Sometimes, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.
Ask Farukh Iqbal. Earlier this year, Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, was alerted to a recent paper in the journal Fuel that cited a 2020 article he’d written with some colleagues.
Iqbal read the paper and realized with dismay that not only was his work — which included parts of his thesis — cited, it was plagiarized:
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Two of the articles have been retracted.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:
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:
The story, titled “When Britney Spears comes to my lab,” appeared in a section of the journal called Nature Futures and refers to Spears “wearing a silver strapless stretch top that doesn’t show too much of her belly (unless she actually moves her arms), and black Capri pants with a little dip in the waistband.”
Spears, it said, would eventually go on to earn a PhD from Harvard and develop a treatment for diabetes. Before that, however, “Britney will pump out a lot of good data (she is something of a workaholic), but gradually, with her music, her intermittent marriages and pregnancies, not to mention her classes, the amount of time she spends in lab will begin to dwindle.”
In a note appended to the article sometime this week, following thousands of tweets and a Retraction Watch post, the editors write:
Just days after adding an expression of concern to a paper published last week claiming that two people died from COVID-19 vaccinations for every three cases the vaccines prevented, the journal Vaccines has retracted the paper.
A study published last week that quickly became another flashpoint for those arguing that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe has earned an expression of concern.
The original paper, published in the MDPI title Vaccines, claimed that:
The number of cases experiencing adverse reactions has been reported to be 700 per 100,000 vaccinations. Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11/100,000 vaccinations. For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.
However, the study’s methods quickly drew scrutiny, and at least two members of Vaccines’ editorial board, Mount Sinai virologist Florian Krammer and Oxford immunologist Katie Ewer, said they have stepped down to protest the publication of the paper.
Britney Spears has, as Retraction Watch readers no doubt know, been in the news a great deal lately, as the battle over her father’s “broad control over her life and finances” plays out in court. But a science fiction story about Spears that published in Nature in 2008 — the year Spears’ father was appointed her conservator — has prompted apologies from its author and the journal.
The story, which appeared in a section of the journal called Nature Futures, is titled “When Britney Spears comes to my lab.” It begins:
When Britney Spears comes to [Louisiana State University] LSU she’ll be wearing a silver strapless stretch top that doesn’t show too much of her belly (unless she actually moves her arms), and black Capri pants with a little dip in the waistband.
That and other passages in the piece — in which Spears goes on to earn a PhD from Harvard and discover a treatment for diabetes — caught the attention of more than 1,000 Twitter users since Friday. Many questioned why Nature would publish it. An example:
Mahin Khatami, a former researcher with the U.S. National Institutes of Health who has argued in print that cancer results from ‘dark energy’ and that the government and the pharmaceutical industry are collaborating in ‘scientific/medical Ponzi schemes’ to keep people sick, has lost a paper to retraction.
As we reported last fall, Robert Speth, a pharmacy science researcher at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., has been urging Clinical & Translational Medicine (CTM) to retract Khatami’s articles — and one in particular — for what is now more than two years.
In mid-October a spokesperson for Wiley, which publishes the journal, told us that she was trying to get more information from the editors about why Khatami’s bizarre paper was acceptable material.
A journal has issued an expression of concern after learning that it may have published abstracts from meetings that appear not to have taken place.
As many journals do, Basic & Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, a Wiley title, occasionally publishes meeting supplements. But according to the journal, it recently learned from several authors that a dozen of those supplements that it produced
between 2018 and 2020 might have contained suspect work. According to a statement we received from the journal:
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