the central finding of the study, an electrocardiogram whose labeling “does not actually represent any of the characteristics” of the tracing.

The paper, “Silent Myocardial Infarction: A Case Report,” was published in Cureus in August 2023 and has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice dated January 28 details issues with the tracing:

Why do nearly 45,000 scholarly papers cite themselves?

While thousands of papers cite themselves, the percentage that do so is relatively low.
*Haunschild & Bornmann/arXiv.org*

While using bibliometric techniques to measure how disruptive research papers are to their field of study, Robin Haunschild and Lutz Bornmann stumbled across a strange phenomenon.

Just under 45,000 academic papers contained citations to themselves, they found. Haunschild and Bornmann — both information scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany — found these “paper self-citations” in journals indexed by Clarivate’s Web of Science since 1980.

Some 7,943 different journals had at least one self-citing paper, the researchers report in their study, posted on arXiv.org earlier this month. Eight journals alone covered 10% of the sample papers, and 129 publications covered the top third. More than 31,000 of the papers appeared under the ‘article’ category in Web of Science, followed by just over 6,000 listed as ‘corrections’ and just under 2,500 as ‘reviews.’

A second article describing new pain syndrome under scrutiny

Among the critiques of a new article is a figure (left) duplicated from a retracted paper (right).

A second paper on a contested pain disease is under investigation after sleuths raised questions about the methodology and possible fabrication of data.

Last year, Scientific Reports retracted a paper comparing the condition, which the authors dubbed Middle East Pain Syndrome, to rheumatoid arthritis for failing to establish a clear distinction between the two ailments.

The new article, published in January in BMC Rheumatology with two overlapping authors, compares MEPS to fibromyalgia, claiming it is distinct for its “hand tufts spur-like excrescences.”

Food scientist impersonated as an editor and reviewer in Frontiers articles

Frontiers has issued a retraction and multiple corrections for papers in several of its journals after the publisher discovered a reviewer had been impersonated.

Alla El-Din Bekhit is listed as the editor of the retracted article, a study of the potential anti-cancer effects of asparagus extract published in Frontiers in Pharmacology in May 2023. According to the retraction notice, dated January 26, the article contained duplicated images and “concerns were raised regarding scientific validity of the article.” The notice continues:

Further, the investigation confirmed that a non-genuine email address was used to impersonate Alaa El-Din Bekhit and the real Alaa El-Din Bekhit did not take any actions on this manuscript.

Don’t tread on me: Snake paper retracted for ‘soft-stepping’ technique

*Bothrops jararaca* is a pit viper species prevalent in southeastern Brazil.
*Credit: Butantan Institute*

Agitating snakes isn’t something most of us would do on purpose, but for a group of researchers, it was central to their research. The authors of a May 2024 paper in Scientific Reports achieved that by “softly” stepping on the head, tail and mid-body of newborn, juvenile and adult pit vipers to see how often they would bite.

But the technique wasn’t quite what the authors’ ethics committee had in mind when approving the study. The journal retracted the paper last month, noting the ethics approval the authors received “did not include newborn snakes or the use of the ‘soft stepping’ method.”

Lead author João Miguel Alves-Nunes blamed the retraction on a “communication error” by the ethics committee. The researchers believed they had approval both to step on snakes and to include newborn snakes, Alves-Nunes, a former researcher at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, said in an email to Retraction Watch.

Seven years after ‘noncompliance’ finding, whistleblowers push for retractions

Seven years after investigations uncovered “serious noncompliance” in the collection of biological samples at a California VA hospital, the original whistleblowers say several papers related to the work use these problematic samples and should be retracted. But the principal investigator of the work says there’s no reason to question the findings.

The VA San Diego Health Care System was one of 12 institutions involved in the InTeam Consortium, a research initiative between 2013 and 2019 focused on alcohol-related liver inflammation. In 2016, two whistleblowers — Mario Chojkier and Martina Buck — alleged staff at the VA hadn’t obtained proper consent to perform biopsies on critically ill patients and use the samples for research related to the project.

Subsequent investigations — including one by VA San Diego’s institutional review board — have confirmed violations of policies, primarily related to a lack of informed consent. Ramon Bataller, the principal investigator of the InTeam Consortium, told local media outlet inewsource in 2019 the samples collected at the VA would be “banished” from any academic papers.

Exclusive: Extensive correction to Genentech PNAS article will get an update after RW inquiry

An article by Genentech scientists received an extensive correction in January for multiple instances of image duplications after comments on PubPeer spurred the authors to review the work.

But the correction “inadvertently omitted” an additional duplication, and will be updated after Retraction Watch brought the matter to the journal’s attention, a representative for the publication said. The sleuth who identified the additional duplication said the original article should have been retracted instead of corrected.

The article, “Death-receptor activation halts clathrin-dependent endocytosis,” appeared in July 2006 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with a correction issued that September. It has been cited 99 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Science paper by Toronto lab retracted

Anomalies in Figure 1 of a 2014 *Science* paper, a portion of which is shown here, is one of several in question in a retraction published in the January 10 *Science*. *Source*

A 2014 paper in Science by a lab in Toronto has been retracted after a December expression of concern raised “potential data integrity issues.”

The paper, “Mitosis Inhibits DNA Double-Strand Break Repair to Guard Against Telomere Fusions,” is from the lab of Daniel Durocher, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.

The retraction notice, published today and signed by all of the original authors, reads, in part:

Elsevier denies AI use in response to evolution journal board resignations

The publisher of the Journal of Human Evolution says it does not use artificial intelligence in its production process, contrary to a statement issued last month by the journal’s editorial board when all but one member of the group resigned.

The statement, shared on X on December 26, noted the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” were resigning because Elsevier, the journal’s publisher, “has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years.” Among the examples cited:

Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier changes

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”

“Elsevier has steadily eroded the infrastructure essential to the success of the journal while simultaneously undermining the core principles and practices that have successfully guided the journal for the past 38 years,” the journal’s “joint Editors-in-Chief, all Emeritus Editors retired or active in the field, and all but one Associate Editor” said in their resignation statement posted to X/Twitter yesterday.

Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”

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