by publisher – Page 29 – Retraction Watch

‘Striking’: Journal editor suspects paper mills behind rash of withdrawn manuscripts

Carol Shoshkes Reiss describes it as “especially striking.”

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 However, in the last two weeks, six papers have been withdrawn on request.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:

“This retraction is one of the fastest I ever experienced after reporting a paper to a journal editor.”

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.

In May, Tang lost a paper from PLOS ONE that Bik had flagged for the journal all the way back in 2015 — a delay that is not unusual for the journal, but becoming less common.

But the response this time was swift, at least for one journal. DNA and Cell Biology, a Mary Ann Liebert title, retracted “microRNA-34a-Upregulated Retinoic Acid-Inducible Gene-I Promotes Apoptosis and Delays Cell Cycle Transition in Cervical Cancer Cells” this week. (The exact date of the retraction is unclear, as Bik notes below.)

Here’s the notice:

Psychology paper retracted after creators of tool allege “serious breach of copyright”

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.

Per the paper’s abstract:

Publisher retracts 14 papers by doctor who ran afoul of U.S. FDA for marketing supplements

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.

Unmeet the beetles: “A very disappointing story” as authors yank paper on new insect species

Grouvellinus leonardodicaprioi via Wikimedia

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.

Recent forays into the region have turned up several new species of water beetle, including the Grouvellinus leonardodicaprioi, which looks, well, not much like its namesake (yes, that Leonardo DiCaprio).

According to the notice:

Western University materials scientist committed misconduct, according to investigation

An investigation into the work of a researcher at Western University “resulted in a clear determination of research misconduct,” according to a retraction notice, but details are scant.

Here’s the notice for “Synthetic peptides derived from salivary proteins and the control of surface charge densities of dental surfaces improve the inhibition of dental calculus formation,” published in Materials Science and Engineering: C in 2017 by Bernd Grohe:

Bad, Medicine: Journal publishes doubly-brutal retraction notice

A journal has retracted a paper it published earlier this year for pretty much every sin under the sun, scoring an own-goal in the process.

The article, “Effects and safety of tanreqing injection on viral pneumonia: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis,” was led by Yue Qiu, of the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and appeared in Medicine on September 11.

The tl;dr version of this post: We have questions.

Subtraction by addition: A journal expresses concern again — but this time, with feeling

A journal published by the Royal Society in the United Kingdom has issued an updated expression of concern for a 2018 paper by a mathematician whose work has been the subject of intense scrutiny on this website and elsewhere. But the notice is less of a statement of problems than a rationalization.

The paper, “Quantum correlations are weaved by the spinors of the Euclidean primitives,” was written by Joy Christian, of the “Einstein Centre for Local-Realistic Physics in Oxford.” In May 2018, the journal issued an initial EoC about the article, stating:

Nature Communications looking into paper on mentorship after strong negative reaction

A Nature journal has announced that it is conducting a “priority” investigation into a new paper claiming that women in science fare better with male rather than female mentors.

The article, “The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance,” appeared in Nature Communications on November 17, and was written by a trio of authors from New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi.

According to the abstract:

Publisher infected twice with the same anti-vaccine article

Researchers who lost a paper derided by critics as anti-vaccine have republished their article in a different journal … owned by the same publisher (hint: rhymes with “smells of beer”).

As we reported in April 2019, the original article version of “Cognition and behavior in sheep repetitively inoculated with aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines or aluminum adjuvant only” appeared in November 2018 in Pharmacological Research.

Antivaccine advocates such as Celeste McGovern seized on the study, which also drew harsh criticism from Skeptical Raptor and Orac, who called it

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