Category: expression of concern

Sometimes, we become part of the story: A play in several acts.

On Jan. 27, 2021, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) issued a report about the work of Ye Zhang, a materials scientist on the faculty. The Institute, as we reported February 2, found that Zhang had committed plagiarism and had fabricated data in a May 2019 paper in Chemical Communications, and suspended her for six months.

Zhang told us on February 3 that she “dispute[d] the conclusion of the investigation on scientific grounds that refute it entirely.” In a comment the next day, a Retraction Watch commenter asked to see the spectra Zhang and colleagues referred to in the paper. Zhang sent those shortly thereafter, and we posted them to the site.

And now, some four and a half months later, comes an expression of concern, signed by the journal’s executive editor, Richard Kelly. The EOC includes Zhang’s full-throated defense, and a link to that PDF:

Last December, Elisabeth Bik notified journals about 45 articles by a researcher in China which struck her as suspicious. Within weeks, one of those journals — DNA and Cell Biology — had retracted the paper she’d flagged.

That reassuringly brisk response appears to have been an anomaly in the case of Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China. Only two other retractions have followed, by our count (Tang had a retraction in 2020, bringing his total so far to four). However, FEBS Letters, which published three articles by Tang that Bik had identified as problematic, has now issued expressions of concern for the papers.  

The notices for the articles, which appeared between 2011 and 2014, raise questions about the “data integrity” in the work. Here’s the one for “Downregulation of PPP2R5E expression by miR-23a suppresses apoptosis to facilitate the growth of gastric cancer cells,” from 2014: 

Never let it be said that journals are not deliberative when it comes to correcting the record. 

Of course, “deliberative” also means “slow.”

Take a 2018 article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID)  by a group of authors in India. 

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper after recognizing that the researchers may have been using contaminated cell lines. 

The article, “Downregulation of NIN/RPN12 binding protein inhibit [sic] the growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma cells,” appeared in Molecular Biology Reports, a Springer Nature title. In it, the authors, from China Medical University Shengjing Hospital, sought to find:

whether the suppression of Nob1 by short hairpin RNA (shRNA) inhibits the growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells. Recombinant lentiviral shRNA expression vector carrying Nob1 was constructed and then infected into human HCC cell line SMMC-7721

Perhaps they did, and the paper has been cited 21 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. However, experimental lines of SMMC-7721 cells are among the many cell lines known to have been contaminated by HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks — highly proliferative cervical cancer cells that have overrun labs worldwide. So perhaps they didn’t. 

As the EoC states: 

Chemosphere has issued an expression of concern for a 2019 paper on microplastics in the ocean with an uncomfortable degree of similarity to a previously published article in another journal.

However, the editors decided that they could find enough daylight between the two papers that leaving their version unretracted was “barely justified” — a less-than-hearty endorsement of the article and one that’s likely to leave readers with more questions than answers about the integrity of the work.  

The article, titled ‘‘Prevalence of microplastic pollution in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean,” came from a group led by Zhong Pan, of the Laboratory of Marine Chemistry and Environmental Monitoring Technology, part of the State Oceanic Administration in Xiamen, China.  

According to the notice: 

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on a study of a potential treatment for autism. 

The article, by a group in Slovakia, purported to show for the first time that the drug ubiquinol — a form of the compound  coenzyme Q₁₀ — could improve the ability of children with autism to communicate with their parents, communicate verbally, play games with other children and help with other behaviors. 

The paper was published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, a Hindawi journal. The first author was Anna Gvozdjáková, of Comenius University in Bratislava, and the last author was Fred Crane, a former biologist at Purdue University in Indiana. Crane, who died in 2016, is credited with being the discoverer of coenzyme Q10 in mitochondria in 1957. The 2014 article — which has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was among the last of his 400-plus papers to appear in print.

Per the EoC: 

More than six months after two of the world’s leading medical journals retracted papers on COVID-19 based on suspect data from a questionable company, a journal says it has cleared a raft of articles by the controversial founder of the firm. Or, has it? 

Vascular, a SAGE title, says it has investigated all papers in the journal by Sapan Desai that relied on  “a significant amount of data,” whatever that means. Desai, you’ll recall, founded Surgisphere, which is now famous for refusing to share its data in articles published in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. 

We counted 18 11 papers in Vascular on which Desai was a co-author. The journal says — in a rather oblique way — that all but two of the articles it examined either checked out or didn’t include enough data to raise alarms.

The expression of concern reads: