Category: Legal Threats

The authors of three papers about abortion Sage retracted earlier this year have sued the publisher, alleging the company pulled the articles “for pretextual and discriminatory reasons.” 

In February, Sage retracted three articles from Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology “because of undeclared conflicts of interest and after expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions,” according to the publisher’s statement at the time. Sage also removed the paper’s lead author from the editorial board of the journal. 

A federal judge cited two of the articles last year in his decision to suspend approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortions. 

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has corrected an article by a prize-winning chemist following a report by Retraction Watch his threat to sue a fellow scientist who had submitted a letter to the journal critiquing the paper. 

Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, received one quarter of this year’s Kavli Prize in nanoscience for his work on spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), the topic of the PNAS article. 

As we reported last month, a lawyer representing Mirkin sent a cease and desist letter to Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, accusing Lévy of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research in a letter Lévy had submitted to PNAS about the now-corrected article. 

In his letter, Lévy wrote that the article’s “presentation of SNAs as a ‘powerful class of nanotherapeutics’ is misleading.” 

A journal has republished an edited version of a paper it retracted after a distributor of a chiropractic product the paper criticized wrote in to complain. 

The distributor accused the publication of making “very serious, incorrect and libelous statements” and threatened legal action, Retraction Watch has learned. 

A Frontiers journal has taken down the abstract of a “provisionally accepted” article about harms from an herbal supplement after the company that sells the products sued the first author for defamation. 

The author of the paper, Cyriac Abby Philips, a hepatologist at Rajagiri Hospital in Kerala, India, has over 266,000 followers on his X account “TheLiverDoc.” In 2020, another of Philips’ papers about harm from supplements was retracted and removed after the large supplement company Herbalife, whose products the paper impugned, put legal pressure on Elsevier. 

Himalaya Wellness, an herbal supplement company which says its products are based on Ayurvedic practices, last year sued Philips for defamation based on his posts on X about the company’s products. 

One of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanoscience has threatened to sue a longtime critic, Retraction Watch has learned. 

In a cease and desist letter, a lawyer representing Chad Mirkin, a chemist and director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, accused Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research.

The demand primarily concerns a letter to the editor Lévy submitted in April to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences regarding an article Mirkin co-authored, “Multimodal neuro-nanotechnology: Challenging the existing paradigm in glioblastoma therapy,” which appeared in the journal in February. 

A journal has retracted a letter to the editor and removed the online version from its website “because legal concerns were raised to the Publisher,” according to the notice. The retracted letter had referred to multiple journals as “predatory.” 

The retracted letter, “A threat to scientific integrity,” appeared in the British Dental Journal in August 2023. The author, Niall McGuinness, director of the MClinDent / DClinDent programme in orthodontics at the Edinburgh Dental Institute, criticized a May 2023 opinion article, “What does the Dentists Act say about orthodontic treatment choice?” for the articles it cited.

In particular, McGuinness called out citations to publications in journals “of questionable probity in regard to publication ethics – ‘predatory’ journals as defined by Jeffrey Beall, of the University of Colorado,” according to an archived version seen by Retraction Watch. He listed four journals cited in the article, including one from the publisher Frontiers and another from MDPI, which appeared on Beall’s list. 

The recent criminal indictment of a medical school professor and former scientific advisor to Cassava Sciences on fraud charges for manipulating images in scientific papers and applications for federal funding is a “rare” outcome for such alleged actions that “sends a very, very powerful message.” 

That’s according to lawyers who have worked on research misconduct cases. 

While many investigations by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity and other government watchdogs find scientists manipulated data in grant applications to the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, few are charged with “major fraud against the United States,” as was Hoau-yan Wang. 

Sometime last summer, Ben Mol, an obstetrician-gynecology researcher in Australia, and his colleagues were adapting a European guideline on unexplained infertility when they came across a 2006 paper from Maria Luisa Casini, a pharmacologist in Rome, that gave them pause because of results that were not statistically significant. 

When they looked further, they ended in a rabbit hole. Casini’s previous work revealed identical patient data across papers published two years apart, despite purporting to come from different groups of patients. The similarities were striking: In the 2006 paper, the women’s mean height was 165.5 centimeters; in the study published two years earlier that reported having more than triple the number of participants, the women had the exact same mean height, with the same standard deviation. 

The guideline update would eventually lead to half of the included trials being flagged for integrity issues, and as a result, left out of the Australian version of the guideline. From that one  paper by Casini that had initially raised doubts, the team was able to unearth a trail of suspicious data connected to several ob-gyns in Italy. An Italian medical society and one of the implicated authors have threatened to sue over the allegations, claiming the complaints were made to interfere with a high-profile society election, but the papers are now part of a wider Elsevier investigation.