by journal – Page 6 – Retraction Watch

Exclusive: NIH researcher resigned amid retractions, including Nature paper

A tenure-track investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a division of the National Institutes of Health, resigned in March, as questions mounted about her work, Retraction Watch has learned.

Jennifer Martinez has retracted at least two papers, including a 2016 Nature paper with the chair of the immunology department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., and has another marked with an expression of concern.

The retraction is the first for Douglas R. Green of St. Jude, although he’s had a handful of corrections and two other papers he published in Nature have been questioned by scientists who couldn’t replicate the results.

After a postdoc at St. Jude, Martinez led an independent research program at NIEHS in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina since 2015, according to an online CV. She resigned from NIEHS in March and a federal research watchdog is looking into her work, a spokesperson told us:

Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza retracts four papers

A Johns Hopkins researcher who shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology has retracted four papers from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) for concerns about images in the articles.

Gregg Semenza is “one of today’s preeminent researchers on the molecular mechanisms of oxygen regulation,” the work for which he shared the 2019 Nobel, according to Hopkins. But even before that, the pseudonymous Claire Francis began pointing out potential image duplications and other manipulations in Semenza’s work on PubPeer, as described in October 2020 by Leonid Schneider.

The four papers retracted yesterday are:

‘It’s time to devise a more efficient solution’: Science editor in chief wants to change the retraction process

On the heels of a high-profile retraction that followed deep investigations by the Science news team, Holden Thorp, the editor in chief of the journal, says it’s time to improve the process of correcting the scientific record.

In an editorial published today, Thorp, a former university provost, describes the often time-consuming and frustrating process involving journals, universities, and government agencies that are often at odds, or at least have different priorities. Based on the experience of what can feel like gridlock, he calls for breaking the process into two stages:

Science retracts coral reef recovery paper more than a year after a report on allegations in its own pages

Fifteen months after its news division published an investigation into work on coral reef recovery, Science has retracted a 2014 paper on the subject.

The article, “Chemically mediated behavior of recruiting corals and fishes: A tipping point that may limit reef recovery,” was written by a group at Georgia Institute of Technology led by Danielle Dixson, then a postdoc at the university. Science issued an expression of concern in February of this year, as we reported then.

According to the retraction notice, signed by Science editor in chief Holden Thorp, the University of Delaware, Lewes, where Dixson has been running her own lab, “no longer [has] confidence in the validity of the data”:

Exclusive: PLOS ONE to retract more than 100 papers for manipulated peer review

In March, an editor at PLOS ONE noticed something odd among a stack of agriculture manuscripts he was handling. One author had submitted at least 40 manuscripts over a 10-month period, much more than expected from any one person.

The editor told the ethics team at the journal about the anomaly, and they started an investigation. Looking at the author lists and academic editors who managed peer review for the papers, the team found that some names kept popping up repeatedly.

Within a month, the initial list of 50 papers under investigation expanded to more than 300 submissions received since 2020 – about 100 of them already published – with concerns about improper authorship and conflicts of interest that compromised peer review.

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions

Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.

The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.

One 2021 article, “Numerical investigation of nanofluid flow using CFD and fuzzy-based particle swarm optimization,” drew a significant amount of attention on PubPeer. In January, a commenter pointed out a variety of apparent problems with the paper and noted that questions have been raised about other work by members of the group – including this now-retracted article in … Scientific Reports.

The Lancet more than doubles its impact factor, eclipsing NEJM for the first time ever

The Lancet has overtaken the New England Journal of Medicine as the medical journal with the highest impact factor, according to Clarivate’s 2022 update to its Journal Citation Reports. And the jump wasn’t subtle: The Lancet’s impact factor – a controversial measure of how often a journal’s papers are cited on average – more than doubled from last year.

Lancet can thank the COVID-19 pandemic for its surge.

In separate news, Clarivate suppressed three journals for self-citation, and warned a half dozen others.

As we’ve written in posts on previous years’ reports:

Cornell food marketing researcher who retired after misconduct finding is publishing again

Brian Wansink, the food marketing researcher who retired from Cornell in 2019 after the university found that he had committed academic misconduct, has published two new papers.

The articles, in Cureus and the International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health, appear to use data that are at least a decade old. Wansink’s only coauthor on the papers is Audrey Wansink, a high school student and, evidently, his daughter. Brian Wansink did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.

Wansink’s work came under scrutiny beginning in 2016, after he published a blog post that described research practices that sounded like p-hacking to some readers. Other researchers started reviewing his published papers and found many issues.

Journal issues 55 expressions of concern at once

The journal Cureus has issued expressions of concern for a whopping 55 papers whose authorship has come into question.

The articles, including a couple like this one on COVID-19, were apparently submitted as part of an effort by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, in Saudi Arabia, to pad the publishing resumes of its medical students – and perhaps the school’s own metrics – who targeted Cureus for reasons that aren’t now clear.

Here’s the notice for “Sylvian Fissure Lipoma: An Unusual Etiology of Seizures in Adults,” which the journal published in January 2022:

Chemistry paper retracted from Science

Science has retracted a 2020 paper which hinted at the future of eco-friendly pharmaceuticals after concluding that the data had been manipulated.

The article, “Asymmetric remote C–H borylation of aliphatic amides and esters with a modular iridium catalyst,” came from a team anchored by Masaya Sawamura, of Hokkaido University, in Sapporo.

Funding for the study – which has been cited 57 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science – came from the Japanese government and the Uehara Memorial Foundation. Hokkaido is now investigating, Science said.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The paper received some attention, including this article in Chemistry & Engineering News which described the results this way:

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