by reason for retraction – Page 25

French ocean institute goes public about authors who forged their researchers’ names

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.

Paper on “suspicious activities” on India-China border retracted

A journal has retracted a 2020 paper about looking for “suspicious activities” on the India-China border — including an incursion in which 20 Indian soldiers were reportedly killed – citing “legal reasons.”

The abstract in Springer Nature’s Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, which alleges that the soldiers were “brutally killed,” is rife with grammatical and punctuation errors:

‘[T]he authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but…retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors’

In September 2018, I wrote to the managing editor of FEBS Letters with my concerns about the extensive textual overlap between a 2011 article by Sonia A. Melo and Manel Esteller and other articles, including some that were not cited, such as a 2009 article in the Annual Review of Pathology by Yong Sun Lee and Anindya Dutta.

The Melo and Esteller article has received considerable attention, and has been cited more than 375 times.

My initial efforts were met with a response that the iThenticate software they used only identified overlap with the published Melo and Esteller article. I then had to guide the editor in the proper use of the program – including searching for partial overlap – that would lead to the finding of a 29% overlap with Lee and Dutta.

On October 4, 2018, after seeing the results, the journal said they would look into the matter.

In April 2019 I asked for an update. There was no answer.

Court injunction forces gastro journal to slap expressions of concern on 40 articles about probiotics

A gastroenterology journal has issued expressions of concern for forty articles about a probiotic formulation that has been at the center of a long-running legal saga in the United States and Europe.

The articles appeared in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis, the official journal of the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation (ECCO) and date back to 2007. All mention a proprietary formulation of probiotics – and therein lies the tale.

Expressions of concern mount for heart researchers over data provenance

A group of heart researchers in China now have four expressions of concern, along with a retraction, for questions about the reliability of their data.

The latest expressions of concern for the team, led by Bu Lang Gao, of Shijiazhuang First Hospital of Hebei Medical University, involves a 2019 paper in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports titled “Asymmetrical middle cerebral artery bifurcations are more vulnerable to aneurysm formation.”

Here’s the notice for the article, which has been cited 4 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:

Wiley snafu costs an early-stage researcher his first paper

Through no fault of his own, Martin Bordewieck is oh-for-one in his publishing career.

The psychology researcher at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany, published his very first paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology in August 2020 – only to lose the article to retraction because of a screw-up by the journal.

Malte Elson, Bordewieck’s co-author – whose name might be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch for his work as a data sleuth – called the situation “a weird one”:

Courage and correction: how editors handle – and mishandle – errors in their journals

Last year, our group noticed an improper analysis of a purported cluster randomized trial (cRCT) in eClinicalMedicine, a Lancet journal, and requested deidentified raw data from the authors to conduct a proper analysis for the study design.

Things were off to a good start. The authors shared their data immediately – which is commendable and, in our experience, rare. We reanalyzed the data using valid statistical procedures, which overturned the published conclusions. We subsequently submitted a manuscript describing our findings to the journal where the original paper was published.

That’s when things stopped going well.

How an ivermectin study that didn’t mention COVID-19 fell under scrutiny

A PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2018 paper which claimed that ivermectin could be useful as a way to control dengue fever.

In fact, the reason the journal re-examined the article was because the hype about the use of ivermectin for Covid-19 led at least one skeptic to take a closer look at the study – and he didn’t like what he saw.

The article, “Antivirus effectiveness of ivermectin on dengue virus type 2 in Aedes albopictus,” was written by a group in China led by Tie-Long Xu, of the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the study, which appeared on PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases:

Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject

“Nailed” doctoral theses on a wall in Biomedicum, Campus Solna, in spring 2021. Photo: Katarina Sternudd

The authors of a paper in a cancer journal have retracted it after acknowledging they lifted parts of it from a thesis about an unrelated topic.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Regulation of RUNX3 Expression by DNA Methylation in Prostate Cancer,” originally published in July 2020 in Cancer Management and Research, a Dove title:

COVID-19 spike protein paper earns an expression of concern

A virology journal has issued an expression of concern about a paper claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can damage DNA after one member of the research team raised reservations about the reported findings.

The article, “SARS-CoV-2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,” was written by a pair of scientists at institutions in Sweden and published in MDPI’s Viruses (as Vincent Racaniello of TWiV would say, the kind that make you sick).

The paper has received a fair amount of attention – particularly among vaccine skeptics who, as critics noted, used the article to buttress their claims that Covid vaccines are unsafe – generating enough buzz on social media and in the news to make it into the top 5% of all articles tracked by Altmetric. TWiV even devoted part of an episode of the show to the findings.

According to the journal:

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