by reason for retraction – Page 11

Exclusive: Embattled dean accused of plagiarism in NSF report

Erick Jones, the dean of engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno, appears to have engaged in extensive plagiarism in the final report he submitted to the National Science Foundation for a grant, Retraction Watch has learned.

The $28,238 grant partially supported a three-day workshop that Jones and his wife, Felicia Jefferson, held for 21 students in Washington, DC, in April 2022 titled “Broadening Participation in Engineering through Improved Financial Literacy.” Jefferson received a separate award for $21,757.

Jones submitted his final report to the agency in May 2023. Retraction Watch obtained a copy of that report through a public records request to Jones’s previous employer, the University of Texas at Arlington, and identified three published sources of extended passages he used without citation or quotation marks.

A cardiac surgeon’s tortuous efforts – including three lawsuits – to get the scientific record corrected

For the past 14 years, a cardiac surgeon in Italy has been trying to blow the whistle on a study written by his former colleagues that has been the subject of several investigations – with two of them finding problems with the data. And despite defeating three defamation lawsuits, two which were brought by authors of the paper, he’s not giving up yet.

The 2006 paper, ‘Relationship between atrial histopathology and atrial fibrillation after coronary bypass surgery’, written by several of cardiac surgeon Vittorio Mantovani’s colleagues at the Ospedale di Circolo in Varese, was published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. To date, the paper – which has been cited 57 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – has been investigated by at least two institutions as well as the journal. None have resulted in a retraction, despite one university finding that only a little more than half of the patients in the dataset could be matched unambiguously with biopsy samples. One university is also waiting on the journal to act before it considers reopening its own investigation.

For Mantovani, the red flags started appearing in 2010, when he came across a minor discrepancy between two other papers written by him and his colleagues. He thought it was odd that in one dataset, patients were identified by name, but in the other, they were identified using numbers.

Medical society takes millions from company that sued it for defamation – and lost

When the American Society of Anesthesiologists last October announced the receipt of a $2.5 million donation from a drug company – “to advance education and innovation for our members” – the news could have been dismissed with a shrug. After all, such gifts from industry to medical societies are commonplace.

What makes this case noteworthy is that until the donation, the ASA and the drug maker, Pacira BioSciences, were better known as adversaries embroiled in a bitter lawsuit over three articles about the company’s flagship product the society had published in 2021 in its main scientific journal.

The papers, which questioned the effectiveness of Exparel, an anesthetic intended for the treatment of patients undergoing orthopedic surgery and other procedures. As we reported in May 2021, as part of a larger suit against the ASA, Pacira demanded in legal filings that the ASA and its journal, Anesthesiology, retract the papers, which it considered libelous.

The company didn’t hold that stance long, however. We wrote then:

Science ‘Majorana’ particle paper earns another editor’s note as expert committee finds no misconduct

A paper that led to hopes that Microsoft might one day build a quantum computer has “shortcomings” that do not rise to the level of misconduct, according to an expert panel convened by the University of Copenhagen.

The paper, originally published in March 2020 in Science, earned an expression of concern in 2021 following critiques of the work from two researchers, Sergey Frolov and Vincent Mourik. This week, Science editor in chief Holden Thorp replaced the expression of concern with an editor’s note referring to a new report from a panel of experts at the University of Copenhagen, saying “we are alerting readers to this report while we await a formal decision on the matter from the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct.”

The panel’s report, dated Feb. 15, 2024, describes several of what it calls “shortcomings” but says “the excluded data did not undermine the paper’s main conclusions.” They also conclude the authors did not engage in “gross negligence” or scientific misconduct.

The last author of the Science paper, Charles Marcus, of the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues followed the recommendations by posting:

Highly cited scientist published dozens of papers after his death

One of the most highly cited authors in engineering has continued publishing after his death more than a year ago.

Jiří Jaromír Klemeš, a researcher at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic and a top editor at an Elsevier journal that has come under fire for author self-citation, is listed as a coauthor of at least 49 papers published since his death in January 2023.

Most of the articles do not mention that Klemeš is deceased. Whether they should have is not entirely clear. Publishers and journals aren’t consistent about the protocol following the death of a research collaborator – a lack of consistency that has even stirred up some debate among our own readers in the past.

Of the 49 papers we found posthumously listing Klemeš as a coauthor, 27 fail to mention his death. Commenters on PubPeer have spotted several of these instances and queried them without a meaningful response from the surviving authors.

Stanford prof who sued critics loses appeal against $500,000 in legal fees

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who sued a journal and a critic for $10 million before dropping the case, has lost an appeal he filed in 2022 to avoid paying defendants more than $500,000 in legal fees.

As we have previously reported, Jacobson:

…who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.

‘The sincerest form of flattery’: How a math professor discovered his work had been plagiarized

Not long ago, it came to my attention that a 2016 paper by my students and me, “Measuring Semantic Similarity Of Words Using Concept Networks,” had been plagiarized, verbatim. The offenders had added two words to the title, which now read: “A Novel Methodology For Measuring Semantic Similarity Of Words Using Concept Networks.” Their article was published in the journal Webology, which has been delisted from Scopus, Elsevier’s abstract and citation database. My first impulse was to ignore the transgression, but I asked the question what to do on a closed mailing list read by former colleagues:

I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I’m sufficiently flattered, and I know that even a Harvard President was let go for lesser forms of plagiarism, but Integral University of Lucknow is not exactly Harvard. We may already live in a post-truth world (if Trump gets reelected it’s proof positive that we do) and I don’t quite have it in me to destroy the futures of some random students (or perhaps faculty?) in India. The online journal where it appeared is published in Teheran, and does not appear on Beall’s list of predatory journals. What to do?

The responses ran 10-0 in favor of doing something. Here is a typical one:

Could ‘write once/read many’ discourage cheating?

In a recent Science editorial, Barbara Redman and our Ivan Oransky called for a boost to the budget and authority of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI). In this letter, a nephrologist and researcher suggests one potential way to fight fraud.

Bravo on your editorial, which pointed out the pathetic funding level for an agency that is supposed to put a check on self-interested fabrication and distortion in scientific research. Perhaps universities and influential individuals who feel the threat of censure have collaborated to minimize that risk by throttling the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Regardless, billions of dollars each year are probably lost in misdirected efforts based on false information. That is a national tragedy.

During the time I was an undergraduate at Caltech we had an honor code that was very clear: You cheat, lie or fabricate and you are at best heavily censured, and likely out. We learned that one’s research notes were our reputation, and that our supervising senior researchers would often and unpredictably ask to review them. It was daunting and occasionally very stressful, but led to a lifelong ethic that stood me in good stead when I went into medicine, where peoples’ lives were at stake based on what we wrote and did.

Journal pulls papers following Retraction Watch investigation

A journal quietly retracted two papers after a six-month Retraction Watch investigation linked them, and two of the journal’s editors, to the Indian paper mill iTrilon.

Based in Chennai, iTrilon hawks authorship of “readymade” publications to scientists “struggling to write and publish papers in PubMed and Scopus-Indexed Journals.” The company, whose website disappeared following our exposé in Science, claims to have connections at journals that allow it to guarantee acceptance of many of its papers.

The two retracted papers – “Evaluation of the neuroprotective activity of citral nanoemulsion on Alzheimer’s disease-type dementia in a preclinical model: The assessment of cognitive and neurobiochemical responses” and “Therapeutic effects of quercetin-loaded phytosome nanoparticles in a preclinical model of Parkinson’s disease: The modulation by antioxidant pathways and BDNF expression” – had both been put up for sale by iTrilon before they appeared last year in the non-indexed journal Life Neuroscience.

We published the matching ads last week in a companion piece to the Science article that linked a professor and dean at a university in Spain to several iTrilon papers. The dean, Dionisio Lorenzo Lorenzo Villegas of Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias, in Las Palmas, acknowledged paying the paper mill, but said he thought the money was meant to cover article-processing charges. He has since taken down his LinkedIn profile.

Wiley reopens plagiarism case about dead researcher’s work

Zulfiqar Habib, dean of computer science at COMSATS University Islamabad, in Pakistan, was appalled when he discovered part of a former PhD student’s dissertation had been published in a scientific journal.

After all, the former student, Kurshid Asghar, had been dead for more than a year by the time the manuscript was submitted to Security and Communication Networks, a Hindawi title. And Habib knew none of Asghar’s coauthors had contributed to the research, which Habib had supervised.

“It was both shocking and unbelievable,” he told Retraction Watch.

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