by reason for retraction – Retraction Watch

A ‘joke’: Paper with ‘completely irrelevant’ citations retracted

A paper that made the rounds last year for its blatantly “irrelevant” citations has now been retracted.

Elsevier’s International Journal of Hydrogen Energy published “Origin of the distinct site occupations of H atom in hcp Ti and Zr/Hf” in November 2024.

Paragraph seven of the introduction consists of a single sentence: “As strongly requested by the reviewers, here we cite some references [35-47] although they are completely irrelevant to the present work.” One of the authors told us they included the references as a “joke” after reviewers pressured them.

All 13 of the references include Sergei Trukhanov as an author, and all but one also includes Alex Trukhanov.

Former VA physician admitted to altering images and deleting data, documents show

A former cancer specialist sanctioned for “recklessly falsifying data” admitted during an investigation interview that he periodically altered images, documents obtained by Retraction Watch show. He also stated “he may have inadequately or improperly labeled and organized” image files, increasing the chances the images were confused or misidentified.

Alan Lichtenstein, previously a staff physician at the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and faculty member at UCLA, engaged in research misconduct, according to a November 2024 notice in the Federal Register. Documents we obtained through a public records request revealed his admissions, made during an inquiry that preceded the misconduct ruling.

The documents also reveal a relatively swift process: The initial inquiry by a joint UCLA-VA GLA committee took from June to August 2023 to determine a full investigation should follow. The investigation committee, formally tasked in October of that year, finished its assessment in March 2024. The inquiry committee looked at 18 allegations across 12 papers, and the investigation considered 31 allegations in 13 papers.

Why RFK Jr.’s pick for a vaccine-autism review may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers

David Geier and his father Mark speak to Fox News in 2022.

When it comes to conversations about vaccines and autism, we always have plenty to write about. And the latest news that the Trump administration has tapped David Geier for a study on possible links between immunizations and autism, first reported by the Washington Post, is no exception.

Geier has a long history of promoting the debunked claim of a link between vaccines and autism, STAT and others report. He has published on the topic as recently as 2020. A December 2020 paper lists his affiliation as the Institute of Chronic Illnesses, an organization he founded with his father Mark Geier, court documents say. In 2011, the Maryland State Board of Physicians disciplined Geier for practicing medicine without a license. He’s currently listed in the HHS employee directory as a senior data analyst, the Post reports.

Geier’s first appearance in Retraction Watch was in 2017, when Science and Engineering Ethics, a Springer Nature title, retracted a paper on how conflicts of interest might influence research on the link between vaccines and autism. That paper has been cited 13 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Sequence errors are ‘canaries in a coal mine’ in genetics studies, sleuth says

A genetics researcher came across an interesting paper earlier this year on the gene he studies. The scientist, a doctoral candidate who asked not to be named, decided to take a closer look at which part of the gene, SNHG14, the authors targeted to measure its expression. He ran the sequence of the short strand of DNA, called a primer, given in the paper through a database and found the sequence matched with a completely different gene.

The scientist searched through similar papers and found 19 more across as many journals with the same problem: all their “SNHG14” primers matched with the gene MALAT1/TALAM1. There may be more, but he stopped looking.

Two of the papers he found have been retracted. One appeared in 2023 in Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine, a journal Wiley acquired from Hindawi that is no longer publishing. The notice cites inappropriate citations and peer review manipulation. The other article, published in 2022 in the International Journal of Oncology, was retracted for plagiarism.

Kidney researcher debarred from federal U.S. funding for image manipulation

A former Baylor College of Medicine researcher has been debarred from federal funding for two years after a review by the Office of Research Integrity found evidence of misconduct.

Liping Zhang, a former assistant professor in the school’s nephrology section, “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) funds,” according to a notice scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on March 19.

ORI based its findings on a Baylor College of Medicine investigation as well as evidence gathered during its oversight review, the notice states. It continues:

His manuscript was rejected. Then he saw it published by other authors

A chemist at a university in Pakistan found a surprise when he opened an alert from ResearchGate on a newly published paper on a topic related to his own work.

When Muhammad Kashif, a chemist at Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, looked at the paper, he noticed “substantial overlap” with an unpublished review article he had submitted to other journals. On closer inspection, he found it was indeed his paper — published by other authors.

“I was shocked and deeply concerned,” Kashif told Retraction Watch. “My unpublished work was replicated without attribution, undermining months of effort.”

Seven years after ‘noncompliance’ finding, whistleblowers push for retractions

Seven years after investigations uncovered “serious noncompliance” in the collection of biological samples at a California VA hospital, the original whistleblowers say several papers related to the work use these problematic samples and should be retracted. But the principal investigator of the work says there’s no reason to question the findings.

The VA San Diego Health Care System was one of 12 institutions involved in the InTeam Consortium, a research initiative between 2013 and 2019 focused on alcohol-related liver inflammation. In 2016, two whistleblowers — Mario Chojkier and Martina Buck — alleged staff at the VA hadn’t obtained proper consent to perform biopsies on critically ill patients and use the samples for research related to the project.

Subsequent investigations — including one by VA San Diego’s institutional review board — have confirmed violations of policies, primarily related to a lack of informed consent. Ramon Bataller, the principal investigator of the InTeam Consortium, told local media outlet inewsource in 2019 the samples collected at the VA would be “banished” from any academic papers.

Was nonsense ‘vegetative electron microscopy’ phrase a Farsi typo?

~~Vegetative~~ Scanning electron microscope
*Wikimedia Commons*

A gibberish phrase that caught the attention of science sleuths after it slipped into several journals might trace its origin to a typo in Farsi rather than questionable use of AI, as we reported earlier this month.

Nearly two dozen scientific papers, including some in journals from major publishers, mysteriously refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope.” As we wrote in our previous story, sleuth Alexander Magazinov speculated on PubPeer “the phrase could have originated through faulty digital processing of a two-column article from 1959 in which the word ‘vegetative’ appeared in the left column directly opposite ‘electron microscopy’ in the right.”

Most of the articles containing the strange wording included authors from Iran. Magazinov told us perhaps an AI model had picked up the phrase from the 1959 article and spit it back into machine-generated text that was later plagiarized in other papers by the same Iranian network of fraudsters.

Exclusive: U.S. federal research integrity teams take hits with departures

Amid efforts by the Trump administration to “put an end to fraudulent and wasteful spending” and “enhance” accountability, two key offices charged with investigating fraud and holding scientists and institutions accountable for federal spending have seen top leadership depart.

At the National Science Foundation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), the changes start at the top: Inspector General Allison Lerner is departing, and Megan Wallace, currently assistant inspector general for investigations at NSF, will become the acting inspector general, effective March 1.

Deputy Inspector General Ken Chason is also departing. The acting deputy will be Catherine DelPrete, who is NSF’s general counsel to NSF’s inspector general, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The changes were confirmed by Nadine Lymn, communications director of the National Science Board, which appoints and supervises NSF’s inspector general.

Meanwhile, Retraction Watch has learned that most — if not all — research investigators at the National Science Foundation’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will also be leaving their jobs.

Author forges document to claim USDA affiliation

A journal has retracted three papers after an investigation revealed one of the authors falsely claimed he was affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture.

All three retraction notices, issued February 13 by the Journal of Environmental Management, state study coauthor Tariq Shah claimed affiliation with the USDA Plant Science Research Unit. “When asked about these issues during an editorial investigation, Shah’s responses caused the editor to further lose confidence in the validity/integrity of the article,” the notices say.

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told us in an email “Shah provided a document claiming to show his official affiliation with USDA that we later learned through our investigation was forged.” Neither Shah nor Elsevier clarified what the document was.

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