More than five years after comments appeared on PubPeer about a 2012 paper in PLoS ONE with a raft of problematic images — and a deceased member of the group whom the corresponding author suggests might have been able to support the validity of the data — the journal has retracted the article.
The article, “Placental expression of CD100, CD72 and CD45 is dysregulated in human miscarriage,” was written by a team of researchers at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, in Ancona, Italy. The first, and corresponding, author of the paper was Teresa Lorenzi, of the school’s Division of Neuroscience and Cell Biology.
The paper has 19 citations, including two in 2019, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The lengthy notice begins with a rundown of 14 questions about three of the paper’s figures. We’ll spare you the entire catalog of ships, but here are a few examples:
A group of dentistry researchers in Japan, whose work on stem cells has been the subject of an institutional investigation, have now lost two papers in PLOS ONE for image problems.
The authors, from Aichi Gakuin University in Nagoya, were led by Makio Mogi, a medicinal biochemist at the school. Mogi asked for at least one of the retractions.
The first article, published in 2013, was titled “Matrix metalloproteinase-3 in odontoblastic cells derived from Ips cells: unique proliferation response as odontoblastic cells derived from ES cells.” It has been cited 18 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. According to the notice:
A group of genetics researchers in Italy has lost a 2014 paper in PLOS ONE for a range of image problems and a glaring conflict of interest.
The article, titled “Neuronal differentiation dictates estrogen-dependent survival and ERK1/2 kinetic by means of caveolin-1,” came from a team led by Luca Colucci-D’Amato, of the Second University of Naples.
The leader of an international team of genetics researchers is seething after a journal responded to critical tweets about their paper by issuing an expression of concern.
A pair of perfume researchers in England have lost a 2019 paper on what makes a scent appealing because, ahem, something about the data didn’t smell quite right.
The article was titled “Social success of perfumes,” and it appeared in July in PLOS ONE. There was a press release and a university writeup about the paper — but not, we should note, about the retraction.
The authors were Vaiva Vasiliauskaite and Tim S. Evans, of the Theoretical Physics Group and Centre for Complexity Science at Imperial College London.
While the presence of publication bias – the selective publishing of positive studies – in science is well known, debate continues about how extensive such bias truly is and the best way to identify it.
The most recent entrant in the debate is a paper by Robbie van Aert and co-authors, who have published a study titled “Publication bias examined in meta-analyses from psychology and medicine: A meta-meta-analysis” in PLoS ONE. Van Aert, a postdoc at the Meta-Research Center in the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Tilburg University, Netherlands, has been involved in the Open Science Collaboration’s psychology reproducibility project but has now turned his attention to understanding the extent of publication bias in the literature.
Using a sample of studies of psychology and medicine, the new “meta-meta-analysis” diverges from “previous research showing rather strong indications for publication bias” and instead suggests “only weak evidence for the prevalence of publication bias.” The analysis found mild publication bias influences psychology and medicine similarly.
Retraction Watch asked van Aert about his study’s findings. His answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
RW: How much are empiric analyses of publication bias influenced by the methods used? Based on your work, do you believe there is a preferred method to look at bias?
Two weeks ago, we covered the retraction of a PLoS ONE paper on mindfulness following criticism — dating back to 2017 — by James Coyne. At the time, the corresponding author, Maria Hunink, of Erasmus and Harvard, had not responded to a request for comment. Hunink responded late last week, saying that she had been on vacation, and with her permission we are posting her comments — including a correction she and her co-authors had originally drafted –here in the spirit of what she called “a fair and open discussion on Retraction Watch.”
We sent an email to PLoS ONE in response to their intention to retract our paper explaining why we disagree with retraction but it seems they did not change their statement and went ahead with retraction. We suggested that discussing the methodological issues is a more rational approach and beneficial than retraction but received no response.
The editors of PLoS ONE have done something that we’re betting Donald Trump will never do: Retract a statement about noisy wind turbines.
The journal is pulling a 2014 article, titled “Adaptive neuro-fuzzy methodology for noise assessment of wind turbine,” after concluding that the researchers plagiarized. The corresponding author of the article is Shahaboddin Shamshirban, of the Department of Computer System and Information Technology at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the retraction isn’t his first. In fact, it’s not even the only one Shamshirban has in PLoS ONE this week. The journal also is retracting a 2016 paper from his group, bringing his total to 20, for sins including plagiarism and faked peer review.
