Category: authorship issues

A paper that sought to bring some math to the idea that the spread of COVID-19 could be tracked in human excrement has been retracted because of the authors submitted it to two different Elsevier journals on the same day — and because of some eyebrow-raising behavior by the alleged peer reviewers. 

The first author of the article was Ernestine Atangana, a researcher in the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. 

The article, “Will the extraction of COVID-19 from wastewater help flatten the curve?,” appeared in Chemosphere in May — where it caught the eye of a researcher in the field (who did not want to be identified) who was struck by its sheer awfulness. (We should note that others have explored the same idea, and come to mixed conclusions.)

Among the more risible sections, the researcher told us, was this: 

A researcher in Bangladesh who fabricated a list of co-authors — and possibly her data, too — in a paper on dengue fever that was recently retracted has published the same article in a different journal.

In 2019, Farzana Ahmed was a pediatric intensivist at United Hospital Ltd, in Dhaka, when she published a study in the Journal of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University. Titled “Diagnostic value of ferritin for the severity of dengue infection in children,” the article described a study of: 

There’s an “us” in lupus, but no “we” — at least in the case of a 2020 paper whose list of authors was a fabrication. 

Published in the journal Lupus, the article, “Antibodies to cellular prion protein and its cognate ligand stress-inducible protein 1 in systemic lupus erythematosus,” was written by a group led by Jozélio F Carvalho, a rheumatologist at the University of São Paulo. Or rather, by Carvalho himself. 

According to the notice: 

Just because you work in a lab doesn’t mean you get to call the data you produce your own. Ask Constantin Heil.

In the mid-2010s, Heil was a PhD student at La Sapienza University in Rome, where he conducted studies with his mentor, Giuseppe Giannini. That research led to Heil’s dissertation, a paper titled “One size does not fit all: Cell type specific tailoring of culture conditions permits establishment of divergent stable lines from murine cerebellum.”  

Heil — who is now working in Switzerland for a company called SOPHiA Genetics — used some of those data to publish a 2019 article, “Hedgehog pathway permissive conditions allow generation of immortal cell lines from granule cells derived from cancerous and non-cancerous cerebellum,” in a peer-reviewed journal, Open Biology, which belongs to the Royal Society.

Want to be a first author on a scholarly paper? A Russian company has you covered — starting at about $500. The company claims to have added the names of more than 10,000 researchers to more than 2,000 published articles in scholarly journals over the past three years. Think eBay — or perhaps StubHub — for unscrupulous scientists. 

Although we can’t verify the numbers, at least one major journal indexer, from whom we recently learned of the scheme, is concerned enough about the site that it has demanded that it stop doing business. 

According to the Russian outfit’s site (through Google Translate): 

Retraction Watch readers may have noticed what seems like a growing trend: Co-first authorships. While the move might seem like a way to promote equality, some researchers are worried that it’s having the opposite effect. In response, the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) recently created additional requirements for shared first authorship. We asked Arturo Casadevall, the first author of an editorial describing those changes, to answer a few questions.

Retraction Watch (RW): The title of your editorial, as well as the editorial itself, refers to bias. What kind of bias is of concern when it comes to co-first authors?