by reason for retraction – Page 19

Veterinary researcher banned from journal after fourth forthcoming retraction

A veterinary researcher with three retracted papers and one marked with an expression of concern has another retraction on the way, Retraction Watch has learned.

The first retraction for Tereza Cristina Cardoso da Silva, of the University of São Paulo State in Brazil, came in 2019. As we reported at the time, the retracted paper, about herpesvirus infections in cattle, had reused an image from an earlier paper describing experiments with chicken cells. (We would apologize for the headline of that post, but we just couldn’t resist.)

Since then, Cardoso has lost two more papers for similarly reusing images of different species of animals, and had another article flagged with an expression of concern that mentions an institutional investigation into her work which culminated in a “Disciplinary Administrative Procedure.” A fourth retraction is in the works, per an email we were copied on from a journal editor to the whistleblower who identified another image reused between species.

In four years, a psychosocial counselor co-authored seven papers on disparate medical topics. How?

At the end of July, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan noticed something curious in the publications of Chulani Herath, a senior lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka in Nawala.

Herath is listed as a middle author on seven papers about various topics in medicine, including heart disease, stroke, and burnout among general practitioners in China.

That struck Sarvananthan, an economist in Sri Lanka, as odd. Herath is a psychosocial counselor, not a physician or expert in medicine. “How could she possibly co-author an article in medical sciences?” he wrote in one email to a journal editor, requesting the editor investigate Herath’s paper as a potential product of a paper mill.

Sarvananthan has written to the editors of the journals that published the following seven papers, requesting they investigate:

How a tweet sparked an investigation that led to a PhD student leaving his program

Leslie McIntosh, like many other denizens of Science Twitter, saw a tweet from a pseudonymous account in mid-March that bemoaned a journal’s lack of action after the owner of the account reported “an obvious case of plagiarism.”

13 months since I reported an obvious case of plagiarism. The paper is still online. Journal gone silent and no longer replying to emails.

Ready to name and shame both authors and the journal.@OpenAcademics @AcademicChatter #academictwitter #sciencetwitter pic.twitter.com/3j1hX9uCiR
— Dr Meming (@Dr_Meming) March 15, 2022

The owner of the account had found a paper that ripped off one by his or her own research group while browsing the literature. “It isnt just sentence copying, the whole structure and concept of the paper is THE SAME,” the account tweeted later in the thread.

McIntosh, CEO and cofounder of Ripeta, a tech company that offers automated tools to assess scientific papers, began looking into the paper and its corresponding author, Mohammed Sahab Uddin.

Former PhD student loses two papers for forging co-author’s name

The journal of a national scientific society in Europe has retracted a pair of papers after a heart specialist in Belgium complained that his name had been included on the manuscripts with neither his knowledge nor permission.

The articles appeared in the official journal of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts: Section of Medical Sciences this July.

Both were led by Sofija Popevska and included a single co-author: Frank Rademakers, a cardiologist at KU Leuven. One was titled “The Left Ventricular Pressure-Volume Area and Stroke Work in Porcine Model of Ascending Compared to Descending Thoracic Aorta Stenosis Creating a Chronic Early Vs. Late Left Ventricular Afterload Increase.” The other, “Prolonged Asynchronous Left Ventricular Isovolumic Relaxation Constant in Ascending Compared to Descending Thoracic Aortic Stenosis for Chronic Early Left Ventricular Afterload and Late Left Ventricular Afterload Increase.”

The problem, as Rademakers told us, was that he’d had nothing to do with the work.

Imagine learning you’re an author on a paper after it’s retracted for plagiarism

An education researcher whose colleague added his name without his knowledge to a paper he didn’t contribute to is now dealing with another problem: The paper has been retracted for plagiarism.

And now he’s suing the publisher – not over the retraction, but for allowing the authorship forgery.

Dragan Lambić, of the University of Novi Sad in Serbia, only learned his name was on the article in question, published in a Serbian education journal in 2020, when he received an email this January informing him that the paper would be retracted.

White House official banned from publishing in PNAS following retraction

Jane Lubchenco, the deputy director for climate and environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has been banned from publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and from other NAS activities for five years.

The move, first reported by Axios, comes ten months after PNAS retracted a paper that Lubchenco had edited despite the fact that one of the authors was her brother-in-law and that she had been his PhD advisor. The paper contained an error, but PNAS editor in chief May Berenbaum told us at the time that the conflict of interest would have been enough to prompt a retraction.

In January of this year, the American Accountability Foundation, which calls itself “a charitable and educational organization that conducts non-partisan governmental oversight research and fact-checking so Americans can hold their elected leaders accountable” and has also been called a “slime machine targeting dozens of Biden nominees” by The New Yorker, asked the NAS to investigate. Thomas Jones, the AAF’s founder, wrote, in part:

Doing the right thing: Harvard researchers retract Cell paper after work contradicts finding

The authors of a 2020 paper in Cell are earning plaudits after they retracted the study following the publication of an article last year that contradicted their earlier findings.

The paper, “Allosteric Activators of Protein Phosphatase 2A Display Broad Antitumor Activity Mediated by Dephosphorylation of MYBL2,” purported to show that a particular compound could be useful in animal studies because it did not have some of the off-target activity of other compounds. It has been cited 45 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But as the retraction notice says, a paper published last year in The EMBO Journal by Jakob Nilsson and Gianmatteo Vit of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found that wasn’t true:

‘A significant departure’: Former Kentucky researcher faked 28 figures in grant applications and papers, say Feds

A former researcher at the University of Kentucky committed misconduct in both published papers and grant applications, according to a federal watchdog.

The finding from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) comes two years after the University of Kentucky announced that it had concluded that the scientist, Stuart Jarrett, had committed misconduct on four papers and two federal grant applications – and demoted his supervisor.

Jarrett, a Wales native who left the school in September 2019, faked data in studies of melanoma and reported it in 28 figures in four papers, one funded NIH grant, and two unfunded NIH grants, according to ORI. “[T]hese acts constitute a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community,” ORI said.

Company’s Alzheimer’s treatment study earns a flag

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a federally-funded paper on Alzheimer’s disease after a sleuth on PubPeer noted potentially duplicated figures in the article.

We shouldn’t forget to mention, as the paper did, that one of the authors – a prominent scientist who happens also to be a co-editor in chief of the journal – has financial ties to a company with interest in the work. That author said the fault lies with the corresponding author.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, it seems, when it comes to neurofibrillary tangles. And we’ve seen at least one other case of a paper failing to disclose conflicts of interest in a paper he’d published in his own journal. (This is a subject that has been taken up elsewhere.)

The article in this case, “Human Umbilical Cord Blood-Derived Monocytes Improve Cognitive Deficits and Reduce Amyloid-β Pathology in PSAPP Mice,” appeared in Cell Transplantation, a SAGE title, in November 2015.

UCLA veteran researcher faked data in 11 grant applications, per Feds

A 10-year veteran of the University of California, Los Angeles “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly and recklessly” faking data in 11 different grant applications, according to a U.S. federal watchdog.

[Please see an update on this post; UCLA now says one of the 11 grant applications did not include faked data.]

Janina Jiang, who joined UCLA’s pathology and laboratory medicine department in 2010, faked “flow cytometry data to represent interferon-γ (IFN-γ) expression in immune cells of mice administered with human recombinant vaults such that the represented data were incompatible with the raw experimental data,” the Office of Research Integrity said in its findings earlier this week.

Jiang, who appears to work at a lab at UCLA affiliate hospital Cedars Sinai, agreed to three years of supervision for any federally funded work. She has not responded to a request for comment from Retraction Watch.

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