Category: by journal

Ethics, authorship concerns sink homeopathy paper by researchers arrested last year

For a host of reasons, a journal has retracted a paper co-authored by a researcher who reportedly once faced charges of practicing medicine without proper qualifications.

According to the retraction notice for “Psorinum Therapy in Treating Stomach, Gall Bladder, Pancreatic, and Liver Cancers: A Prospective Clinical Study,” published Dec. 8, 2010 in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the paper was plagued by:

Continue reading Ethics, authorship concerns sink homeopathy paper by researchers arrested last year

Child took wrong compound for over a year after “communication error”

Credit: Steven Depolo, Flickr

A journal is retracting a paper after it discovered researchers gave a child the wrong supplement for more than a year.

Rhiannon Bugno, managing editor for Biological Psychiatry, told Retraction Watch the mix-up did not put the patient at risk. However, the mistake was enough for the journal’s editor, John Krystal, of Yale University, to request the retraction of a 2016 paper describing the young girl’s experience taking the compound,“Rett-like Severe Encephalopathy Caused by a De Novo GRIN2B Mutation Is Attenuated by D-serine Dietary Supplement.”

Originally published June 17, 2016, the paper was retracted Jan. 15. Led by corresponding author Xavier Altafaj, of the University of Barcelona (UB) and Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), researchers described using an amino acid, D-serine, to treat a child with a rare genetic disorder that affects neurons.

According to the notice, the researchers did use D-serine in lab work used as proof-of-concept; however, when it came time to try it in the patient, as a result of a “communication error:”

Continue reading Child took wrong compound for over a year after “communication error”

Caught Our Notice: Bioethics article retracted for…ethics violation

Title: Bioethics and Medical Education

What Caught Our Attention: As we’ve said before, you can’t make this stuff up: An article on bioethics had its own ethical issues to deal with. It turns out, the authors had “substantial unreferenced overlap” with another article, that “overlap” including the article’s title. Here’s a side by side comparison of the first page, highlighting the matching text: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Bioethics article retracted for…ethics violation

Oops: Elsevier journal retracts the wrong paper

When Saidur Rahman learned last month that his 2010 review paper about nanoparticles in refrigeration systems had been retracted, he was concerned—no one at the journal had told him it was going to be pulled.

Rahman, a professor of engineering at Sunway University in Selangor, Malaysia, had recently corrected his 2010 review in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews—specifically, in January, the journal published a two-page correction rewriting the parts of the paper that were “appear close to some materials we had included in some of our other review research.” But Rahman was not anticipating a retraction. Continue reading Oops: Elsevier journal retracts the wrong paper

Data in biofuel paper “had either been grossly misinterpreted or fabricated”

A biology journal has retracted a 2011 paper after the University of California, Los Angeles determined that the data in three figures “cannot be supported.”

In February, the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology retracted the paper, which explores efforts to engineer bacteria to convert plant biomass into biofuel.

Claudia Modlin, assistant director of UCLA’s Office of Research Policy and Compliance, told Retraction Watch that the university informed the journal about the issues last October, after reviewing the work. Continue reading Data in biofuel paper “had either been grossly misinterpreted or fabricated”

Caught Our Notice: No retraction for “likely fraudulent” study

Title: Homocysteine as a predictive factor for hip fracture in elderly women with Parkinson’s disease

What Caught Our Attention:  In a letter to the editor, researchers led by Mark Bolland recently outlined the many reasons why a study by Yoshihiro Sato and colleagues in The American Journal of Medicine was “unreliable,” including evidence that the patient numbers were not achievable as described, and inconsistencies and errors in the study data. And let’s not forget a 2016 analysis (co-authored by Bolland) which cast doubt on Sato’s body of work, suggesting that more than 30 of his papers could be problematic. Continue reading Caught Our Notice: No retraction for “likely fraudulent” study

When a journal is delisted, authors pay a price

Shocked, confused, disappointed — these are the reactions of authors who recently published in a cancer journal that was delisted by a company that indexes journals.

Recently, Clarivate Analytics announced it would discontinue indexing Oncotarget after the first few issues of 2018 — as a result, the journal would not receive a current impact factor. The company did not tell us a specific reason why, simply saying it “no longer meets the standards necessary for continued coverage.” Last year, the journal was also removed from the U.S. government biomedical research database MEDLINE, also with no explanation. (At the time, the National Library of Medicine’s Associate Director for Library Operations told us readers who are familiar with the guidelines MEDLINE follows when deselecting journals “can draw their own conclusions” as to why Oncotarget was removed.)

After we covered Clarivate’s decision to delist Oncotarget, many posted comments on the story, including suggestions the move could hurt authors who submitted papers before the announcement. (Some comments also appeared to be versions of the same request that the journal be indexed through January 15.)

We reached out to many of the corresponding authors on papers in the January 26 issue, the seventh issue published in 2018. Many are based at leading institutions around the world; all had submitted their manuscripts months ago. Some noted that they were surprised by the decision, as the review process appeared quite rigorous; some told us that if they’d known the journal was going to be delisted, they would not have submitted their papers there.

Continue reading When a journal is delisted, authors pay a price

Retraction count for Italian researcher swells to 15 as five papers fall

A researcher who is facing a criminal investigation in Italy for research misconduct has seen five more papers retracted, for a total of 16 15.

Molecular and Cellular Biology has retracted four papers published between 1987 to 2001 by Alfredo Fusco, a cancer researcher in Italy; the Journal of Virology retracted one 1985 paper. Fusco was first author on two papers and last author on three. Both journals are published by The American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which issued identical retraction notices for all five papers, mentioning “evidence of apparent manipulation and duplication.”

Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher now at the Ohio State University, who has been dogged by misconduct allegations, co-authored one of the papers.  Croce now has eight retractions.

Here’s the notice presented for all five retractions: Continue reading Retraction count for Italian researcher swells to 15 as five papers fall

A “GROSS CASE OF PLAGIARISM:” How did one Elsevier journal plagiarize another?

Nicholas Peppas

When Nicholas Peppas, chair of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, discovered one of his papers had been plagiarized, he decided to “go public!”

On February 27, Peppas tweeted about a “gross case of plagiarism:” He alleged a 2013 review published in Saudi Pharmaceutical Journal had directly copied sections of his 2011 review in Advanced Drug Delivery Reviews—both published by Elsevier. (The tweet includes a side-by-side image of a section of the two texts.) Continue reading A “GROSS CASE OF PLAGIARISM:” How did one Elsevier journal plagiarize another?

Overlooked virus “generated a mess,” infected highly cited Cell, PNAS papers

When Alexander Harms arrived at the University of Copenhagen in August 2016, as a postdoc planning to study a type of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, he carried with him a warning from another lab who had recruited him:

People said, “If you go there, you have to deal with these weird articles that nobody believes.”

The papers in question had been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011 and Cell in 2013. Led by Kenn Gerdes, Harms’s new lab director, the work laid out a complex chain of events that mapped out how an E. coli bacterium can go into a dormant state, called persistence, that allows it to survive while the rest of its colony is wiped out.

Despite some experts’ skepticism, each paper had been cited hundreds of times. And Harms told us:

I personally did believe in the published work. There had been papers from others that kind of attacked [the Gerdes lab’s theory], but that was not high-quality work.

But by November 2016, Harms figured out that the skeptics had been right.  Continue reading Overlooked virus “generated a mess,” infected highly cited Cell, PNAS papers