Category: by reason for retraction

Earlier this week, we reported that a paper claiming that two deaths resulted from COVID-19 vaccination for every three cases that were prevented had earned an expression of concern.

[Please see an update on this post; the paper has been retracted.]

The authors, including Harald Walach, who was also co-author of a just-published paper in JAMA Pediatrics questioning the safety of masks in children, had used data from the Dutch national registry of side effects. That registry carries a warning label about its use. The editors of Vaccines, which published the study last month, wrote that there were concerns over “misrepresentation of the COVID-19 vaccination efforts and misrepresentation of the data.”

Sometimes, we become part of the story: A play in several acts.

On Jan. 27, 2021, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) issued a report about the work of Ye Zhang, a materials scientist on the faculty. The Institute, as we reported February 2, found that Zhang had committed plagiarism and had fabricated data in a May 2019 paper in Chemical Communications, and suspended her for six months.

Zhang told us on February 3 that she “dispute[d] the conclusion of the investigation on scientific grounds that refute it entirely.” In a comment the next day, a Retraction Watch commenter asked to see the spectra Zhang and colleagues referred to in the paper. Zhang sent those shortly thereafter, and we posted them to the site.

And now, some four and a half months later, comes an expression of concern, signed by the journal’s executive editor, Richard Kelly. The EOC includes Zhang’s full-throated defense, and a link to that PDF:

Last December, Elisabeth Bik notified journals about 45 articles by a researcher in China which struck her as suspicious. Within weeks, one of those journals — DNA and Cell Biology — had retracted the paper she’d flagged.

That reassuringly brisk response appears to have been an anomaly in the case of Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China. Only two other retractions have followed, by our count (Tang had a retraction in 2020, bringing his total so far to four). However, FEBS Letters, which published three articles by Tang that Bik had identified as problematic, has now issued expressions of concern for the papers.  

The notices for the articles, which appeared between 2011 and 2014, raise questions about the “data integrity” in the work. Here’s the one for “Downregulation of PPP2R5E expression by miR-23a suppresses apoptosis to facilitate the growth of gastric cancer cells,” from 2014: