by publisher – Page 11 – Retraction Watch

Seven months after an author request, journal retracts

Two weeks after we reported on the unsuccessful efforts of a researcher at The Ohio State University to have one of his papers retracted for data manipulation, the journal that had been delaying the move has acted.

As we wrote earlier this month based on a request for public records, Philip Tsichlis had been urging Nature Communications since November of last year to retract a 2021 article from his group which contained fabricated findings. But although a second journal had reacted promptly to the request, retracting the paper in December, the Nature Communications editors didn’t – resulting in a series of emails in which the researcher negotiated the wording of the retraction notice and expressed increasing frustration with the delay. (Both journals are owned by Springer Nature.)

Now, two weeks after our story, the journal has retracted the article, “AKT3-mediated IWS1 phosphorylation promotes the proliferation of EGFR-mutant lung adenocarcinomas through cell cycle-regulated U2AF2 RNA splicing.”

According to the notice:

Author demands a refund after his paper is retracted for plagiarism

The author of a 2021 paper in a computer science journal has lost the article because he purportedly stole the text from the thesis of a student in Pakistan – a charge he denies.

According to the editors of Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, a Hindawi title, Marwan Ali Albahar, of Umm Al Qura University College of Computer Science, in Saudi Arabia, plagiarized from the student for his paper “Contrast and Synthetic Multiexposure Fusion for Image Enhancement.”

As the retraction notice states:

An Elsevier journal said it would retract 10 papers two years ago. It still hasn’t.

An Elsevier journal has sat for two years on its decision to retract 10 papers by researchers with known misconduct issues, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

The Journal of the Neurological Sciences had decided by June 2020 to retract the articles by Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, who are currently in positions four and six on our leaderboard of retractions, according to the emails. But the papers still haven’t been retracted, to the disappointment of one of the data sleuths who raised concerns about the work – and in the meantime have been cited more than a dozen times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

As Andrew Grey, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, wrote to a staffer at the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) who became involved in the case:

An Elsevier book plagiarizes an abstract published by…Elsevier

Elsevier plans to remove the introduction from a book on mineralogy after investigating allegations of plagiarism, including from another Elsevier publication, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.

Photo Atlas of Mineral Pseudomorphism by J. Theo Kloprogge and Robert Lavinsky, was published in 2017 and still appears to be for sale for $100 for a hardcover and ebook bundle. (The usual price is $200, but there is a sale on at the time of this writing.) Its listing on ScienceDirect includes the introduction with no note about removal.

As we’ve previously reported, Elsevier last year retracted an entire book by Kloprogge, an adjunct professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas and honorary senior fellow at the University of Queensland, that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia.

According to the emails we obtained, Gloria Staebler, of mineralogical publisher Lithographie, Ltd., noticed the plagiarism in the book in May while preparing to formally publish a manuscript by Si and Ann Frazier that had been circulated in a mineral club newsletter in 2005. In a May 31st email to an editor at Elsevier, Staebler laid out her evidence:

Journal run by new AMA president-elect caught in special issue scam

A med-tech journal whose editor-in-chief is the president-in-waiting of the American Medical Association has retracted six papers for compromised peer review and related problems.

The Journal of Medical Systems, led by Jesse Ehrenfeld – an anesthesiologist in Wisconsin who this week became president-elect of the AMA – said the articles were part of a special issue that ran in 2018 titled “Advancements in Internet of Medical Things for Healthcare System.”

Here’s the retraction notice for “LSTM Model for Prediction of Heart Failure in Big Data”:

‘This has been a nightmare’: One paper was retracted. The other still lingers.

On a Saturday last November, Philip Tsichlis of The Ohio State University received an email no researcher wants to get.

Another scientist had tried to replicate a finding in a recent paper of his, and couldn’t. “We believe that our results should lead to some revision of the model you propose,” stated the email, which was released to us by OSU following a public records request.

It turned out that was an understatement. The email eventually led Tsichlis to discover data fabrication in that paper and a related article. Within a week, he requested the retraction of both papers, one in Communications Biology and the other in Nature Communications, both Springer Nature journals. One was retracted in December, but not the other.

In an email to a Nature Communications editor on November 22nd, Tsichlis wrote:

This has been a nightmare and I blame myself for not having detected it earlier. However, we cannot go back. I hope that we will retract this paper as soon as possible.

Seven months later, it remains unflagged.

Retraction leads to review change at SAGE journal

A cancer journal has retracted a 2016 paper by a group in China after deciding – more than five years after publication – it couldn’t stand behind the work.

The article, “The preoperative platelet–lymphocyte ratio versus neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio: which is better as a prognostic factor in oral squamous cell carcinoma?”, appeared in Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology, a SAGE title. The authors were led by Shan Chen, of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.

The notice reads:

Widely touted abstract on ivermectin and COVID-19 retracted

The authors of a controversial meeting abstract linking ivermectin to lower mortality from Covid-19 have retracted the study, saying that the work has been widely “misinterpreted” and might be leading to patient harm.

The abstract, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database,” was presented at the 2021 International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance.

According to the researchers, from the University of Miami, Covid-19 patients who took ivermectin were about 70% less likely to die of the disease than those who took remdesivir.

Journal about ‘ambient intelligence’ retracts more than 50 papers at once

Perhaps the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing needs to look for a different kind of smarts.

The journal – a Springer Nature title – has just retracted 51 papers. The episode is the latest in a string of high-volume retractions by major publishers of papers included in special issues. In at least five cases, editors have claimed that their peer review processes were scammed by what some have called rogue editors.

All of the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing retractions begin this way:

‘Conclusions related to vaccine safety are not validated’: COVID-19 spike protein paper retracted

It took about five months, but a virology journal has retracted a paper on the microbe that causes COVID-19 after tagging it with an expression of concern back in December.

As we reported then, the paper, “SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,” was a hit with vaccine skeptics who used the article to buttress their claims that Covid vaccines are unsafe.

The paper, which appeared in MDPI’s Viruses, generated enough buzz on social media and in the news to make it into the top 5% of all articles tracked by Altmetric. This Week in Virology, a podcast on, well, virology, devoted part of an episode of the show to deconstructing the findings.

But as the journal noted last year:

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