by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

1 in 7 scientific papers is fake, suggests study that author calls ‘wildly nonsystematic’

In 2009, a now highly-cited study found an average of around 2% of scientists admit to have falsified, fabricated, or modified data at least once in their career.

Fifteen years on, a new analysis tried to quantify how much science is fake – but the real number may remain elusive, some observers said.

The analysis, published before peer review on the Open Science Framework on September 24, found one in seven scientific papers may be at least partly fake. The author, James Heathers, a long-standing scientific sleuth, arrived at that figure by averaging data from 12 existing studies — collectively containing a sample of around 75,000 studies — that estimate the volume of problematic scientific output.

Exclusive: One university’s three-year battle to retract papers with fake data

In 2021, the provost of the University of Maryland, Baltimore sounded the alarm about a troubling batch of papers from the lab of Richard Eckert, the former chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the institution.

The provost sent letters to the editors of seven journals calling out a string of serious issues. Based on the university’s investigation, the papers contained duplicated, fabricated and falsified data, according to emails obtained by Retraction Watch.

But more than three years later, the results of those alerts are mixed: Of the 11 papers the university flagged in 2021, editors corrected three and retracted two. Six still await resolution, with no apparent action taken by the journals.

Former Harvard cancer researcher plagiarized data, federal watchdog says

A former research fellow at Harvard Medical School faked data and used images from another scientist without attribution in a published paper and two grant applications, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The researcher, Arunoday K. Bhan, was also a former staff scientist at City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif., and first author on “Human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived platelets loaded with lapatinib effectively target HER2+ breast cancer metastasis to the brain,” which appeared in Scientific Reports in October 2021. The article has been cited eight times.

The paper was retracted in March. The retraction note cited an investigation by City of Hope and detailed “discrepancies in the data” that match ORI’s findings.

‘The PubPeer conundrum:’ One view of how universities can grapple with a ‘waterfall of data integrity concerns’

As Retraction Watch readers no doubt know, PubPeer has played a key role in a growing number of cases of misconduct, allowing sleuths to publicly shine light in shadowy corners and prompting action by many universities. (Disclosure: Our Ivan Oransky is a volunteer member of the PubPeer Foundation’s board of directors.) But that has also meant that universities can feel overwhelmed by a deluge of PubPeer comments.

In a new article, three attorneys from Ropes & Gray in Boston who advise universities on such cases, along with Barbara Bierer, a researcher and former research integrity officer at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also in Boston, examine “the origins of PubPeer and its central role in the modern era of online-based scouring of scientific publications for potential problems and outlines the challenges that institutions must manage in addressing issues identified on PubPeer.” Attorneys Mark Barnes, Minal Caron and Carolyn Lye, and the Brigham’s Barbara Bierer, also recommend ways federal regulations could change to make the investigation process more efficient. We asked them to answer some questions about the article.

What prompted you to write this piece?

First-time scientific sleuths prompt nine retractions for neurosurgery group

Two Dutch researchers were preparing a review of preclinical animal models for hemorrhagic stroke last July when they stumbled across a disturbing pattern in the literature.

First, they found many more papers on the topic than the 50 or so they expected based on their experience: more than 600.

Also, nearly every study proposed a different intervention, which was “very unusual,” said René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “Why would you show a very beneficial effect and then say, ‘let’s do something else?’”

Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct

One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.

The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.

Researchers found only 8,515 articles published the figure captions and the image’s metadata banners, both of which are needed to determine whether the correct microscope is listed in papers. Metadata banners usually contain important information about the experiments conducted, including the operating voltage of the microscope and the instrument’s model and parameters.

Of these papers, 2,400 (28%) listed the wrong microscope manufacturer or model, raising questions about the integrity of the conducted research.

A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.

In June of last year, Salvador Pineda received an email from a researcher at Zhejiang University in China informing him one of his articles had been plagiarized.

The researcher pointed Pineda to a paper, “A robust optimization method for optimizing day-ahead operation of the electric vehicles aggregator,” which appeared in Elsevier’s International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in November 2021. The article, by researchers at the University of Lahore, Pakistan, contained several figures copied from Pineda’s 2020 paper “An efficient robust approach to the day-ahead operation of an aggregator of electric vehicles,” as well as similar text.

Pineda, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Málaga in Spain, immediately wrote to the journal’s editor-in-chief, who said he’d retract the article, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

Yet the article remains intact, more than a year later, with the publisher blaming the delay on staffing changes at the journal.

A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.

When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work.

“It’s so blatant,” Payne, an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, posted on X.

Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere.

“I had imagined they would just keep submitting it to new journals until it got accepted, because it was so brazenly plagiarized that they clearly didn’t care,” Payne told Retraction Watch.

Months later, Payne’s worry was justified. The paper, by researchers at First Moscow State Medical University, in Russia, appeared in Wiley’s Proteomics in May.

Authors retract quantum physics paper from Science after finding mistakes

A team of physicists has retracted a paper from Science after they discovered mistakes in their data and statistical analysis when following up on their work.

The paper “A room-temperature single-photon source based on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms” published in 2018, garnered 117 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Of these, 97 citations came after the authors corrected the paper in 2020 to adjust for updated calibrations, which they said did not affect the conclusions of the article.

This correction was unrelated to the reasons for retraction, said corresponding author Tilman Pfau, a professor of physics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

Exclusive: Publisher to retract article for excessively citing one researcher after Retraction Watch inquiry

A paper that cited a single researcher’s work in 53 of 64 references will be retracted following our inquiries, the publisher of the journal has told Retraction Watch.

The article, ‘Culturally-informed for designing motorcycle fire rescue: Empirical study in developing country’, published in June in AIP Advances, overwhelmingly cites the work of Muhammed Imam Ammarullah, a lecturer at Universitas Pasundan in West Java, Indonesia, sometimes without obvious relevance to the text.

An anonymous tipster came across the soon-to-be retracted paper on Google Scholar, then alerted the editors at AIP Advances in June to the strange citation pattern. The journal investigated, but didn’t acknowledge a problem with the excessive citations to Ammarullah’s work in their initial response to the complaint. Instead, they identified issues with six other, unrelated citations, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: