by reason for retraction – Page 2

Author forges document to claim USDA affiliation

A journal has retracted three papers after an investigation revealed one of the authors falsely claimed he was affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture.

All three retraction notices, issued February 13 by the Journal of Environmental Management, state study coauthor Tariq Shah claimed affiliation with the USDA Plant Science Research Unit. “When asked about these issues during an editorial investigation, Shah’s responses caused the editor to further lose confidence in the validity/integrity of the article,” the notices say.

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told us in an email “Shah provided a document claiming to show his official affiliation with USDA that we later learned through our investigation was forged.” Neither Shah nor Elsevier clarified what the document was.

Exclusive: Extensive correction to Genentech PNAS article will get an update after RW inquiry

An article by Genentech scientists received an extensive correction in January for multiple instances of image duplications after comments on PubPeer spurred the authors to review the work.

But the correction “inadvertently omitted” an additional duplication, and will be updated after Retraction Watch brought the matter to the journal’s attention, a representative for the publication said. The sleuth who identified the additional duplication said the original article should have been retracted instead of corrected.

The article, “Death-receptor activation halts clathrin-dependent endocytosis,” appeared in July 2006 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with a correction issued that September. It has been cited 99 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

IQ paper gets expression of concern as misconduct fallout continues

The authors of a paper on how incentives influence IQ have requested an expression of concern after a recent retraction altered the results of their study.

On January 20, we reported that a paper by embattled researcher and child psychologist Stephen Breuning was retracted decades after an investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct. Breuning’s papers came into question following a 1987 report from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which found he “knowingly, willfully, and repeatedly” engaged in research misconduct and fabricated results in 10 NIMH funded articles.

Since then, six of Breuning’s papers have been retracted. The latest retracted article, originally published in 1978, was not part of the investigation but came about “due to concerns about the integrity of the data reported and other issues identified within the NIMH Final Report that clearly established a pattern of ongoing scientific misconduct,” the retraction notice read.

As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use

The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a “fingerprint”: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement. Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.

Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigation published last month in The Conversation. And the tale of “vegetative electron microscopy” shows how nonsense phrases can enter the vocabulary of researchers and proliferate in the literature.

Researcher removed from journal masthead, loses three more papers

A management journal has removed from its masthead an editor who was the subject of a Retraction Watch post last month.

Shalini Srivastava, a professor at the Jaipuria Institute of Management in India, was an associate editor at Employee Relations, an Emerald Publishing title. We reported last month that two articles she coauthored — one in Employee Relations and another in the Journal of Organizational Change Management, also an Emerald journal — were retracted because “a large portion of this article’s models, samples, and results are taken, without full and proper attribution, from” earlier work, both retraction notices read.

Following our report, Srivastava’s name disappeared from the editorial team page of Employee Relations. Asked to comment on the change, a spokesperson from Emerald’s research integrity department replied:

How academic leaders should respond to shock and awe

The first weeks of the second Trump administration have brought unprecedented shock and awe to science. In response, the leaders of the scientific community must cease their hand-wringing and align behind two strong approaches to dealing with the chaos: protest and candor.

I write these words as an attorney representing whistleblowers of scientific fraud. Prior to law school, I was an investigative journalist focused on this same phenomenon. Today I represent scientists and technical experts independent of whether the falsified data they have uncovered support a political agenda. Twenty years of experience investigating, exposing and, when necessary, litigating cases of scientific fraud, has, however, led me to think in terms of a different kind of politics: the politics of nonconfirmatory data. Any research-based organization – a university, a healthcare provider, a laboratory or a corporation – faces a daily challenge from data gathered by scientists within that contradict the scientific hypotheses that are bringing in the money.

Former student was running a paper mill, says University of Manchester

An English university has issued a finding of research misconduct against a former graduate student and is requesting 10 retractions of his published work, which they say bears the marks of being papermilled.

The former student, Sameer Quazi, was enrolled at the University of Manchester in 2021 in the school’s “PGCert” program in clinical bioinformatics, according to his LinkedIn profile. The certificate program sits between undergraduate and masters training. Quazi’s profile states he is currently enrolled in a master’s program in biomedical sciences at Anglia Ruskin University, in Cambridge. (Update, 2/7/25: As of 2/3/25, his LinkedIn profile says he left there this month, and Ruskin tells us his course there ended in March 2023.)

According to a January 30 statement from the university:

Anatomy of a retraction: When cleaning up the literature takes six years

In 2018, a biochemist in Scotland became aware of image irregularities in two of his papers through comments on PubPeer, each in a different journal. The researcher, Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee, said he alerted his home institution immediately.

In July and October 2024, the papers were retracted.

Emails obtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request show what happened in the intervening six years: Consecutive investigations by Dundee and a funder, then delays as the journals juggled conflicting narratives. In the meantime, the papers continued racking up citations.

Paper retracted after author told journal study was ‘not actually performed’

Nearly 20 years after the publication of a paper on phytoestrogens in postmenopausal women, one of the authors said the study had never been performed, according to a recently published retraction notice.

The retraction is the second for two of the authors. It comes after sleuth Ben Mol and his colleagues initially discovered data similarities between the recently-retracted study and another by the same group, as we reported last year.

The two papers that seem to share data appeared in Fertility and Sterility, an Elsevier publication, in 2004 and 2006.

‘Foolish mistake’: Guest editor loses three articles published in his own special issues

An Elsevier journal has pulled three articles after the publisher determined an author had been “involved in the peer review and decision making” as managing guest editor of the special issues in which they appeared.

The author, botany researcher Vijay Kumar of Lovely Professional University in Punjab, India, told Retraction Watch his apparent involvement in assigning reviewers was “purely unintentional” and a “foolish mistake.”

Two of the articles appeared in a special issue section of the South African Journal of Botany in 2022. They were:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: