by reason for retraction – Page 15

President of Iranian university in ‘serious breach of ethical standards’

The president of an Iranian university and a colleague appear to have published the same microelectronics paper twice, according to allegations seen by Retraction Watch.

The articles, by Bahram Azizollah Ganji and Kamran Delfan Hemmati of Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, deal with the design of a new capacitive accelerometer with a high dynamic range and sensitivity. Both appeared online in 2020, first in the Slovenia-based Journal of Microelectronics, Electronic Components and Materials and later in the higher-impact Springer journal Microsystem Technologies. The former version has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, while the latter has been cited twice.

The editors of Microsystem Technologies were made aware of the allegations on November 16 in an email that cited “significantly identical content” in the two papers. “Pretty much the entire introduction section and almost all figures are an exact copy from” the authors’ previous article, the email stated.

Elsevier journal temporarily removes article by prolific psychologist – with a typo at “frist”

An Elsevier psychology journal took down an article in early December with a notice that appeared to be an internal memo, including a typo.

The article, a letter titled “First COVID-19 suicide case in Bangladesh due to fear of COVID-19 and xenophobia: Possible suicide prevention strategies,” was published in June of 2020 in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry by Mark D. Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in the UK and Mohammed A. Mamun of Jahangirnagar University and the Undergraduate Research Organization in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It has been cited more than 300 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Griffiths’ high publishing rate – according to his university’s index he published nearly 200 journal articles in 2022 – came under scrutiny from Oxford University psychologist Dorothy Bishop in 2020, including his many collaborations with Mamun. Griffiths told the Times Higher Education that he “made an intellectual contribution to every refereed paper I’ve published.”

University to investigate adjunct professor after allegations of plagiarism – and legal threats

The University of Zurich in Switzerland has announced that it will open an investigation into an adjunct professor alleged to have taken images and other material from a popular blog on medieval manuscripts and published them in her book without attribution.

The news, first reported by kath.ch, follows an eyebrow-raising exchange between the researcher who discovered his work had been used without citation and someone claiming to be the professor’s secretary, who told him, “nobody cares about your blog!”

The professor, Carla Rossi, is also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition, abbreviated as RECEPTIO. The center operates an academic press that published Rossi’s 2022 work, The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy: a.k.a. The Courtanvaux-Elmhirst Hours, Digitally Restored Through the Wayback Recovery Method.

The book describes a manuscript that Rossi purported to have digitally reconstructed.

Article that critiqued high-profile abortion study retracted

An article that critiqued a study on what happened after women did not get abortions that they sought has been retracted after observers raised concerns that the peer review process had not been objective.

The article, “The Turnaway Study: A Case of Self-Correction in Science Upended by Political Motivation and Unvetted Findings,” was originally published in Frontiers in Psychology in June of 2022.

The Turnaway Study itself was an effort of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed women who had received abortions and women who sought abortions but did not get them because they were too far along in their pregnancies “to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term,” according to its website.

Meet the publisher making the science of Brontë, Faulkner, and Whitman available for the first time

Waves have a higher energy thickness contrasted with other sustainable power sources, so it requires less space to create a similar measure of energy. The upside of these waves is that they convey measures of dynamic energy and keep them all through the excursion from the focal point of the ocean to the ocean side. The dynamic energy of the ocean waves is tackled to mechanical works like power age …

Few scholars of the work of William Faulkner know that the winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature toyed with the above passage in early drafts of his 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!

He went instead with the more memorable:

Contamination leads to swift retraction for Science paper on the origins of Omicron in Africa

The authors of a paper that proposed the Omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 had evolved in Western Africa months before it was first detected in South Africa have retracted their study after discovering contamination in their samples, as several scientists had suggested on Twitter was the case.

The article, “Gradual emergence followed by exponential spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Africa,” was published in Science on December 1 by a team led by Jan Felix Drexler of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Soon after publication, many geneticists expressed skepticism on social media about the study, including questioning whether the results came from contamination during the sequencing process.

Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tweeted on December 4 about “weaknesses” in the study, including that “the quality of the sequences seems problematic”:

‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review

A retired professor of education has lost three papers – which he said he helped edit for a former student – after the publisher discovered manipulated peer review led to their acceptance.

Roger Shouse, an associate professor emeritus at Penn State College of Education, spent the 2018-2019 academic year at Sichuan University in China as a professor of public administration. While there, he helped several students write research articles in English, and advised one who listed him as a coauthor on three papers even though Shouse didn’t ask for authorship, he told us.

Those papers – on land use, climate vulnerability and disaster response among rural communities in Bangladesh – were retracted from the journal Land Use Policy this past August, after an investigation revealed the peer review process had been manipulated.

Shouse was listed as the last author, and researcher Md Nazirul Islam Sarker of Neijiang Normal University was the first author. A fourth paper retracted at the same time, with an identical retraction notice, listed Sarker as second author but did not include Shouse.

The retracted papers are:

Cancer researcher banned from federal funding for faking data in nearly 400 images in 16 grant applications

A former associate professor at Purdue University faked data in two published papers and hundreds of images in 16 grant applications, according to a U.S. government research watchdog.

Alice C. Chang, whose publications and grants listed her name as Chun-Ju Chang, received nearly $700,000 in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through grant applications that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said contained fake data. She will be banned from receiving federal grants for a decade – a more severe sanction than ORI has typically imposed in recent years.

In its findings, ORI said Chang, who was an associate professor of basic medical sciences at Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine:

PLOS flags nearly 50 papers by controversial French COVID researcher for ethics concerns

The publisher PLOS is marking nearly 50 articles by Didier Raoult, the French scientist who became controversial for promoting hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, with expressions of concern while it investigates potential research ethics violations in the work.

PLOS has been looking into more than 100 articles by Raoult, but determined that the issues in 49 of the papers, including reuse of ethics approval reference numbers, warrant expressions of concern while the publisher continues its inquiry.

In August of 2021, scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik wrote on her blog about a series of 17 articles from IHU-Méditerranée Infection that described different studies involving homeless people in Marseille over a decade, but all listed the same institutional ethics approval number. One of those papers, “Distinguishing Body Lice from Head Lice by Multiplex Real-Time PCR Analysis of the Phum_PHUM540560 Gene,” about which Bik also posted on PubPeer, was published in PLOS ONE in 2013, and is receiving an expression of concern today.

A paper used capital T’s instead of error bars. But wait, there’s more!

Mere days after tweets went viral pointing out that the purported error bars in one figure of a paper were really just the capital letter T, the publisher has marked it with an expression of concern. [12/22/22: The paper has now been retracted; see an update on this post.]

And that’s not all that’s strange about the paper.

The July 2022 article, “Monitoring of Sports Health Indicators Based on Wearable Nanobiosensors,” was published in a special issue of the journal Advances in Materials Science and Engineering, a Hindawi title.

The article purports to show that using nanoparticles can better measure the biochemical fitness levels of elderly people than other methods.

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