by reason for retraction – Page 25

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.

US federal research watchdog wants your input

A U.S. government watchdog for scientific misconduct has floated the possibility of revising some of its regulations, and it wants your thoughts on what should change.

The Office of Research Integrity recently issued a Request for Information – essentially an email inbox open for suggestions – to help shape its potential revision of the 2005 Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct, 42 C.F.R. Part 93 in the federal code.

These regulations define what “research misconduct” means for work funded by the U.S. Public Health Service – the oft-quoted “falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism” – and establish how the government and research institutions respond to these issues.

The current regulations replaced rules issued in 1989, the same year the Office of Scientific Integrity in the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Scientific Integrity Review in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were created. These two offices were merged into the Office of Research Integrity in 1992.

Here’s the meat of the request:

Paper co-authored by Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi to be marked with expression of concern

Another article co-authored by Australian journalist Maryanne Demasi will be marked with an expression of concern for image duplication, Retraction Watch has learned.

Demasi’s reporting has cast doubt on statins and raised the possibility of a link between wi-fi and brain tumors – controversial claims she and co-authors have previously told us they believe made her scientific publications a target of critique. She has not responded to our request for comment on the forthcoming expression of concern.

Following an investigation by the University of Adelaide into allegations of image manipulation in Demasi’s PhD thesis in rheumatology, one paper that resulted from the dissertation was retracted and another was marked with an expression of concern.

Paper co-authored by sleuth Elisabeth Bik marked with expression of concern

A paper with scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik as a co-author now has an expression of concern. It dated back to her time at the now-defunct startup uBiome and described research that the company used to develop a clinical test of bacteria living in the human gut – and that she raised concerns about some years ago.

The article, “16S rRNA gene sequencing and healthy reference ranges for 28 clinically relevant microbial taxa from the human gut microbiome,” was published in PLOS ONE in 2017 and has been cited 39 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The expression of concern detailed the journal’s investigation into allegations that some of the samples in the paper weren’t suitable for determining a healthy baseline of the human gut microbiome — being from infants, people who might have recently taken antibiotics, and pets — and the authors’ responses.

It’s a long notice, but this paragraph sums up the concerns:

Elsevier journal retracts nearly 50 papers because they were each accepted on the “positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report”

An Elsevier journal has retracted 47 papers that an accomplished sleuth says appear to have been generated by a paper mill.

The articles, by researchers from countries including China, Kazakhstan and Russia appeared in Thinking Skills and Creativity.

Here’s a sample notice, for a paper titled “Steal like an artist: Connection between critical thinking and creativity of a future musician in a digital environment,” whose authors come from Shandong University of Science and Technology and, somewhat improbably, the Department of Music at the Shandong Institute of Petroleum and Chemical Technology:

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