by reason for retraction – Page 25

US federal research watchdog gets new permanent director

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity, the agency that oversees research misconduct investigations for work funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has a new permanent director after a year and a half without one.

Sheila Garrity, currently associate vice president for research integrity and research integrity officer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., will start as ORI’s next permanent director the week of March 26, according to an internal memo from Rachel Levine, the Biden Administration’s Assistant Secretary for Health.

Garrity previously was director of the division of research integrity at Johns Hopkins University, where she worked for more than 20 years. She also was a founding member and the first president of the Association for Research Integrity Officers (ARIO).

Levine’s memo described Garrity as “a leader in the fields of research integrity and the responsible conduct of research education,” and asked staff to “join me in welcoming Sheila to the OASH family and in thanking Wanda Jones for the incredible job she has done in running ORI while we conducted our candidate search.”

How fishy email addresses tipped off a sleuth to a paper mill

Anna Abalkina noticed something odd about a psychology paper on the “modern problems of youth extremism”: The corresponding author was affiliated with a university in Russia, but his email address had a domain name from India.

The unusual domain name was part of a pattern Abalkina, of the Freie Universität Berlin, noticed in hundreds of papers that seemed to have been produced by paper mills.

Six of those papers, including the one on youth extremism, had been published in the Journal of Community Psychology, a Wiley title. Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, conducted a detailed review of the six articles, along with the published referee reports and editorial correspondence on Publons, to see if anything else about them was amiss.

Judge orders OSU cancer researcher to pay $1 million to lawyers from failed libel suit

Lawyers who represented Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus, in failed libel and defamation suits – and who later sued him for not paying his tab – have won a judgment for $1 million against the scientist.

The judgment, dated Dec. 8, 2022, orders Croce to pay just shy of $1.1 million plus interest to Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, one of the firms that represented him in his libel lawsuit against the New York Times and his defamation case against David Sanders, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., both of which he lost.

The firm sued Croce in 2020, seeking more than $920,000 in unpaid fees. After the case went to trial, a jury awarded the full amount to the firm in damages, and the judge ruled that the lawyers were entitled to prejudgment interest at a rate of 4%, totaling an additional $175,000. The judgment amount can continue accruing interest, and Croce is responsible for the court costs.

In his post-trial decision, judge Richard A. Frye wrote:

Paper on writing centers as ‘neocolonial tools’ is retracted

Are academic writing centers agents of US hegemony, spreading the evils of colonialism as they work to topple rogue syntax and rehabilitate failing grammatical states?

So argued a pair of authors in Canada in a now-retracted 2022 article which claimed that such centers have been used as “neocolonial tools” to push American foreign policy goals.

But according to critics, that claim – which seems like it might have emerged from a cross between Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” and Graham Greene’s, well, lots of his books – suffered from a fatal flaw or two, as we’ll shortly see.

President of Iranian university in ‘serious breach of ethical standards’

The president of an Iranian university and a colleague appear to have published the same microelectronics paper twice, according to allegations seen by Retraction Watch.

The articles, by Bahram Azizollah Ganji and Kamran Delfan Hemmati of Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, deal with the design of a new capacitive accelerometer with a high dynamic range and sensitivity. Both appeared online in 2020, first in the Slovenia-based Journal of Microelectronics, Electronic Components and Materials and later in the higher-impact Springer journal Microsystem Technologies. The former version has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, while the latter has been cited twice.

The editors of Microsystem Technologies were made aware of the allegations on November 16 in an email that cited “significantly identical content” in the two papers. “Pretty much the entire introduction section and almost all figures are an exact copy from” the authors’ previous article, the email stated.

Elsevier journal temporarily removes article by prolific psychologist – with a typo at “frist”

An Elsevier psychology journal took down an article in early December with a notice that appeared to be an internal memo, including a typo.

The article, a letter titled “First COVID-19 suicide case in Bangladesh due to fear of COVID-19 and xenophobia: Possible suicide prevention strategies,” was published in June of 2020 in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry by Mark D. Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in the UK and Mohammed A. Mamun of Jahangirnagar University and the Undergraduate Research Organization in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It has been cited more than 300 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Griffiths’ high publishing rate – according to his university’s index he published nearly 200 journal articles in 2022 – came under scrutiny from Oxford University psychologist Dorothy Bishop in 2020, including his many collaborations with Mamun. Griffiths told the Times Higher Education that he “made an intellectual contribution to every refereed paper I’ve published.”

University to investigate adjunct professor after allegations of plagiarism – and legal threats

The University of Zurich in Switzerland has announced that it will open an investigation into an adjunct professor alleged to have taken images and other material from a popular blog on medieval manuscripts and published them in her book without attribution.

The news, first reported by kath.ch, follows an eyebrow-raising exchange between the researcher who discovered his work had been used without citation and someone claiming to be the professor’s secretary, who told him, “nobody cares about your blog!”

The professor, Carla Rossi, is also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition, abbreviated as RECEPTIO. The center operates an academic press that published Rossi’s 2022 work, The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy: a.k.a. The Courtanvaux-Elmhirst Hours, Digitally Restored Through the Wayback Recovery Method.

The book describes a manuscript that Rossi purported to have digitally reconstructed.

Article that critiqued high-profile abortion study retracted

An article that critiqued a study on what happened after women did not get abortions that they sought has been retracted after observers raised concerns that the peer review process had not been objective.

The article, “The Turnaway Study: A Case of Self-Correction in Science Upended by Political Motivation and Unvetted Findings,” was originally published in Frontiers in Psychology in June of 2022.

The Turnaway Study itself was an effort of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed women who had received abortions and women who sought abortions but did not get them because they were too far along in their pregnancies “to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term,” according to its website.

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”:

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