An Elsevier journal has corrected a retraction notice after we asked questions about what exactly it was saying — but not before the journal’s editor tried to defend what turned out to be a mistaken passage.
Kyoto University has fired a researcher after determining that he committed fraud in at least five papers about the deadly Kumamoto earthquake of 2006.
The authors of a 2021 article on “cognitive radio” have lost the paper after the journal learned that they’d pilfered the work from a doctoral dissertation.
“A Cluster-Based Distributed Cooperative Spectrum Sensing Techniques in Cognitive Radio” was published in the proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, which was held in Coimbatore, India. The proceedings was a supplement to Innovative Data Communication Technologies and Application, a Springer Nature title.
Cognitive radio, according to Wikipedia, “can intelligently detect whether any portion of the spectrum is in use, and can temporarily use it without interfering with the transmissions of other users.”
A total of 436 papers in two Springer Nature journals are being subjected to expressions of concern, in the latest case of special issues — in this case, “topical collections” — likely being exploited by rogue editors or impersonators.
The move follows the discovery, as we reported in August, of more than 70 papers in a collection in one of the journals, the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, that referred to subjects — aerobics and running wear, for example — seemingly unrelated to geology. That sleuthing began on PubPeer and was broadened by Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac. We have now learned that Springer Nature had already been looking into the issues.
Here’s the notice that appears with a list of more than 400 articles from three differenttopicalcollections for the Arabian Journal of Geosciences:
Leen Kawas, President and CEO of Athira Pharma. (PRNewsfoto/Athira Pharma, Inc.)
A group of researchers at Washington State University has received four expressions of concern for papers whose findings underpin a publicly traded company founded by two of the most senior authors on the articles.
The studies, all of which appeared in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, came from the labs of Joseph Harding, a medical chemist at Washington State, and his colleague Jay Wright. Published between 2011 and 2014, the four articles report on a molecule called angiotensin IV, work which Harding and Wright leveraged to spin-off Athira, a Seattle-based biotech firm developing treatments for conditions including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
The CEO of Athira, formerly known as M3 Biotechnology, is Leen Kawas, once a PhD student at Washington State whose 2011 doctoral dissertation provided figures for this fraught 2011 article in JPET, which earned a correction in 2014. Earlier this year, as STAT reported, Kawas was forced to take a leave of absence from the company over concerns that she altered images in several papers. And there has been other scrutiny of the company.
A surgery journal has retracted a 2021 article by a group of researchers in Brazil for failure to disclose a key conflict of interest and other problems.
“Intracranial pressure waveform changes in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment” — which now seems to have disappeared entirely from the journal’s site — appeared in Surgical Neurology International in July. Led by Estela Barbosa Ribeiro, a nurse at the Federal University of São Carlos, in São Paulo, the article, still available and not marked retracted on PubMed Central, purported to find that measuring intracranial pressure:
Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with the varied — and often unsatisfying — responses of journals to scientific sleuthing that uncovers potential problems with published images. Some editors take the issues seriously, even hiring staff to respond to allegations and vet manuscripts before publication. Some, however, take years to handle the allegations, or ignore them altogether.
Recently, STM’s Standards and Technology Committee (STEC) appointed a working group to look at these issues At a webinar last week, the group — including members from the American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and other publishers — released a draft of their recommendations, which:
A chemistry journal has retracted a 2014 paper by a group from China after the first author on the article copped to having Photoshopped a figure — marking the second retraction for members of the group in less than a week and the 14th for one of the authors.
The paper, “Polymer nanodots of graphitic carbon nitride as effective fluorescent probes for the detection of Fe3+ and Cu2+ ions,” appeared in Nanoscale and was written by a group with ties to Soochow University, Hefei University of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, and Yale University. The first author was Shouwei Zhang, whose name appears on at least seven papers flagged on PubPeer for problematic images.
The senior author was Xiangke Wang, whose tally of PubPeer entries is now at 76 and who now has 14 retractions. One of those, the 2013 article “Superior adsorption capacity of hierarchical iron oxide@magnesium silicate magnetic nanorods for fast removal of organic pollutants from aqueous solution,” was retracted from the Journal of Materials Chemistry A on September 13, with the following notice:
A cancer researcher who was a former division director at Emory University in Atlanta “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsifying data” in a federal grant application and six published papers, according to new findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
Ya Wang, who retired from Emory a year ago, “falsified protein immunoblot data by reusing and relabeling the same images to represent different experimental conditions in mammalian tissue culture models of DNA damage and repair in eighteen (18) figure panels in eleven (11) figures in one (1) grant application and six (6) published papers,” the ORI said.
Wang “neither admits nor denies” ORI’s findings of misconduct, according to the agency’s report on the case. She agreed to a four-year ban on any federal funding, and to correct or retract four papers:
Do journal editors have the responsibility to ensure authors are disclosing relevant conflicts of interest?
According to the editor of one Elsevier journal, the answer is “no.”
The case marks the second time this year that the editor of an Elsevier journal has been less than dogged about enforcing the company’s clearly stated policies about undisclosed conflicts.
