In late 2021, editors at Laboratory Investigation noticed something strange. The journal was receiving far more emails than usual asking to withdraw manuscripts that were already being peer reviewed. And some of the emails were strikingly similar, even using the same unusual language.
A total of five identical emails said that the authors had new results to add to the manuscript:
Continue reading When emails asking to withdraw manuscripts started repeating themselves, an editor got suspicious
After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.
The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.
Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.
Continue reading Exclusive: Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings
More than a month after a federal watchdog announced that a UCLA scientist had included fake data in a grant application worth more than $50 million, the university says the application didn’t have issues, after all.
In early August, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said that Janina Jiang faked data in eleven grant applications from UCLA. At the time, based on what was available in the ORI’s report, we noted:
Continue reading UCLA walks back claim that application for $50 million grant included fake data
A major research institution has accused a former postdoc of forging letters of recommendation from a supervisor, according to a court complaint.
Georgios Laliotis was terminated by The Ohio State University on Nov. 30, 2021, according to the complaint filed in Franklin County Municipal Court, which we’ve made available here. Earlier that month, his PI, cancer researcher Philip Tsichlis, had uncovered manipulated data in two papers on which Laliotis was the first author, and emailed journal editors to retract them, as we previously reported.
Emails released to us by OSU following a public records request indicated that Laliotis had been working at Johns Hopkins at the time, but OSU staffers had been told he had resigned his position effective November 24 and would go back to Greece. Whether he was employed by both universities simultaneously is unclear.
Continue reading Fired postdoc faked recommendation letters from supervisor, OSU alleges
On August 10 of last year, Jim Stagge, an environmental engineering professor at The Ohio State University, emailed editors of Water Resources Management, a Springer Nature title, to let them know that a paper in the journal had taken significant blocks of his text without attribution.
The Water Resources Management paper in question, “Recommendations for Modifying the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) for Drought Monitoring in Arid and Semi-arid Regions,” was published July 16, 2021. Stagge said that it borrowed liberally from a paper of his, “Candidate Distributions for Climatological Drought Indices (SPI and SPEI),” that was published in the International Journal of Climatology in 2015.
The 2021 paper, with first author Peyman Mahmoudi from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan in Iran, did cite Stagge’s 2015 work, but didn’t indicate that large sections taken directly from Stagge and his co-authors were quotes.
Continue reading A journal did nothing about plagiarism allegations for a year. Then the tweets (and an email from Retraction Watch) came.
Stephen Barrett, a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatch, makes a point of calling out homeopathy and other health products and practices that lack evidence.
In that vein, earlier this year he emailed the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery to critique a 2019 article by Walter Tatch titled “Opioid Prescribing Can Be Reduced in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Practice,” which has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Continue reading Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids
Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million but then dropped the case, is appealing a recent court order that he pay the journal’s publisher more than $400,000 in legal fees. Those fees are based on an anti-SLAPP statute, “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
As we have previously reported, Jacobson:
Continue reading Stanford prof appeals order to pay $428K in legal fees after dropping defamation suit
A former postdoc at the National Cancer Institute faked 15 figures and a movie in grant applications, presentations, a paper, and an unpublished manuscript, according to a federal watchdog.
The finding from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) comes more than a year after PLOS Biology retracted a 2016 paper and noted that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had found that the postdoc, Ritankar Majumdar, committed misconduct and faked data in two figures.
The same day, the journal republished a revised version without the faked data. The retracted paper has been cited 107 times, 13 of those after it was retracted, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The revised paper — which included Majumdar as a first author — has been cited eight times.
The retraction notice stated that Majumdar agreed with the retraction but that he “disputes the NIH’s finding of misconduct.”
Continue reading Former NCI postdoc faked data, says federal watchdog
A veterinary researcher with three retracted papers and one marked with an expression of concern has another retraction on the way, Retraction Watch has learned.
The first retraction for Tereza Cristina Cardoso da Silva, of the University of São Paulo State in Brazil, came in 2019. As we reported at the time, the retracted paper, about herpesvirus infections in cattle, had reused an image from an earlier paper describing experiments with chicken cells. (We would apologize for the headline of that post, but we just couldn’t resist.)
Since then, Cardoso has lost two more papers for similarly reusing images of different species of animals, and had another article flagged with an expression of concern that mentions an institutional investigation into her work which culminated in a “Disciplinary Administrative Procedure.” A fourth retraction is in the works, per an email we were copied on from a journal editor to the whistleblower who identified another image reused between species.
Continue reading Veterinary researcher banned from journal after fourth forthcoming retractionAt the end of July, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan noticed something curious in the publications of Chulani Herath, a senior lecturer at the Open University of Sri Lanka in Nawala.
Herath is listed as a middle author on seven papers about various topics in medicine, including heart disease, stroke, and burnout among general practitioners in China.
That struck Sarvananthan, an economist in Sri Lanka, as odd. Herath is a psychosocial counselor, not a physician or expert in medicine. “How could she possibly co-author an article in medical sciences?” he wrote in one email to a journal editor, requesting the editor investigate Herath’s paper as a potential product of a paper mill.
Sarvananthan has written to the editors of the journals that published the following seven papers, requesting they investigate:
Continue reading In four years, a psychosocial counselor co-authored seven papers on disparate medical topics. How?