by reason for retraction – Page 22

BMJ says it’s “an ongoing effort” to find articles by plagiarizing concussion researcher Paul McCrory

Weeks after the British Medical Journal corrected a press release about nine retractions and dozens of expressions of concern to mark articles by a prominent concussion expert, a spokesperson for the journal told us it’s still “an ongoing effort” to identify all the articles on which the expert is the sole author.

The concussion researcher, Paul McCrory, was editor in chief of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, published by the BMJ, from 2001-2008, and published many editorials on which he was the only listed author. McCrory also chaired the influential Concussion in Sport Group, was involved in drafting consensus statements on concussion in sports, and consulted with leagues.

Ten of those articles, however, have been retracted this year for plagiarism, recycling his own work, and misrepresenting a reference.

In comments to us, his only public statements to date about the matter, McCrory acknowledged some of the plagiarism as unintentional “errors,” and offered “my sincere and humble apologies.” He no longer chairs the Concussion in Sport Group, and the Australian Football League has critically reviewed his work for the league, the Guardian Australia reported.

Psychiatrist in Canada faked brain imaging data in grant application, U.S. federal watchdog says

A psychiatrist studying the development of psychosis faked data from studies of brain imaging in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health, a U.S, government watchdog has found.

The federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced sanctions against Romina Mizrahi, associate chair of research in McGill University’s department of psychiatry in Montreal, Canada, for “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying data” in a grant application to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Mizrahi submitted the grant application in question, R01 MH118495-01, “Imaging nociceptin receptors in clinical high risk and first episode psychosis,” in February 2018; it does not appear to have been funded.

According to ORI, Mizrahi:

“A huge relief”: Journal takes down plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch reporting

Following a Retraction Watch story about a 2004 paper that had been copied twice since its publication, one of the journals involved has taken down its version of the article.

Last month, we reported that an undergraduate student researching her thesis had found two papers that copied material from “Models of the medical consultation: opportunities and limitations of a game theory perspective,” published in BMJ Quality and Safety by psychologist Andrew Colman and two colleagues.

One of the plagiarizing articles, “Relevance of Game Theory Models in Medical Consultation: Special Reference to Decision Making,” appeared last year in the International Journal of Research in Engineering, Science and Management (IJRESM). Colman said that the article had copied the structure and main ideas of his, although the text was paraphrased, and it included a figure he had created.

We had emailed the journal before our story was published on Oct. 17 to ask if it would investigate the allegations. We received this reply on November 5th:

Author critical of study involving abortion hires lawyers after journal flags paper

Priscilla K. Coleman testifying before U.S. Congress in 2007

The author of an article on unwanted pregnancies that has received an expression of concern for reasons that remain unclear says she has hired lawyers to defend herself against “defamation.”

Priscilla K. Coleman, a professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio – whose controversial work on the link between abortion and mental health problems has come under scrutiny – told us that she plans “to actively pursue all options available including legal avenues to rectify the situation” after Frontiers in Social Health Psychology slapped the EoC on her 2022 article.

The paper in question was titled “The Turnaway Study: A case of self-correction in science upended by political motivation and unvetted findings.” The Turnaway Study is an ongoing look by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco at the effects on women – including the physical, emotional, and economic toll – of carrying unwanted pregnancies. The main finding, according to its site, “is that receiving an abortion does not harm the health and wellbeing of women, but in fact, being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health and family outcomes.”

The abstract for Coleman’s review reads, in part:

Pain researchers lose three papers after Cochrane group questioned data

A group of pain management researchers have had three of their papers retracted since September, after another group published a critique of their work earlier this year.

The critique, published in the journal Pain in April, found that ten studies led by physiatrist Marco Monticone of the University of Cagliari in Italy may not be reliable. The studies had several inconsistencies, including data that diverged from almost all similar studies, impossible statistical significance values, and duplicated or very similar data from other studies by the group, though the studies were purportedly separate clinical trials.

Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report

A few years ago, funding for the UCLA pathology lab where Janina Jiang had worked since 2010 was running out.

The head of the lab was grateful when another scientist offered to chip in $50,000 to keep Jiang on for six more months.

But some of the experiments Jiang – perhaps feeling that her job was on the line, a colleague speculated – ran for that scientist raised suspicions. Other experiments didn’t corroborate her results, and Jiang failed to provide all her raw data.

Jiang’s benefactor asked another staff scientist to review and reanalyze her work.

What he found spurred an institutional investigation, which in July 2021 found Jiang faked data representing flow cytometry experiments in several figures included in 11 grant proposals, resulting in 19 counts of research misconduct.

“Horrible!”: Scientist finds plagiarized copy of his paper – and can’t get the journal that published it to pay attention

Earlier this month, Werther Ramalho, an environmental scientist in Brazil, got some bad news from a colleague: A paper he’d published in 2013 as a postdoctoral researcher had been plagiarized in its entirety.

“They stole years of effort and dedication that I had at the beginning of my career as a scientist! Horrible!” Ramalho, who is currently affiliated with the Instituto Boitatá de Etnobiologia e Conservação da Fauna, told us.

Ramalho’s original paper, “Study on the population structure of the paradoxical frog, Pseudis bolbodactyla (Amphibia: Anura: Hylidae), using natural markings for individual identification,” was published in the journal Zoologia and has been cited three times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

NIH asked to replace a PI on grants after university said she violated policy

An office of the National Institutes of Health requested earlier this year that a university designate a new principal investigator (PI) for two grants after the institution found she had violated its policy in a research misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned.

The NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees funding granted to external institutions, made the request after SUNY Downstate sent the office a summary of its investigation report that found Stacy Blain, an associate professor in the departments of pediatrics and cell biology at Downstate, had committed research misconduct in 11 instances.

As we reported in August, Blain is suing SUNY for discrimination and retaliation related to the finding of research misconduct, seeking, among other things, reinstatement on the grants.

When editors confuse direct criticism with being impolite, science loses

In January 2022, motivated by our experience with eClinicalMedicine, we wrote about mishandling of published errors by journal editors. We had noticed that the methods used for the analysis of a cluster randomized trial published in the journal were invalid. Using a valid approach, we reanalyzed the raw data, which were shared with us by the original authors. The trial’s results were overturned.

As Retraction Watch readers may recall, we subsequently submitted a manuscript describing why the original methods were invalid, what a valid analysis should be, and our results after conducting a valid analysis. After an initial desk rejection “in light of [the journal’s] pipeline” and further exchanges of correspondence, the journal shared our findings with the statistician involved in the original review and the original authors and sought their responses.

After receiving the responses, both of which we thought contained factually incorrect statements, the editorial team eventually suggested that we summarize our full manuscript as a 1000-word letter for submission to the journal. We did not agree that a letter would allow us to fully communicate our methods and reanalysis. Thus, to meet the journal’s word limit while fully laying out our arguments, we posted our additional points as a preprint and cited the preprint in a letter we submitted to the journal.

It was then that we met another roadblock to correcting the literature.

Meet a sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions

Nick Wise had always been “slightly interested” in research integrity and fraud, just from working in science.

Then, last July, from following image sleuth Elisabeth Bik on Twitter, he learned about the work of Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and Alexander Magazinov identifying “tortured phrases” in published papers.

Such phrases – such as “bosom peril,” meaning “breast cancer” – are computer-generated with translation or paraphrasing software, perhaps by authors seeking to fill out their manuscripts or avoid plagiarism detection.

Cabanac, Labbé, and Magazinov had started with tortured phrases in the field of computer science, so Wise decided to try his hand at finding them in his own field, fluid dynamics.

He got a thesaurus widget, started plugging in phrases like “heat transfer,” and Googled the results – “heat move,” “warmth exchange,” etc.

“Up popped a load of papers,” said Wise, age 30, who recently wrapped up his PhD in architectural fluid dynamics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and will be starting a postdoc there soon.

It was the beginning of a sleuthing hobby that has already resulted in more than 850 retractions.

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