expression of concern – Page 2

Author critical of study involving abortion hires lawyers after journal flags paper

Priscilla K. Coleman testifying before U.S. Congress in 2007

The author of an article on unwanted pregnancies that has received an expression of concern for reasons that remain unclear says she has hired lawyers to defend herself against “defamation.”

Priscilla K. Coleman, a professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio – whose controversial work on the link between abortion and mental health problems has come under scrutiny – told us that she plans “to actively pursue all options available including legal avenues to rectify the situation” after Frontiers in Social Health Psychology slapped the EoC on her 2022 article.

The paper in question was titled “The Turnaway Study: A case of self-correction in science upended by political motivation and unvetted findings.” The Turnaway Study is an ongoing look by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco at the effects on women – including the physical, emotional, and economic toll – of carrying unwanted pregnancies. The main finding, according to its site, “is that receiving an abortion does not harm the health and wellbeing of women, but in fact, being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health and family outcomes.”

The abstract for Coleman’s review reads, in part:

Paper co-authored by sleuth Elisabeth Bik marked with expression of concern

A paper with scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik as a co-author now has an expression of concern. It dated back to her time at the now-defunct startup uBiome and described research that the company used to develop a clinical test of bacteria living in the human gut – and that she raised concerns about some years ago.

The article, “16S rRNA gene sequencing and healthy reference ranges for 28 clinically relevant microbial taxa from the human gut microbiome,” was published in PLOS ONE in 2017 and has been cited 39 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The expression of concern detailed the journal’s investigation into allegations that some of the samples in the paper weren’t suitable for determining a healthy baseline of the human gut microbiome — being from infants, people who might have recently taken antibiotics, and pets — and the authors’ responses.

It’s a long notice, but this paragraph sums up the concerns:

Company’s Alzheimer’s treatment study earns a flag

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a federally-funded paper on Alzheimer’s disease after a sleuth on PubPeer noted potentially duplicated figures in the article.

We shouldn’t forget to mention, as the paper did, that one of the authors – a prominent scientist who happens also to be a co-editor in chief of the journal – has financial ties to a company with interest in the work. That author said the fault lies with the corresponding author.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, it seems, when it comes to neurofibrillary tangles. And we’ve seen at least one other case of a paper failing to disclose conflicts of interest in a paper he’d published in his own journal. (This is a subject that has been taken up elsewhere.)

The article in this case, “Human Umbilical Cord Blood-Derived Monocytes Improve Cognitive Deficits and Reduce Amyloid-β Pathology in PSAPP Mice,” appeared in Cell Transplantation, a SAGE title, in November 2015.

Papers in Scientific Reports – and their expressions of concern – raise questions

Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.

The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.

One 2021 article, “Numerical investigation of nanofluid flow using CFD and fuzzy-based particle swarm optimization,” drew a significant amount of attention on PubPeer. In January, a commenter pointed out a variety of apparent problems with the paper and noted that questions have been raised about other work by members of the group – including this now-retracted article in … Scientific Reports.

A hare-raising expression of concern after an author hires a third party to get a paper published

An Elsevier journal has issued a rather remarkable expression of concern for a 2021 paper on rabbit husbandry after learning that the lead author misrepresented the authorship of the article – and possibly more.

The paper, “Supplementing rabbit diets with butylated hydroxyanisole affects oxidative stress, growth performance, and meat quality,” appeared in animal and ostensibly came from a group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia led by Tharwat Imbabi.

But as the journal explains, the article wasn’t the first rabbit rodeo for Imbabi, of the department of animal production at Benha University. According to the notice, the researcher had failed repeatedly to publish his manuscript in other journals, so he turned to “third parties” for help.

Those contributors did the bulk of the work – but wanted none of the credit. Meanwhile, Imbabi appears to have found other authors willing to join the list.

We’ll let the expression of concern tell the rest:

Drug researchers in Russia have four papers subjected to expressions of concern

A psychiatry journal has issued expressions of concern for four papers by a group of researchers in Russia after questions surfaced about the integrity of the data.

The first author on all of the papers was Ilya D. Ionov, of the Centre On Theoretical Problems in Physical and Chemical Pharmacology, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The co-authors are affiliated with Timpharm LTD, a drug company without much in the way of an online presence.

The papers appeared in Psychopharmacology, a Springer Nature title.

Here’s the notice for “Anticataleptic activity of nicotine in rats: involvement of the lateral entorhinal cortex,” which Psychopharmacology published in 2021:

Journal issues 55 expressions of concern at once

The journal Cureus has issued expressions of concern for a whopping 55 papers whose authorship has come into question.

The articles, including a couple like this one on COVID-19, were apparently submitted as part of an effort by Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, in Saudi Arabia, to pad the publishing resumes of its medical students – and perhaps the school’s own metrics – who targeted Cureus for reasons that aren’t now clear.

Here’s the notice for “Sylvian Fissure Lipoma: An Unusual Etiology of Seizures in Adults,” which the journal published in January 2022:

Dermatology journal calls for investigation into Bordeaux-INSERM work

Two and a half years after critics raised concerns, a dermatology journal says it has called on two French institutions to launch an inquiry into a 2017 paper.

The Journal of Investigative Dermatology has issued an expression of concern for the article, “NADPH Oxidase-1 Plays a Key Role in Keratinocyte Responses to UV Radiation and UVB-Induced Skin Carcinogenesis,” which it published in June 2017.

The authors of the group were led by Hamid Reza Rezvani, the head of the dermatology team at Université de Bordeaux, and a research director with INSERM, France’s publicly funded science agency.

According to the article’s abstract:

Ivermectin papers slapped with expressions of concern

A journal has issued expressions of concern for a pair of 2021 meta-analyses purporting to find that ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid-19 after data sleuths raised questions about some of the research in the studies.

As we reported last fall, one of the two papers – “Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines” – began to wobble when data central to its conclusion were retracted from the journal Viruses. That article has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, making it a highly-cited, “hot” paper.

The other article was titled “Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19” and was written by a group led by Pierre Kory. Kory is a controversial Wisconsin physician whose ideas about how to treat the infection, and particularly ivermectin, have made him a darling of ivermectin proponents like Joe Rogan.

Kory’s group lost a different Covid-19 paper last November over problems with the data, and a paper similar to the one now subject to an expression of concern was removed from a Frontiers journal last year.

The two meta-analyses were the subject of an editorial in the November/December 2021 issue of the journal by its editor, Peter Manu, who cautioned that:

Biotech’s ‘cell squeezing’ technology paper earns expression of concern

A 2018 study in PNAS that claimed to show a biotech company’s platform for creating immunotherapies was better than existing methods has earned an expression of concern over the reproducibility of some of its findings.

When the article appeared, STAT called “Cell engineering with microfluidic squeezing preserves functionality of primary immune cells in vivo,” a “major paper that showed more clearly why companies like Roche are so interested in using its technique.”

The technique was developed by SQZ Biotech, which was founded by MIT’s Robert Langer, a founder or co-founder of numerous biotechs including Moderna, and with whom Roche partnered in 2015.

The paper has been cited 55 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. According to a press release announcing the work:

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