by reason for retraction – Page 39

Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers

The pantheon of husband-wife teams in science includes Marie and Pierre Curie, Gerty and Carl Cori, even Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the founders of BioNTech, which collaborated with Pfizer on a Covid-19 vaccine.

To that list we hesitatingly add Ahmed Elkhouly and his spouse.

Elkhouly, a medical resident at St. Francis Medical Center, in Trenton, N.J., has lost five papers from the journal Cureus over a rather curious (ahem) domestic arrangement. According to the journal, Elkhouly used his unnamed wife as a peer reviewer on the articles, whose topics ranged from a case study on appendicitis to the neurological manifestations of COVID-19 infection.

Here’s the retraction notice for the COVID paper — which, by the way, raises our tally of retracted papers on the pandemic to 89:

Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off

We’re always on the lookout for papers with that fillip of irony that lets us wonder if the Great Comedian in the Sky enjoys our little project. This week, we found two such articles.

One involves a 2008 paper in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research titled “Examining Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis as One of the Main Views on the Relationship Between Language and Thought.” The author was Iman Tohidian, an Irani scholar. Except, in fact, the author was not Iman Tohidian, who appears to have what we might consider a rather appropriative view of the relationship between language and thought.

According to the retraction notice:

Drug researchers retract two papers, one because “human stem cells were actually mouse stem cells”

A group of drug researchers has lost a pair of 2020 papers for a lack of reproducibility and other problems, including the unfortunate mislabeling of murine stem cells as having come from humans. (In case you’re wondering, mouse and human stem cells are at once quite similar and highly divergent.)

One article, “Divergent synthesis of 5-substituted pyrimidine 2′-deoxynucleosides and their incorporation into oligodeoxynucleotides for the survey of uracil DNA glycosylases,” appeared in Chemical Science. The second, “Convenient synthesis of pyrimidine 2′-deoxyribonucleoside monophosphates with important epigenetic marks at the 5-position,” was published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry. Both journals belong to the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The senior author on the papers was Yana Cen, a medicinal chemist now at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Cen has not responded to a request for comment.

According to the abstract of the Chemical Science paper:

An author loses a fifth paper because it “bears the hallmarks of plagiarism”

A researcher in France has lost his fifth paper for plagiarism, this one a 2015 article on weakness in the elderly.

The study, “Identification of biological markers for better characterization of older subjects with physical frailty and sarcopenia,” appeared in Translational Neuroscience and came from a group in France led by Bertrand Fougère, of the Universitaire de Toulouse.

As we reported in 2019, Fougère had tallied previous retractions for plagiarism dating back to 2018. At the time, he told us:

University of Tennessee investigation finds manipulated images in Science paper

An investigation by the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center, in Memphis, into a 2006 Science paper found evidence that three figures in the article had been manipulated.

Science sleuth Elisabeth Bik first flagged the paper, titled “Molecular Linkage Between the Kinase ATM and NF-κB Signaling in Response to Genotoxic Stimuli,” to the editors of Science in 2015. Today, Science issued an expression of concern for the paper:

University of New Mexico investigation finds manipulated data and images, prompts retractions

A research group at the University of New Mexico has lost at least two papers after an inquiry found evidence of manipulated data.

One article, “Large-Area Semiconducting Graphene Nanomesh Tailored by Interferometric Lithography,” appeared in 2015 in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature title, and has been cited 25 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The other, “Vertical Charge Transfer and Lateral Transport in Graphene/Germanium Heterostructures,” was published in 2017 in the American Chemical Society’s journal Applied Materials & Interfaces. It has been cited twice.

The senior author on both articles was Sanjay Krishna, who has since moved to the Ohio State University, where he is the George R. Smith Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The retraction notice for the paper in Scientific Reports states:

“The right decision”: Group retracts Nature Chemical Biology paper after finding a key error

Nicola Smith, credit Karl Welsch, Welsch Photography

Researchers in Australia have retracted a 2016 paper in Nature Chemical Biology after discovering a critical error in their research, bringing some closure to a gut-wrenching case for the scientists involved.

As we reported in January, Nicola Smith, the senior author of the article, titled “Orphan receptor ligand discovery by pickpocketing pharmacological neighbors,” described learning of the error as “the most horrific time” of her career.

Smith, then at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney (she’s now at the Orphan Receptor Laboratory at the University of New South Wales) told us that she briefly considered letting the flawed research — which has been cited 26 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — go uncorrected.

After all, as one colleague told her, the subject of the studies was so arcane that

Third journal scammed by rogue editors

Burned by the offer of a special issue, a journal has retracted four papers after determining that the guest editors of the supplement were not legit.

Neuroscience Letters, an Elsevier title, published the special issue — “Special Issue on Clinical and Imaging Assessment of Cognitive Dysfunction in Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders” — last summer, but it’s no longer on the journal’s website. The guest editors were listed as “Dr. Kalemaki Katerina Kalemaki, Dr. Hailong Li and Prof. Wiesława Grajkowska.”

This case is the third we’ve seen lately involving journals and publishers scorched by rogue guest editors. For an insider’s look at how such scams can run, check out our 2019 Q&A with Jamie Trapp, whose journal, Physical and Engineering Sciences in Medicine (formerly the Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine), fell victim to one not long ago. A preview:

‘Conference organizers have ignored this:’ How common is plagiarism and duplication in abstracts?

Harold “Skip” Garner has worn many hats over the course of his career, including plasma physicist, biologist, and administrator. One of his interests is plagiarism and duplication the scientific literature, and he and colleagues developed a tool called eTBLAST that compares text passages to what has already been published to flag potential overlap.

A new paper in Research Integrity and Peer Review by Garner and colleagues estimates “the prevalence of text overlap in biomedical conference abstracts.” We asked Garner some questions about the paper.

Retraction Watch (RW): You used a “text similarity engine” called eTBLAST. What is eTBLAST, and what does it do?

Eleven papers corrected after nutrition prof fails to disclose patent, company ties

Eight journals have corrected a total of eleven papers after one of the authors failed to list potential financial conflicts of interest. Two additional journals have also told Retraction Watch that they plan to issue corrections, which will bring the total to 13 or more.

Stuart Phillips is a professor and director of the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise, and Health Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The corrected studies — which now reflect Phillips’ links to companies or patents — are all related to his research on nutritional supplements and exercise.

One journal, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, issued a single correction for four studies authored by Phillips:

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