by reason for retraction – Page 20

A response to a public records request that raised more questions than it answered

Last August, a U.S. federal research misconduct watchdog announced findings that a longtime researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles named Janina Jiang faked data in 11 grant applications.

More than a month later, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) issued a rare correction to its announcement, saying “additional information” from UCLA indicated that one of the grants “did not fund or contain falsified/fabricated data.” The watchdog agency said it would remove the application in question from its findings of research misconduct.

The grant, UL1 TR000124, helped fund the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) with $57 million from 2012-2015. The listed principal investigator, Steven M. Dubinett, is the interim dean for UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

At the time of the correction, we wondered how a report that would have had to be reviewed by multiple officials – and lawyers – at both institutions could include such a mistake, and filed public records requests to find out.

Debate over whether video games ‘rot kids’ brains’ won’t be settled by this retraction

The global sigh of relief was almost audible when a study last year found kids who played video games for hours every day had no worse mental health than non-gamers. In fact, they came out ahead on some cognitive measures.

“Video Games May Not Rot Kids’ Brains After All,” one of the many news stories about the research trumpeted. Another headline declared: “Video games could improve kids’ brains.“

Now it turns out the study, titled “Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children,” was so flawed it had to be retracted and republished. The updated results show gamers did actually score significantly worse on things like attention and depression, although some of their performance metrics were still slightly better than among non-gamers.

According to the republished article in JAMA Network Open:

A professor found her name on an article she didn’t write. Then it got worse

Anca Turcu was going over her publication stats a few weeks ago, as she does every year to apply for research awards and update her CV, when she found an “unpleasant surprise.”

Turcu, a senior lecturer in the University of Central Florida’s School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, was listed as the sole author of an article entitled “Impact of government intervention measures on recycling of waste equipment in China,” which had been published in the African Journal of Political Science in February 2022.

She hadn’t written the paper, which had nothing to do with her research on diasporas and voting. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

Former Yale prof faked data, says Federal watchdog

A liver researcher who worked at Yale University for 15 years faked data in multiple papers and grant applications, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Carlo Spirli, who rose to the rank of associate professor before leaving Yale in 2020, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in four published papers, two presentations, and three NIH grant applications, the ORI said in announcing its findings today.

Spirli, according to the ORI:

‘Sad but necessary’: Ant researchers pull fossil paper over errant claim

An army ant, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorylus#/media/File:Dorylus_gribodoi_casent0172627_dorsal_1.jpg

A group of insectologists is receiving praise on social media for retracting a 2022 paper in which they claimed, erroneously, it turns out, to have discovered a novel ant fossil.

The paper, “An Eocene army ant,” appeared in November in Biology Letters, a Royal Society title. The authors were led by Christine Sosiak, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. The paper has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to Sosiak and her colleagues:

One small error for a physicist, one giant blunder for planetary science

For a decade, scientists have been scratching their heads when trying to put a date on primeval events like the crystallization of the magma ocean on the moon or the early formation of Earth’s continental crust.

Their problem? A revised estimate of the half-life of a radioactive isotope called samarium-146 that is used to gauge the age of ancient rocks.

The updated value, published in 2012 in Science, shortened samarium-146’s half-life by a whopping 35 million years, down to 68 million years from the standard estimate of 103. This reset the clock on the solar system’s early history and suggested the oldest rocks on Earth could have formed tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought.

Norway demotes Hindawi journal after claims one published a stolen paper

In June 2021, Espen Flo Bødal began to believe that a paper he’d co-authored had been stolen.

The news came via a ResearchGate alert that the Norwegian researcher’s work had been cited, according to the publication Universitets (article in Norwegian). When Bødal checked the alert, he saw that part of his doctoral thesis had been published, essentially word for word.

But instead of his name and those of his collaborators at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the article listed researchers at the Huzhou Power Supply Company and North China Electric Power University as its authors.

In unusual move, publishers remove authors victimized by forger

Three major publishers have removed several authors’ names from five papers, most published a decade ago, following correspondence from an attorney representing one of the individuals.

Three of the papers appeared in PLOS ONE in 2013, one appeared in Springer Nature’s Tumor Biology the same year, and one appeared in Elsevier’s Obesity Research & Clinical Practice in 2014. As we reported in 2016, the journals retracted the articles because one of the authors – Lishan Wang – had forged the rest of his co-authors’ names and manipulated the peer review process.

Years later, Yongyong Shi, a distinguished professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Bio-X Institutes and one of the authors whose name Wang forged, hired a lawyer named Joseph Lewin, a solicitor with Dorsey & Whitney (Europe) LLP. Lewin, in turn, requested that the three publishers remove Shi’s name from the original papers.

Article retracted when authors don’t pay publication fee

In March 2020, a group of biologists published a paper on the website of an open access journal.

Nearly three years later, the publisher, Wiley, withdrew the article because, according to the withdrawal notice, the authors were “unable to finalize” payment of the fee to publish the version of record, known as the Article Publication Charge or APC.

The manuscript, “Eco-evolutionary factors that influence its demographic oscillations in Prochilodus costatus (Actinopterygii: Characiformes) populations evidenced through a genetic spatial–temporal evaluation,” had appeared on the site of the journal Evolutionary Applications “as an Accepted Article,” according to the notice, but the full text is no longer available online. It had not been indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science before being withdrawn on February 27.

The notice stated that the article

Chemist who cooked data claims PhD years after it was revoked

By the time Shiladitya Sen was officially declared guilty of research misconduct in 2018 by U.S. federal officials, The Ohio State University had long since stripped him of his doctorate in chemistry.

Years later, however, Sen is still billing himself as a PhD in the signature of his work email at a company that provides lab mice and other animals to many scientists, Retraction Watch has learned.

Sen, now a director of analytical chemistry at Charles River Laboratories, with headquarters in Wilmington, Mass., confirmed to us by phone that he has not earned another doctoral degree. He hung up when asked why his email signature claims he has a PhD.

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