Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So the saying goes.
What about fool me 20 times?
In December of last year, Dove Press — a unit of Taylor & Francis — retracted 14 papers by Marty Hinz, a Minnesota physician who has been sanctioned by the U.S. FDA as well as the Minnesota state medical board. In March, Dove retracted six more. A typical notice:
Continue reading Publisher retracts 20 of a researcher’s papers — then asks him to peer review
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) has sanctioned a researcher who violated the journal’s policy by refusing to share a strain of algae that he used in a 2018 paper.
Zhangfeng Hu was one of two corresponding authors, and the last author, of the paper, “New class of transcription factors controls flagellar assembly by recruiting RNA polymerase II in Chlamydomonas.” The paper has been cited three times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
May Berenbaum, PNAS’ editor in chief, tells Retraction Watch:
Continue reading PNAS bans author for refusing to share algae strain
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity, which oversees investigations into allegations of misconduct in grants from the NIH, is once again without a permanent director.
Elisabeth (Lis) Handley, who became director in 2019, has taken on a new role in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), of which ORI is a part. Wanda Jones, who has served as interim and deputy director of the agency, will serve as acting director, according to an HHS spokesperson.
Handley has become principal deputy assistant secretary for health. In a memo to staff, assistant secretary for health Rachel Levine wrote:
Continue reading US federal watchdog loses director to another government role
Never let it be said that journals are not deliberative when it comes to correcting the record.
Of course, “deliberative” also means “slow.”
Take a 2018 article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases (JID) by a group of authors in India.
Continue reading First, this paper was corrected. Now it has an expression of concern. And maybe, just maybe, it will be retracted.
When the University of Colorado at Denver completed an investigation in 2015 into the work of a former faculty member, the school recommended that nine papers be corrected or retracted.
But six years after the close of that investigation, the researcher, urologist Hari Koul, has had just two papers retracted and one corrected.
Multiple journal editors told Retraction Watch they had not been informed that papers published in their journals were recommended for retraction or correction, according to documents obtained by Retraction Watch via a public records request. And emails show Koul was still negotiating the retraction of at least one of the papers last year.
Continue reading Exclusive: Six years after a misconduct investigation, more than half of suspect papers remain unflagged
The periodic table is, as a recent book notes, a guide to nature’s building blocks. But the building blocks of said book appear to have been passages from Wikipedia.
The book, The Periodic Table: Nature’s Building Blocks: An Introduction to the Naturally Occurring Elements, Their Origins and Their Uses, was published by Elsevier last year. But in December, Tom Rauchfuss, of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, “tipped off by an Finnish editor on Wikipedia,” alerted the authors and Elsevier about the apparent plagiarism from the online encyclopedia.
On January 6, an Elsevier representative told Rauchfuss:
Continue reading Elsevier retracts entire book that plagiarized heavily from Wikipedia
A journalist in Washington, D.C. prompted a correction in both Nature and the New York Times after finding that the lead author of a paper on fish farming failed to disclose financial ties to one of the world’s largest aquaculture companies.
The article, “A 20-year retrospective review of global aquaculture,” found that the practice of fish farming has become significantly more friendly to the environment than it was two decades ago.
The paper caught the attention of the New York Times, which wrote about the findings. It also grabbed the attention of Tim Schwab, who noticed something a bit, well, fishy, about the study.
Continue reading Reporter prompts corrections in Nature, New York Times after researcher fails to disclose ties to Cargill
All rejection is hard to take. But, as one psychology researcher has found out, “having a paper rejected half a year after publication is something new …”
We’ll explain.
In January 2021, Eiko Fried, of the Department of Clinical Psychology at Leiden University, in The Netherlands, published an article in Psychological Inquiry titled “Lack of Theory Building and Testing Impedes Progress in The Factor and Network Literature.”
Since then, the paper has been viewed more than 2,400 times and cited a handful of times.
But on May 17, Fried received an email from the journal, which is published by Taylor & Francis, with unfortunate news: His article, according to the support administrator, was “unsuitable for publication.”
Continue reading Congratulations! Your already-published article has just been rejected
Talk about missing the trees for the, ahem, forest plots. A researcher is accusing an Elsevier journal of refusing to retract a study that depends in large part on a flawed reference.
The paper, “The effect of Acupressure and Reiki application on Patient’s pain and comfort level after laparoscopic cholecystectomy: A randomized controlled trial,” appeared in early April in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice and was written by a pair of authors from universities in Turkey.
The article caught the attention of José María Morán García, of the Nursing and Occupational Therapy College at the University of Extremadura in Caceres, Spain. Morán noticed that what he considered a critical underpinning of the paper was a 2018 meta-analysis (also by authors from Turkey) with a major flaw: According to Morán and a group of his colleagues, the meta-analysis — also in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice — showed the opposite of what its author stated. Indeed, they’d made the case to the journal back in 2018, when the meta-analysis first appeared in a paper titled “Misinterpretation of the results from meta-analysis about the effects of reiki on pain.”
Continue reading Oh, the gall(stones): A journal should retract a paper on reiki and pain, says a critic
A group of authors has lost a pair of papers in a computing journal for monkeying with the peer review process.
The first author on both articles was Mohamed Abdel-Basset of the Department of Operations Research in the Faculty of Computers and Informatics at Zagazig University, in Sharqiya. Mai Mohamad, also of Zagazig, is the only co-author to appear on both papers, which were published in Future Generation Computer Systems, an Elsevier journal.
As we reported previously, the journal has some experience with publishing highjinx.
The latest cases involve the 2019 article titled “A novel and powerful framework based on neutrosophic sets to aid patients with cancer.” According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Years after faked peer review concerns surfaced, journals are still falling for it