The Sage journal American Surgeon has issued a mass expression of concern for 116 articles.
The expression of concern states the journal “was made aware” of “concerning author activity” on the articles.
Sage is no stranger to mass editorial actions. In 2023, the publisher pulled large tranches of papers at leastthreetimes, and last year it retracted over 450 papers from a journal the company had acquired from IOS Press. The publisher was one of the first to begin retracting papers in bulk, primarily to combat manipulated peer review.
Science has issued expressions of concern for two articles from the lab of Daniel Durocher, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.
The notices, and two more editor’s notes on Nature articles, follow PubPeer comments on several of Durocher’s papers pointing out potentially duplicated images, as described by ForBetterScience. Durocher has responded to many of the comments promising to look into the issues.
A 14-year-old paper has earned an expression of concern after an anonymous whistleblower found evidence of image duplication in the work.
The authors have had images from several more papers flagged on PubPeer. The corresponding author, Kelly McMasters, is chair of the Hiram C. Polk, Jr., MD Department of Surgery at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky.
The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.”
An Elsevier journal has issued just over 100 expressions of concern for papers published by a group of researchers led by the French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who also notched a new retraction – his tenth – in a separate publication.
As we and others have reported, Raoult’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic drew intense scrutiny from data sleuths, most notably Elisabeth Bik – whose critiques, which extended beyond his COVID studies, were met with vicious online trolling and a legal complaint filed by Raoult himself.
The allegations prompted an ethics investigation by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products into Raoult’s research during his tenure at the IHU Méditerranée Infection, in Marseille, which he led between 2011 and his retirement as director in 2022. That inquiry found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”
A Springer Nature journal has issued an expression of concern for a 16-year-old paper by Carlo Croce, the cancer researcher – and noted art collector – at The Ohio State University three years after the publication had received a correction for problematic images and roughly 20 months after the news division at Nature reported on a pair of institutional investigations into problems with Croce’s work.
As we and others have reported, those investigations concluded Croce had not committed misconduct but had overlooked the misdeeds of others in his lab.
Here’s the notice for the paper, “MicroRNA signatures of TRAIL resistance in human non-small cell lung cancer,” which Oncogene published in 2008:
A paper that led to hopes that Microsoft might one day build a quantum computer has “shortcomings” that do not rise to the level of misconduct, according to an expert panel convened by the University of Copenhagen.
The paper, originally published in March 2020 in Science, earned an expression of concern in 2021 following critiques of the work from two researchers, Sergey Frolov and Vincent Mourik. This week, Science editor in chief Holden Thorp replaced the expression of concern with an editor’s note referring to a new report from a panel of experts at the University of Copenhagen, saying “we are alerting readers to this report while we await a formal decision on the matter from the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct.”
The panel’s report, dated Feb. 15, 2024, describes several of what it calls “shortcomings” but says “the excluded data did not undermine the paper’s main conclusions.” They also conclude the authors did not engage in “gross negligence” or scientific misconduct.
The last author of the Science paper, Charles Marcus, of the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues followed the recommendations by posting:
Science has rescinded an expression of concern it issued one month ago after the authors provided data that “addressed concerns about the integrity of the paper.”
The article has been cited 43 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The journal is publishing the newly submitted data as a correction, as well as an editor’s note explaining the removal of the expression of concern. The new notice states:
A paper published in Science two years ago has been flagged with an expression of concern while the editors give the authors a chance to correct a data issue identified by two different readers.
The publisher PLOS is marking nearly 50 articles by Didier Raoult, the French scientist who became controversial for promoting hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, with expressions of concern while it investigates potential research ethics violations in the work.
PLOS has been looking into more than 100 articles by Raoult, but determined that the issues in 49 of the papers, including reuse of ethics approval reference numbers, warrant expressions of concern while the publisher continues its inquiry.
