“This article has been retracted due to unlawful and indefensible breach of copyright. There was significant overlap with a previous publication, Physics, technology and the Olympics by Dr Steve Haake.”
Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the agency that oversees institutional investigations into misconduct in research funded by the NIH, as well as focusing on education programs.
Earlier this month, ORI released data on its case closures dating back to 2006. We’ve charted those data in the graphics below. In 2021, ORI made just 3 findings of misconduct, a drop from 10 — roughly the average over the past 15 years — in 2020. Such cases can take years.
As the first chart makes clear, a similar dip in ORI findings of misconduct occurred in 2016. That was then-director Kathy Partin’s first year in the role, and a time of some turmoil at the agency. In an interview with us then, Partin referred multiple times to the agency being short-staffed. Partin was removed from the post in 2017 and became intramural research integrity officer at the NIH in 2018.
ORI — as has often been the case over the past two decades — is once again without a permanent director. The most recent permanent director, Elisabeth (Lis) Handley, became Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health in July 2021.
We asked ORI to explain what’s behind the figures. A spokesperson responded on their behalf.
If you had a book retracted for plagiarism, would you submit a book proposal to the same publisher? And if you were that publisher, would you entertain said pitch?
Svein Åge K. Johnsen and Ingeborg Olsdatter Busterud Flagstad, of the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, have been trying to publish a manuscript on the psychology of green entrepreneurship.
In January 2021, they submitted it to the International Small Business Journal, a SAGE publication. The editors rejected it without sending it to peer review. So did The Journal of Entrepreneurship, another SAGE title. So Johnsen and Flagstad submitted it to Cogent Business & Management, a Taylor & Francis title.
And then, on December 25, as perhaps the worst Christmas present ever, they saw the paper published – by someone else.
A leading repository of social science which is owned by Elsevier has reposted an article it removed on New Year’s Day after the author was accused of defamation and the site was threatened with legal action if it didn’t remove the paper.
The article in question was written by Ann Lipton, the associate dean for faculty research at Tulane University Law School and appeared on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
Titled “Capital Discrimination,” the paper – which has been accepted by the Houston Law Review – explores:
The article as it appears at the time of this writing
Yes, you read that headline right.
In January 2021, we reported that The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (JSCR) would soon be retracting two papers because a graduate student had committed misconduct in the work.
The journal – the official research publication of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NCSA) – did retract the papers, according to a notice posted to PubMed and on the title’s site, both dated March 2021.
A journal has issued expressions of concern for a pair of 2021 meta-analyses purporting to find that ivermectin is an effective treatment for Covid-19 after data sleuths raised questions about some of the research in the studies.
As we reported last fall, one of the two papers – “Ivermectin for Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19 Infection: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis, and Trial Sequential Analysis to Inform Clinical Guidelines” – began to wobble when data central to its conclusion were retracted from the journal Viruses. That article has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, making it a highly-cited, “hot” paper.
The other article was titled “Review of the Emerging Evidence Demonstrating the Efficacy of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID-19” and was written by a group led by Pierre Kory. Kory is a controversial Wisconsin physician whose ideas about how to treat the infection, and particularly ivermectin, have made him a darling of ivermectin proponents like Joe Rogan.
The two meta-analyses were the subject of an editorial in the November/December 2021 issue of the journal by its editor, Peter Manu, who cautioned that:
A 2018 study in PNAS that claimed to show a biotech company’s platform for creating immunotherapies was better than existing methods has earned an expression of concern over the reproducibility of some of its findings.
The technique was developed by SQZ Biotech, which was founded by MIT’s Robert Langer, a founder or co-founder of numerous biotechs including Moderna, and with whom Roche partnered in 2015.
The paper has been cited 55 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. According to a press release announcing the work:
The head of a Japanese university has been found guilty of research misconduct for self-plagiarism – technically, duplication – and has agreed to pay a one-time cash penalty for his transgressions.
The National Institute for Ocean Science (Ifremer) in France has flagged 11 papers on PubPeer for concerns including faked authorship and plagiarism, and has blasted the journals involved for their failure to adequately address the unethical work.
In some cases, for example the International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, editors have removed the names of the forged authors without informing readers.
