Ask Kevin Pile. Pile edits the International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases(let’s call it the IJRD), a Wiley publication. Last year, he published a guest editorial by Vaidehi Chowdhary, a rheumatologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on a form of kidney disease.
But it turns out that Chowdhary, a member of Pile’s editorial team, had intended to submit her article, “When doing the right thing is wrong: Drug efflux pumps in steroid‐resistant nephrotic syndrome,” to a different journal, the Indian Journal of Rheumatology, or IJR. We think you can see how this all went down.
According to Pile, the episode was “a tail of consecutive mistakes”:
We’re rounding out the week with a third post about paper mills: A Taylor & Francis journal is up to 39 retractions, 18 of which appear to have been the work of at least one such operation.
Last March, The publication, “Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology,” issued an expression of concern for 13 of the articles, after a group of data sleuths pointed out problems with the papers.
As Science magazine pointed out at the time, the sleuths, including Elisabeth Bik, found evidence that more than 400 articles generated by the suspected mill contained fabricated images. All of the papers came from research teams based in China, they noted.
A year and a half after its publication, the paper is the subject of two critical blog posts, one by Nick Brown and one by Ethan and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. In the days since we first shared embargoed drafts of those posts with Hall, he and the sleuths engaged in a back and forth, and Brown and the Ludwin-Peerys now say they are satisfied that many of the major issues appear to have been resolved. They have also made changes to their posts, including adding responses from Hall.
In short, it seems like a great example of public post-publication peer review in action. For example, the Ludwin-Peerys write:
When we took a close look at these data, we originally found a number of patterns that we were unable to explain. Having communicated with the authors, we now think that while there are some strange choices in their analysis, most of these patterns can be explained…
In a draft of their post shared with us early last week — see “a note to readers” below — the Ludwin-Peerys said that some of the data in the study “really bothered” them. In particular, they write, the two groups of people studied — 20 received ultra-processed foods, while 20 were given an unprocessed diet — “report the same amount of change in body weight, the only difference being that one group gained weight and the other group lost it.” They were also surprised by the “pretty huge” correlation between weight changes and energy intake.
Brown’s draft post, which digs into the data, concludes:
Of course, nothing of the kind occurred. The carefully curated moment was less informative for its scientific value — in effect, nil — than for what it says about how years of attention-seeking and speculation in biology can drive an agenda. Equally concerning, despite the intervening decade in which other researchers debunked the overhyped result, is that the journal involved has yet to retract the article in question, allowing it to live in a zombie state.
The announcement at the press conference was, to the disappointment of many, the supposed “discovery” of a microbe that could grow on arsenate in the absence of phosphate and incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorus in macromolecules such as nucleic acids and proteins that was being published in Science. Steven Benner (referring to himself as a curmudgeon) was the only individual at the press conference who talked real sense by undermining the claims. Mary Voytek, NASA Senior Scientist for Astrobiology (a position she still occupies) employed a Star Trek analogy:
It appears to be Paper Mill Sweeps Week here at Retraction Watch.
On Tuesday, we reported on an editor who believes one such operation was responsible for the withdrawals of at least two articles in her journal.
Now, the Royal Society of Chemistry is retracting 68 articles, across three of its titles, after an investigation turned up evidence of what it suspects was the “systemic production of falsified research.” The society said it is in the process of beefing up its safeguards against milled papers and plans to train its editors to have “extra vigilance in the face of emerging, sophisticated digital fraud.”
I have been Editor-in-Chief of DNA and Cell Biology for the last decade. It has been rare for authors to request withdrawal of a paper they have submitted. However, in the last two weeks, six papers have been withdrawn on request.
What really puzzled Reiss, a professor emerita at New York University, was that two of the withdrawals used identical language — down to the incorrect punctuation and stilted phrasing:
A researcher who has had more than 40 papers questioned by scientific sleuths has lost a second to retraction.
On December 14, Elisabeth Bik reported problems in 39 papers coauthored by Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China, to the editors of the journals that had published the papers. PubPeer commenters found problems in several other papers, and Bik tallied the 45 articles in a December 18 post.
A researcher in Ecuador has lost a 2019 paper on the application of a widely-used psychological research instrument after the owner of the tool flexed their copyright muscle.
The episode — like another one, recently — echoes the case of Donald Morisky, a UCLA researcher who developed an instrument for assessing medication adherence — and then began charging other scientists small fortunes (and, in some cases, large ones) for use of the tool, or forcing retractions when they failed to comply. (For more on the Morisky case, see our 2017 piece in Science and this recent warning by journal editors.)
Written by Paúl Arias-Medina, of the University of Cuenca, the article, “Psychometric properties of the self-report version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire in the Ecuadorian context: an evaluation of four models,” appeared in BMC Psychology.
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 Quackwatch — alerted 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.
Don’t tell the aquatic beetles in the family Grouvellinus Champion 1923, but their number just got a little smaller. Officially speaking, that is. Unofficially, keep that place setting at the holiday table. Well, don’t, if you’re under travel restrictions for COVID-19. You get the picture.
A journal has retracted a 2019 paper describing the discovery of a new member of the family, part of a “citizen science” (or “taxon expedition”) effort to collect samples of the insects in the remote Maliau Basin of Borneo, over a bureaucratic dispute.
