Category: wiley retractions

On March 1, 2022, Eric Ross, then a psychiatrist-in-training in Boston, alerted two major publishers to a pair of disturbingly similar papers he suspected had been “fabricated.” 

“The articles are written by the same corresponding author and contain much of the same unrealistic data,” Ross, now an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, wrote in an email whose recipients included the editors-in-chief of Wiley’s CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics and Springer Nature’s Neurotherapeutics.

Ross listed several “red flags” he felt clearly pointed to “research misconduct” in the two papers, which reported on two separate clinical trials of new antidepressant add-on medications (metformin and cilostazol). He also emphasized that fake medical research could have real consequences:

Continue reading Give or take a year or two: Case reveals publishers’ vastly different retraction times

The Anatomical Record is correcting itself in a big way, pulling 13 articles, including several linked to paper mills. 

The papers, all by authors in China, were published between 2019 and 2021. 

Some were flagged in a September 2021 report on research misconduct by the Chinese government. They join a slew of articles The Anatomical Record has retracted since 2020 for similar concerns. 

Here’s an example of a retraction notice, this one for “Long noncoding RNA TUG1 facilitates cell ovarian cancer progression through targeting MiR-29b-3p/MDM2 axis,” which appeared in January 2020 from a group at the Department of Pharmacy at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University: 

Continue reading Anatomy journal retracts 13 papers

What a difference a D makes. 

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”:

Continue reading A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title

A pediatrics journal has retracted a 2016 article purporting to be the first randomized controlled trial on the effects of vitamin D supplements on autism over concerns about the reliability of the findings.

The paper, “Randomized controlled trial of vitamin D supplementation in children with autism spectrum disorder,” appeared in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and has been cited 27 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “highly cited paper” designation compared to its counterparts of a similar age.

The authors came from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, Chile, the UK and Norway. According to the abstract, the researchers looked at the effects of vitamin D supplements on 109 boys and girls with autism:

Continue reading Study of autism and vitamin D earns retraction after questions about reliability