by reason for retraction – Page 21

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.

Buzzy Lancet long COVID paper under investigation for ‘data errors’

An early and influential paper on long COVID that appeared in The Lancet has been flagged with an expression of concern while the journal investigates “data errors” brought to light by a reader.

An editorial that accompanied the paper when it was published in January of last year described it as “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19. The article has received plenty of attention since then.

Titled “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study,” the paper has been cited nearly 1,600 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Altmetric finds references to it in multiple documents from the World Health Organization.

‘Just some eccentric guy in Australia’: The story of a non-retraction for plagiarism

After reading a paper published in The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England last March, Andrew Thomas, an orthopedic surgeon in the UK, noticed that it was very similar to an article published the previous December in another journal.

He wrote a letter to the editor of Annals, notifying the journal of the similarity between its paper, “The possible effect of different types of ventilation on reducing operation theatre infections: a meta-analysis,” and “The effect of type of ventilation used in the operating room and surgical site infection: A meta-analysis,” published in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

In his letter, Thomas pointed out several apparent mistakes in the analyses, and also noted similarities between both papers and a 2017 article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, which has been cited 93 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Despite the similarities Thomas noted, which another surgeon verified with anti-plagiarism software, the journal has not retracted the paper, but flagged it with an expression of concern so readers can “draw their own conclusions.” At the same time, the journal retracted an unrelated article that was also found to be similar to one published elsewhere, then the retraction was changed to an expression of concern, and now neither notice appears online.

Biotech exec stole an image and reused others while in academia, US federal watchdog says

A pioneer in the field of exosome biology engaged in research misconduct by reusing images he had falsely relabeled in two published papers and several grant applications, according to a U.S. government research watchdog.

The case goes back several years, as the scientist’s former institution seems to have been investigating his work for nearly a decade.

Douglas Taylor, who in the 1970s discovered that tumor cells release exosomes, “used falsely labeled images to falsely report data in figures, and in one finding, intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarized, reused, and falsely labeled an image to falsely report data in a figure,” according to the published finding from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Scientist goes to court to clear his name after fake peer review retractions

A scientist who lost 11 papers for fake peer review and other reasons went to court to pin the misconduct on a coauthor – and received a favorable judgment.

The retractions for Aram Mokarizadeh, a biomedical researcher previously affiliated with the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, were part of a batch of 58 papers in seven journals that Springer and BioMed Central pulled in 2016 after an investigation found “evidence of plagiarism, peer review and authorship manipulation, suggestive of attempts to subvert the peer review and publication system to inappropriately obtain or allocate authorship.”

After our story on the case appeared, Mokarizadeh told us that a coauthor was “responsible for all problems associated with retraction,” and that he had brought a case to court in Iran to prove it.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: