Category: expression of concern

A group of researchers at Washington State University has received four expressions of concern for papers whose findings underpin a publicly traded company founded by two of the most senior authors on the articles.

The studies, all of which appeared in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, came from the labs of Joseph Harding, a medical chemist at Washington State, and his colleague Jay Wright. Published between 2011 and 2014, the four articles report on a molecule called angiotensin IV, work which Harding and Wright leveraged to spin-off Athira, a Seattle-based biotech firm developing treatments for conditions including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. 

The CEO of Athira, formerly known as M3 Biotechnology, is Leen Kawas, once a PhD student at Washington State whose 2011 doctoral dissertation provided figures for this fraught 2011 article in JPET, which earned a correction in 2014. Earlier this year, as STAT reported, Kawas was forced to take a leave of absence from the company over concerns that she altered images in several papers. And there has been other scrutiny of the company.

A marketing journal is taking heat on social media for issuing an expression of concern over a 2019 paper that many readers believe should have been retracted — and correcting another instead of retracting it.

The article now subject to an expression of concern, “Role of Ambient Temperature in Influencing Willingness to Pay in Auctions and Negotiations,” was written by Jayati Sinha, who holds the Macy’s Retailing Professorship at Florida International University and Rajesh Bagchi, of Virginia Tech University. 

According to the abstract:

Less than a month after the withdrawal of a widely touted preprint claiming that ivermectin could treat COVID-19, the authors of a meta-analysis that relied heavily on the preprint say they will retract their paper.

According to an expression of concern posted yesterday and announced by Paul Sax, the editor of the journal that published the paper:

Should a journal retract a paper when they learn that one of its authors has earned a year-long prison sentence for downloading child pornography?

For Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics the answer was no. And experts in publication ethics say that was the right call.

The researcher in question is Jan Joosten, who held the prestigious Regius professorship of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, was convicted of downloading 28,000 child abuse images and videos and  placed on the register for sex offenders in France, according to the Guardian.

Just months after Nature retracted a paper on the “Majorana” particle because other researchers found issues in the work, Science has placed an expression of concern on a different paper that suggested “a relatively easy route to creating and controlling [Majorana zero modes] MZMs in hybrid materials.”

If such particles exist, they could allow Microsoft — which employs some of the researchers involved in the work — to build a quantum computer. But scientists have suggested that the findings of various studies do not suggest the presence of Majorana particles.

The Science paper has been cited 29 times since it was published in 2020, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The EoC reads:

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 17-year-old paper by one of the world’s most prominent behavioral psychologists after it partly failed a statistical stress test conducted by a group that has been trying to reproduce findings in the field. 

The 2004 article, by Dan Ariely, of Duke University but then at MIT, and James Heyman, then a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, was published in Psychological Science. Titled “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets,” the article looked the relationship between labor and payment for that work:

Elsevier says it is reassessing its procedures for special issues after one of its journals issued expressions of concern for six such publications, involving as many as 400 articles, over worries that the peer review process was compromised. 

The journal, Microprocessors & Microsystems, published the special issues using guest editors.  

The EoCs vary slightly, but the journal has issued the following blanket statement for these six issues:

Earlier this week, we reported that a paper claiming that two deaths resulted from COVID-19 vaccination for every three cases that were prevented had earned an expression of concern.

[Please see an update on this post; the paper has been retracted.]

The authors, including Harald Walach, who was also co-author of a just-published paper in JAMA Pediatrics questioning the safety of masks in children, had used data from the Dutch national registry of side effects. That registry carries a warning label about its use. The editors of Vaccines, which published the study last month, wrote that there were concerns over “misrepresentation of the COVID-19 vaccination efforts and misrepresentation of the data.”