plos one – Retraction Watch

Duke scientists lose eight papers for alleged image manipulation

Eight papers by two emeritus researchers from Duke University have been retracted in recent months for alleged image duplications. Although the researchers had worked at the university for decades, Duke officials have not responded to repeated inquiries about the retractions.

The papers were published between 2004 and 2014 in The Journal of Cellular Biochemistry and PLOS One. According to the retraction statements, the articles contained images and figures that appeared similar or identical to others in the same paper or published elsewhere.

The two researchers, Salvatore Pizzo, a former chair of Duke’s Department of Pathology, and his colleague Uma Kant Misra, spent much of their careers studying prostate cancer. From 1993 to 2015, Pizzo and Misra published 70 papers together, with 26 where they are the only authors. Pizzo did not respond to repeated emails from Retraction Watch asking for comment. Misra died Sept. 18.

Authors defend retracted paper on vitamin D and COVID-19 called ‘deeply bizarre’ by critic

PLOS One has retracted a paper linking vitamin D levels and COVID-19 morbidity three years after a critic flagged the data in the study as “deeply bizarre.” The authors objected to the retraction, with one calling it “outrageous” and pointing to flaws in the published notice.

The article, which appeared in February 2022, claimed people with low levels of vitamin D were at increased risk for severe COVID-19 and were more likely to die of the disease than other patients. It has been cited 65 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The paper had a “huge, immediate impact,” said Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, a senior research fellow from the University of Wollongong in Australia, citing the fact that the paper had been viewed over 1 million times within six weeks of being published. The article joins others, many also flagged by Meyerowitz-Katz, purporting to find links between vitamin D intake and COVID-19 severity that have been retracted or removed.

PLOS One slaps four papers with expressions of concern for overlapping control data

Four papers from a team of researchers in Japan have received expressions of concern for overlap in control samples, data, study design and statistical analyses. The publisher of the articles says it has closed its investigation.

The notices were published in PLOS One from July 31 to August 3 to inform readers of “study design concerns” and to provide additional supplementary data. They also cite a pair of related papers in other journals for the same problems, but those articles remain unmarked.

Masaya Oki, a professor of applied chemistry and biotechnology at the University of Fukui in Japan, is the corresponding author on all six papers. Each discusses the effects of a different gene inhibitor on cataracts taken from rat eyes. While the authors used multiple methods to study these effects, the EOCs concern the results obtained using microarrays to compare lens samples.

Fourth retraction for Italian scientist comes 11 years after sleuths flagged paper

PLOS One has retracted a 2011 paper first flagged for image issues 11 years ago. The retraction marks the fourth for the paper’s lead author, Gabriella Marfè of the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli,” in Caserta, Italy.

“Involvement of FOXO Transcription Factors, TRAIL-FasL/Fas, and Sirtuin Proteins Family in Canine Coronavirus Type II-Induced Apoptosis,” has been cited 41 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Elisabeth Bik flagged the article on PubPeer in 2014 for apparent image manipulation and duplication in six figures. In a 2019 email to PLOS staff, pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis drew attention to Bik’s findings. The journal retracted the paper on May 6 of this year.

Replication probe finds ‘statistically improbable data’ tied to institute in Bangladesh

A Bangladesh-based organization focused on development economics and its founder have been churning out papers filled with misstatements, inconsistencies, ethical lapses and “statistically improbable data,” according to researchers involved in an ongoing effort to replicate the work.

One journal has already retracted a paper for falsely claiming to describe a randomized, controlled trial and data collection that failed to adhere to the journal’s ethical guidelines. The study, published in the European Economic Review, was retracted following a March 11 report from the Institute for Replication, or I4R. The group is conducting a broader probe into the Global Development & Research Initiative (GDRI), the organization that implemented the intervention described in the paper.

GDRI’s founder and the study’s sole author is Asad Islam, a developmental economist at Monash University in Australia. Since 2022, Islam has received over $2 million in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and other organizations, according to a copy of his resume. Islam did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the retraction or the broader concerns about the work. But in a statement posted to his now-deleted account on X, he wrote:

Send lawyers, Einstein and Maugham: Authors object to PLOS ONE retraction

Here’s a tale of a paper retracted because other articles published years later seemed to plagiarize it – and its unhappy authors, whose behavior the journal says hints at paper mill activity.

On January 16 of this year, Maria Zalm, a senior editor at PLOS ONE and team manager for publication ethics, asked the authors of a 2015 paper to respond to concerns about their work – which had been flagged on PubPeer the previous November – by February 6, according to an email seen by Retraction Watch. After some apparent back and forth, Zalm wrote to the authors on March 6 to say the journal had decided to retract the article.

Exclusive: PLOS ONE to correct 1,000 papers, add author proof step

The megajournal PLOS ONE will be correcting about 1,000 papers over the next few months, Retraction Watch has learned, and will add an author proof step – a first for the journal.

The corrections are for “errors in author names, affiliations, titles and references; to make minor updates to the acknowledgements, funding statements, and data availability statements, among other minor issues,” PLOS ONE head of communications David Knutson told us. He continued:

This batch of corrections does not reflect a recent change in the journal’s quality control standards or processes. Rather, we are clearing a backlog that accumulated during a 2-year period when minor corrections were deprioritized and resources were diverted to other areas. PLOS ONE is in the process of implementing an author proof step so that in the future such errors can be identified and addressed prior to publication.

Reddit post prompts retraction of article that called Trump ‘the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter’

In October 2021, a Reddit user on the r/badscience subforum posted a long critique of an article published in PLOS ONE earlier that year that had analyzed the “anti-vaccination infodemic” on Twitter and concluded that former U.S. president Donald Trump was “the main driver of vaccine misinformation” on the platform before his account was suspended.

The critique, titled “Terrible PlosOne Paper Dissected,” listed concerns about the sample size (50 pro-vaccine and 50 anti-vaccine accounts), method of selecting the sample and control groups, and data analysis. The Redditor also looked at the reviews of the article which PLOS ONE made available, and concluded that “clearly neither reviewer actually read it in any detail.”

The day after the comment was posted, an account for PLOS Communications responded, thanking the user “for your post publication peer review” and saying that PLOS ONE was looking into the article.

‘Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate’ paper gets lengthy expression of concern

An article from 2019 that caught some media buzz – including from the New York Times – for its analysis of political speeches now bears an expression of concern that’s almost as long as the original paper.

In “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches,” published in PLOS ONE, the authors concluded that “speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties,” as they stated in their abstract.

But after reading the article, linguist Joe McVeigh, a university teacher at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, wrote an online comment on the article detailing “several fundamental and critical flaws in its methodology.” A key issue: applying the Flesh-Kincaid test, which was developed for assessing the readability of a written text, to political speeches. As McVeigh told us:

Med school vice dean says he’s correcting paper amid negative misconduct inquiry

A gastroenterology research group led by a vice dean at a medical school has requested that a journal correct a paper with an image duplicated from an earlier study by the same group, Retraction Watch has learned. The journal has not yet determined what kind of notice to place on the article.

The group’s leader informed us of the correction request in emails asking us to remove a comment on a post from June pointing out the duplicated image. He also told us that he requested the correction before his employer received an allegation of research misconduct and started an inquiry, which found he and his group had not committed research misconduct.

Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va. and chair of the department of clinical and translational science, is corresponding author on both of the papers that share an image. Sundaram also has a dual appointment at a VA medical center in Huntington.

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