A kidney research group led by a medical school dean has accumulated five retractions.
All five came within the last year, after commenters on PubPeer pointed out image similarities.
Joseph I. Shapiro, vice president and dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, is an author on each of the five papers and corresponding author for two. (Shapiro recently said he will be stepping down at the end of this month after ten years as dean, but will remain a tenured professor, according to a news report.)
A urology researcher who stepped down from his post as department chair after an institutional investigation prompted by Retraction Watch reporting has lost another paper.
The article apparently was not flagged during a misconduct investigation, but a PubPeer commenter noted overlapping images in August 2021.
Hari Koul had been interim chair of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at LSU Health New Orleans until last December. He stepped down from the post (but remains a professor) amid the university’s investigation of allegations that he secured grants from two federal agencies for the same research project, following reporting by Retraction Watch in October.
An LSU Health New Orleans spokesperson told Retraction Watch the “process has not been completed.”
A group of biomedical engineering researchers has lost four papers because they appear to be recycling their images from other papers.
The retractions for the group, from Banaras Hindu University in India, span papers published between 2011 and 2014. The retractions began in 2020, after anonymous PubPeer commenters pointed out the similarities between images. The four papers have been cited a total of 140 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Followers of this blog know that “a reader” seems to be the force behind a huge number of retractions – and that, despite the apparent unwillingness of journals to name them, they are real people. One of the more prolific “readers” is Elisabeth Bik, the data sleuth whose efforts to identify problematic images has led to the removal of hundreds of dodgy papers.
Journals now seem more willing to give credit where it’s due, by identifying Bik – who has faced threats for her efforts – in their notices.
A few recent examples: Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, an Elsevier title, has name-checked Bik in a dozen retractions of papers dating back to 2017.
The University of Glasgow is “in discussions to retract” seven papers by a pharmacology researcher who worked there for more than 25 years, after it learned of allegations on PubPeer by pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis.
The development confirms reporting by Retraction Watch earlier this month. In that post, we wrote:
A journal is considering issuing an expression of concern for a 2005 paper by authors tied to a company that’s now under investigation for fraud, Retraction Watch has learned.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Institutes of Health were investigating claims that the company manipulated data for simulfilam, its experimental drug for Alzheimer’s disease.
A urology researcher at Louisiana State University lost his post as department chair after a misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned. But he eventually moved on to be department chair at a different LSU campus — where he remains today.
In June, we reported that the work of urology researcher Hari Koul had been investigated by his former employer, the University of Colorado, following a recommendation by LSU. But between the time the misconduct investigation concluded in 2014 and the publication of our story, only three of nine papers by Koul that Colorado recommended for corrections or retractions had been amended in any way. More of those publications have been retractedfollowing our story, the reporting of which was how some editors learned of the issues.
Now, via a public records request, we’ve gained access to the inquiry at LSU which led to the investigation at CU Denver and includes notes from interviews with Koul and his postdoc. The Denver investigation didn’t find Koul guilty of misconduct, but it found many errors in his published work, leading LSU’s Health Science Center in Shreveport to demote him in 2016. After several years of apparently unrelated legal battles with LSU’s Health Science Center in Shreveport, Koul moved to a different LSU institution, LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, last year.
Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with the varied — and often unsatisfying — responses of journals to scientific sleuthing that uncovers potential problems with published images. Some editors take the issues seriously, even hiring staff to respond to allegations and vet manuscripts before publication. Some, however, take years to handle the allegations, or ignore them altogether.
Recently, STM’s Standards and Technology Committee (STEC) appointed a working group to look at these issues At a webinar last week, the group — including members from the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and other publishers — released a draft of their recommendations, which:
A chemistry journal has retracted a 2014 paper by a group from China after the first author on the article copped to having Photoshopped a figure — marking the second retraction for members of the group in less than a week and the 14th for one of the authors.
The paper, “Polymer nanodots of graphitic carbon nitride as effective fluorescent probes for the detection of Fe3+ and Cu2+ ions,” appeared in Nanoscale and was written by a group with ties to Soochow University, Hefei University of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, and Yale University. The first author was Shouwei Zhang, whose name appears on at least seven papers flagged on PubPeer for problematic images.
The senior author was Xiangke Wang, whose tally of PubPeer entries is now at 76 and who now has 14 retractions. One of those, the 2013 article “Superior adsorption capacity of hierarchical iron oxide@magnesium silicate magnetic nanorods for fast removal of organic pollutants from aqueous solution,” was retracted from the Journal of Materials Chemistry A on September 13, with the following notice:
A law firm known for filing shareholder suits says that data supporting a drug company’s plan for trials of its experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease show evidence of manipulation.
Stock in the company, Cassava Biosciences, tumbled yesterday after the FDA posted material from the firm, Labaton Sucharow, and a top research integrity expert tells Retraction Watch he sees near-certain signs of fabrication in the data.
Earlier this week, Labaton Sucharow submitted a “citizen’s petition” to the FDA regarding a regulatory filing from Cassava, and called on the agency to halt trials of Cassava’s drug simulfilam on the grounds that it had:
