Publisher retracts paper with ethics committee discrepancy after question from Retraction Watch

Photo by Bilal Kamoon via flickr

Dove, a publisher owned by Taylor & Francis, has retracted a paper published last year after a Retraction Watch reader pointed out that the authors’ statements on ethical approval made no sense.

Dove’s Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy published the article, “Serum Human Epididymis Protein 4 is a Potential Biomarker for Early Chronic Kidney Disease in an Obese Population,” in April 2021. In August, we received an email from a puzzled reader which read, in part:

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Pro-tip: When claiming to use a dataset, make sure it collects what you say it does

Tilda Swinton has no more to do with TILDA than the data these authors used (credit: Manfred Werner (Tsui)

Irish eyes most definitely were not smiling on three papers that purported to contain data from a national repository from the Emerald Isle. 

The articles, which appeared in a trio of journals from Dove Medical Press — part of Taylor & Francis — were written by various researchers at Nanchang University, in China. 

Two of the articles have been retracted. “Serum Human Epididymal Protein 4 is Associated with Depressive Symptoms in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,” from 2020, was published in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Per the abstract: 

Continue reading Pro-tip: When claiming to use a dataset, make sure it collects what you say it does

Publisher won’t retract most papers by chemist editor-in-chief who left university post under a cloud

The retractions appear to be trickling in for Thomas Webster, a once-prominent chemistry researcher who left his post at Northeastern University after nearly 70 of his papers were flagged on PubPeer for concerns about the data in the studies. 

But while the publisher of a journal he co-founded — and left earlier this year — has retracted one paper, it said it would correct, not retract, nine of the papers he co-authored.

So far, we have seen two recent retractions for Webster, one involving a previously corrected 2015 paper in the journal Nanomedicine titled “Antibacterial and osteogenic stem cell differentiation properties of photoinduced TiO2 nanoparticle-decorated TiO2 nanotubes,” which has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The retraction notice for that article states: 

Continue reading Publisher won’t retract most papers by chemist editor-in-chief who left university post under a cloud

Supplement-selling doctor who ran afoul of FDA and state medical board up to 20 retractions

Marty Hinz
Marty Hinz

Dove Press, which late last year retracted more than a dozen articles by a U.S. physician who appears to have used the articles and other publications as marketing material for dietary supplements he sold, has pulled six more of his papers. 

The new retractions make 20 removals by Dove — a unit of Taylor & Francis — for Marty Hinz. 

As we have reported, Hinz has a long history of running afoul of regulatory bodies, from the FDA to the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, which in March 2020 reprimanded and fined him more than $7,000 following allegations including that he claimed on his website to have “reinvented the medical science foundation of Parkinson’s disease” and to “treat and do things for our Parkinson’s disease patients that most doctors of the world believe are impossible.” 

Continue reading Supplement-selling doctor who ran afoul of FDA and state medical board up to 20 retractions

Publisher retracts 14 papers by doctor who ran afoul of U.S. FDA for marketing supplements

Marty Hinz
Marty Hinz

Dove Press last week retracted 14 papers by Marty Hinz, a Minnesota doctor who caught the attention of the U.S. FDA years ago for hyping supplements sold by a company he once owned.

The 14 articles — on the use of supplements to treat conditions ranging from Crohn’s disease to Parkinson’s disease — were among 20 that the publisher slapped expressions of concern on earlier this year. The other six articles flagged in April remain under review, a spokesperson for Taylor & Francis, which owns Dove, tells Retraction Watch.

That move came two and a half years after Stephen Barrett — a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatchalerted Dove to his concerns about Hinz’s failure to disclose conflicts of interest on the papers. Barrett says Hinz has used those papers to support claims that supplements made by Hinz’s  former company, now owned by his daughter but from which he has received royalties, are effective in treating various conditions.

Continue reading Publisher retracts 14 papers by doctor who ran afoul of U.S. FDA for marketing supplements

‘An isolated incident’: Should reviewers check references?

Peer reviewers are supposed to be experts in their fields, competent enough at least to spot methodological errors, wayward conclusions and implausible findings. But checking references? Apparently, not so much. 

A journal about academic medicine has retracted a 2020 article because its reviewers and editors didn’t bother to confirm that the references said what the authors said they did — and because when pressed, the corresponding author couldn’t provide the underlying data for the paper.

The paper, “Medical students’ perception of their education and training to cope with future market trends,” appeared in March in Advances in Medical Education and Practice, a Dove Press title. The author was Mohamed Abdelrahman Mohamed Iesa, a physiologist at Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia. 

The article presented the results of a survey of 500 medical students at 10 schools in the United Kingdom. It purported to find that

Continue reading ‘An isolated incident’: Should reviewers check references?

Publisher retracts paper when authors try publishing it again in another of its journals

via Pixabay

Pro-tip: If you’re going to try to publish the same paper twice, don’t submit the duplicated version to a journal from the same publisher where you published the original — especially if you plan to monkey with the data.

Well, don’t try to publish the same paper twice, nor monkey with data, period. But you’ll see our point, we hope, when you read this tale.

Continue reading Publisher retracts paper when authors try publishing it again in another of its journals

Journal flags paper on painkiller for misused trial registry record

A pain journal has expressed concern over a 2018 paper by a group of researchers in China after a reader alerted the publication to problems with the article, including previously-reported data and a bogus trial registry record. 

The article, “Population pharmacokinetic modeling of flurbiprofen, the active metabolite of flurbiprofen axetil, in Chinese patients with postoperative pain,” appeared in the Journal of Pain Research, a title from Dove Medical Press. The authors are affiliated with several Peking University and Capital Medical University in Beijing. 

Here’s the expression of concern

Continue reading Journal flags paper on painkiller for misused trial registry record

Conflicts of disinterest: Why does it take a publisher 18 months, and counting, to correct papers?

Taylor & Francis

On February 23, 2018, Stephen Barrett — a physician in the United States perhaps best known for his work at Quackwatch — sent Dove Press this message:

I believe you have published 20 articles in 6 of your journals in which the lead author did not make a full conflict-of-interest disclosure. Please email me directly with the name and email address of an individual to whom I should report.

The lead author in question was Marty Hinz. As Barrett writes in a summary of the case

Continue reading Conflicts of disinterest: Why does it take a publisher 18 months, and counting, to correct papers?

Caught Our Notice: Wait…we wrote WHAT paper?

Via Wikimedia

TitleAssessment of coronary heart diseases in diabetics in al-Madinah al-Munawarah

What Caught Our Notice: We’ve seen researchers dinged for adding authors to papers who didn’t participate in the research, but it’s rare to have a notice say co-author signatures were forged. In a recent retraction, the first two authors said the signatures on the the approval document received by the journal do not belong to them. The notice does not indicate which of the remaining two co-authors might be responsible for the forgery. Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Wait…we wrote WHAT paper?