Category: wiley

A U.K.-based surgeon who was suspended last year for conducting colorectal surgeries that caused harm to hundreds of women has had nine of his research papers flagged and one withdrawn.

In July 2024, Tony Dixon was suspended for six months from Southmead Hospital and Spire Hospital in Bristol, England, by a tribunal at the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) after an investigation found the surgeries caused harm in 259 of his patients who underwent a procedure to treat rectal prolapse.

The MPTS panel extended the suspension in January for another six months, during which time Dixon is unable to operate on patients, a spokesperson for the U.K.’s General Medical Council (GMC) told Retraction Watch. 

A Wiley journal has retracted more than two dozen articles in the last few months for peer review issues. 

The articles, which appeared in Environmental Toxicology, have been retracted in batches, the latest on February 16-17, with previous sets in January and November.

The retraction notices of all 26 papers read in part:

The decision to abandon a process to re-evaluate a review recommending exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has reignited calls for the article to be withdrawn. 

The 2019 version of the Cochrane Library review, “Exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome,” has accumulated 67 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The review recommends exercise therapy to treat ME/CFS, a treatment approach that drew widespread criticism from the patient community and researchers, who say physical activity isn’t an adequate remedy for the condition. According to the petition, Cochrane’s former editor-in-chief admitted the review in question wasn’t “fit for purpose,” although the editor-in-chief’s statement did not use that phrase.

In January 2022, The Oncologist switched publishers from Wiley to Oxford University Press. 

Last month, the journal issued an extensive correction for one of its most popular articles, a 2020 paper that describes results of a clinical trial the authors claimed found a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer. 

The article page that remains on Wiley’s website, however, does not reflect the recent correction. 

The Journal of Cellular Physiology, a Wiley title, will retract two articles by an arthritis researcher the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found to have engaged in research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Last November, the VA published findings stating Hee-Jeong Im Sampen, formerly a research biologist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago, faked images and inflated sample sizes in three published papers, a grant application, a presentation, and an unpublished manuscript. 

Based on the findings, the VA banned Sampen, who publishes under the name Hee-Jeong Im, from conducting research for the department and requested retractions of the three publications. 

Two of the papers, “Development of an Experimental Animal Model for Lower Back Pain by Percutaneous Injury-Induced Lumbar Facet Joint Osteoarthritis” and “Environmental Disruption of Circadian Rhythm Predisposes Mice to Osteoarthritis-Like Changes in Knee Joint,” appeared in the Journal of Cellular Physiology in 2015, and don’t currently have any sort of notice about the VA finding they contain faked images. 

Two years after a journal told sleuths it wouldn’t retract flawed papers, it changed course and pulled them.  

Mark Bolland, a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who is no stranger to unearthing academic wrongdoing, first sent complaints about one of the papers to The International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (IJGO)  in March 2021. He said the data on bone mineral density in “Isosorbide mononitrate versus alendronate for postmenopausal osteoporosis,” which has been cited 26 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, were “impossible.”

Bolland said the data the researchers reported were not consistent with the reference values provided by the maker of the device used to measure bone density in the study. The normal ranges are 0.96 +/- 0.12 g/cm², whereas the experiment reported much lower values of 0.21-0.24 g/cm².

In an email to Retraction Watch, Bolland’s colleague Andrew Grey called the data “laughable, frankly.”