by publisher – Page 16 – Retraction Watch

‘This has been a nightmare’: One paper was retracted.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 One was retracted in December, but not the other.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:

A college that doesn’t exist. An email address that goes dark. Who wrote this paper?

Alexander Templeton works at the math library of Glen Liberty Community College in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

At least that’s what a paper, “A bibliometric analysis of Atangana-Baleanu operators in fractional calculus,” Templeton appears to have published in the Alexandria Engineering Journal claims. But no Glen Liberty Community College appears to exist in Scottsbluff – or anywhere – and the Gmail address Templeton used as contact information no longer works. (There is a Western Nebraska Community College in Scottsbluff, but no Glen Liberty.)

UPenn prof retracts three papers for ‘substantive questions’

A pharmacology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania is up to four retractions for problems with the data in his articles after a neurology journal pulled three papers late last month.

According to the Journal of Neurotrauma, a Mary Ann Liebert title, William Armstead – who holds a research professorship in Anesthesiology and Critical Care at Penn [please see an update on this post] – requested the retraction of three articles while informing that, in his words:

substantive questions have arisen regarding the findings, presentation and conclusions reported in the paper that could not be answered with available source data.

But beyond that, Armstead – who has not responded to a request for comment from Retraction Watch – left things a bit of a mystery.

Elsevier retracts papers when it realizes one of the authors hid fact he was guest editor of issue

A researcher who guest edited an issue has lost two papers after a journal’s publisher discovered that he had changed his name on the manuscripts following submission.

The retraction notices in Computers in Industry, an Elsevier title, for “Evaluation of the green supply chain management practices: A novel neutrosophic approach” and “An integrated neutrosophic ANP and VIKOR method for achieving sustainable supplier selection: A case study in importing field” read the same way:

Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction

It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year:

Figure 5: There is an overlap between two images taken from different experimental conditions. I’ve added a version below with the contrast enhanced. It’s difficult to match the brightness perfectly, but all of the same structures can be matched between these two sections. Would the authors comment?

Vincent Rotello of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the corresponding authors, responded right away. “Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention,” Rotello wrote on PubPeer. “We take data integrity seriously and are investigating the origin of the image duplication.”

Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.

If the writers of “Welcome Back, Kotter” wanted to issue a retraction statement, it might look something like this one from Mary Ann Liebert. We’ll call this one a hat tip to Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein, a Sweathog whose permission slips “from his mother” became a meme.

The paper in question appeared in 2016 in Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals and written by a group in China led by Liqun Yang, of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical Center and the State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology at Southwest University in Chongqing.

In November 2021, Yang emailed the journal asking to swap out the original figure in the article with a corrected version. What Yang didn’t know was that a week earlier, the journal had received word of a post on PubPeer raising questions about the figures in the paper.

The post received the following response from someone writing as co-author Hongjuan Cui:

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