by reason for retraction – Page 17

Authors hire lawyer as journal plans to retract their article on pesticide poisoning

A public health journal intends to retract an article that estimated how many unintentional pesticide poisonings happen each year worldwide, Retraction Watch has learned.

In response, the authors hired a lawyer to represent them in contesting the retraction, and maintain the journal’s decision “undermines the integrity of the scientific process.” This is the second time within a few months that the journal retracted an article through a process authors said was problematic.

Archaeologists claimed old findings as their own, critic says

Around Christmas last year, Preston Sowell received an unpleasant delivery.

An archaeologist who knew about Sowell’s work in southeastern Peru sent him a paper about new findings in a particular part of the country Sowell, an independent environmental scientist, was familiar with. The paper, written by several of Sowell’s former colleagues, contained a “shocking” surprise.

“I almost immediately recognized there were errors in the paper,” Sowell said. “I recognised, literally with my first read, some of those artifacts.”

Exclusive: Whistleblower fired after raising concerns about journal articles on LinkedIn

A business school in Pakistan has fired a marketing professor after finding he had “damaged the repute” of the university and its scholarly journal, Retraction Watch has learned.

In a LinkedIn post, Muhammad Mohsin Butt, the now-fired professor, shared a picture of the table of contents of a 2015 issue of Business Review, published by the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), in Karachi. The contents listed seven case studies authored by two other professors at the school:

PLOS backs down from expression of concern after author’s lawsuit

A researcher who sued the publisher PLOS to prevent it from posting an expression of concern for one of her papers has dropped her suit, and the publisher tells us it will add a correction to the article instead – but may “revisit this case” to deal with “unresolved issues.”

We’ve previously reported on the lawsuit Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., filed against PLOS in April, as well as signs of a pending settlement.

According to an order filed November 2, Singh informed the court that she “voluntarily dismisses” the claims in her complaint, without the possibility of re-filing them, and the judge dismissed the case.

In her complaint, Singh alleged that PLOS planned to place an expression of concern on one of her papers, “Cyclooxygenase pathway mediates the inhibition of Na-glutamine co-transporter B0AT1 in rabbit villus cells during chronic intestinal inflammation,” published in PLOS ONE in September 2018, after she and her co-authors had requested a correction of a duplicated image. The paper has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, but not since April 2021.

Exclusive: NYU cancer center director suspended

The director of one the nation’s premier cancer centers has been suspended amid concerns over several of his papers – but he tells Retraction Watch it is unrelated to comments about that work on PubPeer.

An email Wednesday to employees at New York University’s medical center – and a subsequent message to staff at the institution’s Perlmutter Cancer Center – explained that Benjamin Neel, the former director of the center, had been suspended.

The letter, signed by Steven Abramson, a rheumatologist and executive vice president at NYU Langone Health, did not state the reason for the move:

Controversial French researcher loses two papers for ethics approval issues

Didier Raoult, the French infectious disease scientist who came to prominence for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, has lost two papers for ethics concerns after other scientists flagged issues with hundreds of publications from the institute he formerly led.

Both papers, “Increased Gut Redox and Depletion of Anaerobic and Methanogenic Prokaryotes in Severe Acute Malnutrition,” and “Gut Microbiota Alteration is Characterized by a Proteobacteria and Fusobacteria Bloom in Kwashiorkor and a Bacteroidetes Paucity in Marasmus,” appeared in Scientific Reports in 2016 and 2019, respectively. They have been cited approximately 160 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notices, published Monday, were nearly identical. They stated:

Cancer researcher with nine retractions says he’ll take publisher to court

A cancer researcher who lost nine papers in one day as a publisher purged articles offered in “authorship-for-sale” schemes told Retraction Watch he and his co-authors “will soon defend ourselves legally.”

Last month, the publisher Frontiers announced it had retracted 38 papers after its research integrity team found links to the practice of buying and selling authorship positions. Brokers list advertisements for authorships of scientific papers on dedicated websites as well as social media.

Nine of the 38 articles Frontiers retracted listed Mostafa Jarahian, formerly of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, as a co-author.

When we initially reported on the large batch of retractions, one of Jarahian’s co-authors shared an article from Frontiers indicating the publisher had decided to retract the paper after “concerns were brought to our attention from the German Cancer Research Center regarding the authorship of the article.”

PLOS and scientist appear close to settling lawsuit over expression of concern

The publisher PLOS appears close to an agreement with a scientist who sued to stop the addition of an expression of concern to one of her articles, according to a recent filing in the case.

Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., filed suit against PLOS in April, as we previously reported.

According to Singh’s complaint, the publisher planned to place an expression of concern on one of her papers after she and her co-authors had requested a correction.

Singh’s suit sought a temporary restraining order and permanent injunction preventing PLOS from publishing the expression of concern, as well as damages and legal fees.

Professor who blamed plagiarism on ghostwriter to earn first retraction

A professor in France who plagiarized extensively in a review article and then blamed the offense on an undisclosed medical writer will lose the publication, Retraction Watch has learned.

“We have decided to retract this paper,” Yi-Xiang Wang, editor-in-chief of Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery, told us by email.

The move comes one day after a Retraction Watch exclusive describing how the professor, Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne, claimed he had not written the offending paper despite being listed as its first and corresponding author. Instead, Loffroy put the blame on an alleged medical writer.

The retraction will be Loffroy’s first. He did not immediately respond to our request for comments.

Alcohol researcher faked data in animal studies, US watchdog says

A neuroscientist who studies alcohol and stress faked data in two published studies and two grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to a U.S. government watchdog.

Lara S. Hwa, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, since January 2021, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data, methods, results, and conclusions in animal models of alcohol use disorders,” the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) concluded in its findings.

ORI found Hwa, who has not immediately responded to our request for comment, “falsified and/or fabricated experimental timelines, group conditions, sex of animal subjects, mouse strains, and behavioral response data” in the grant applications and papers. The articles were published when she was a postdoc at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.

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