by publisher – Page 21 – Retraction Watch

Abstracts flagged because conferences — including one in Wuhan in late 2019 — may not have happened

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:

The peer reviewers and editor wanted to publish my paper. The legal team rejected it.

Move over, Reviewer 2: The legal reviewer wants your job.

Last month, I was relieved when the journal Research Ethics published my article, “The Use of Confidentiality and Anonymity Protections as a Cover for Fraudulent Fieldwork Data.” One unexpected hurdle had almost thwarted publication. The problem wasn’t with the proverbial hard-to-please peer reviewer called Reviewer 2. Rather, the problem was with a behind-the-scenes reviewer of a different sort, Legal Reviewer 1.

I suspect that many authors have never heard of a legal reviewer. Yet depending on your research topics, you may have had your manuscripts delayed—or even rejected—without ever knowing of the powerful influence of persons in that role. In my case, the journal editor was candid in telling me that my manuscript would be sent to a “legal team” after clearing peer review.

Two meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary outcomes

A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles.

The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of meditation developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and promoted by the Art of Living Foundation, which describes itself thusly:

Elsevier retracts entire book that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia

The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia.

The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. But in December, Tom Rauchfuss, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “tipped off by an Finnish editor on Wikipedia,” alerted the authors and Elsevier about the apparent plagiarism from the online encyclopedia.

On January 6, an Elsevier representative told Rauchfuss:

How hijacked journals keep fooling one of the world’s leading databases

It keeps happening.

There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the world’s leading databases for scholarly literature. The Transylvanian Review did the same thing, and so did Test Engineering and Management.

These journals — which can make millions of dollars for their illegitimate publishers — exploit vulnerabilities in Scopus, owned by Elsevier, by making themselves look close enough to real journals, often exploiting the real ISSN and other metadata of those titles. That, in turn, entices potentially unknowing authors whose careers may depend on publishing in journals in major indexes.

Now into the mix comes Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology. This time, the tip-off, discovered by Russian scholar Dmitry Dubrovsky, was almost unbelievable: an article about the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet resistance to Germany’s 1941 invasion — in a journal specializing in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology.

Antiviral: ‘TikTok Doc’ loses paper on faculty development over concerns about harassment suit

The now-infamous “TikTok Doc” who was embroiled in a recently settled sexual harassment suit has lost a 2020 paper on, wait for it, faculty development after his co-authors decided that the collaboration risked “reputational damage” to themselves and dismissal of the work.

Jason Campbell was an anesthesiology resident at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland, when he became a social media darling. Clips of him dancing in the hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic went viral on TikTok — before Campell was accused of sexually harassing a social worker at the Portland VA hospital, where the anesthesiologist sometimes worked. (Campbell left the institution and reportedly now lives and works in Florida.)

According to The Oregonian, the suit against Cambell and OHSU alleges that:

Clinical trial paper that made anemia drug look safer than it is will be retracted

A study that a pharmaceutical company admitted last month included manipulated data will be retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

The paper, “Pooled Analysis of Roxadustat for Anemia in Patients With Kidney Failure Incident to Dialysis,” was published in Kidney International Reports in December 2020. The study analyzed data from a clinical trial for roxadustat, a drug intended to help anemic patients make more red blood cells. The medicine was tested in more than 1,500 patients with kidney failure that had been on dialysis for less than four months.

The paper compared roxadustat to a standard treatment, epoetin alfa. Epoetin alfa is not given to anemic patients who have kidney disease and are not dependent on dialysis, according to reporting in April by FiercePharma, because it can increase the risk of a cardiovascular event, including heart attacks.

In the study, roxadustat was as effective as epoetin alfa for these patients, but carried a 30 percent lower risk for death, heart attacks or strokes.

Then, on April 6th, Fibrogen announced, according to FiercePharma, that researchers had

Rejection overruled, retraction ensues when annoyed reviewer does deep dive into data

As a prominent criminologist, Kim Rossmo often gets asked to review manuscripts. So it was that he found himself reviewing a meta-analysis by a pair of Dutch researchers — Wim Bernasco and Remco van Dijke, of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, in Amsterdam — looking at a phenomenon called the buffer zone hypothesis. In this framework, criminals are thought to avoid committing offenses near their own homes.

The paper, for Crime Science, analyzed 33 studies, of which, according to the authors, 11 confirmed the hypothesis and 22 rejected it.

Rossmo, who holds the University Chair in Criminology and directs the Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation in the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Texas State University in San Marcos, told us:

Paper on ‘energy medicine’ retracted after reader complaints

An integrative health journal has retracted a 2019 paper two months after issuing an expression of concern about the article distancing itself from the work.

The paper, which appeared in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, was a review of “energy medicine” by Christina Ross, of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

As we reported in March, Ross told us that a reader in England complained to the journal for her suggestion in the paper:

Paper partly funded by controversial stem cell company retracted

The timestamps always get you in the end.

A widely touted 2017 paper linked to a controversial company promoting regenerative medicine has been retracted after the journal came to doubt the validity of the data thanks to some strange anachronisms and a digital breadcrumb.

“Intra-articular injection in the knee of adipose derived stromal cells (stromal vascular fraction) and platelet rich plasma for osteoarthritis,” appeared in the Journal of Translational Medicine to no small notice.

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