by reason for retraction – Page 42

Oh, the gall(stones): A journal should retract a paper on reiki and pain, says a critic

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.”

Years after faked peer review concerns surfaced, journals are still falling for it

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:

Prominent Chinese scientist failed to disclose company ties in COVID-19 clinical trial paper

Nanshan Zhong, by 东方(美國之音記者) via Wikimedia

One of China’s leading scientists in the fight against COVID-19 failed to disclose ties to a pharmaceutical company in a paper stemming from a clinical trial, Retraction Watch has learned. A co-author on the paper is married to the daughter of that pharmaceutical company’s founder, who herself sits on the firm’s board of directors.

Nanshan Zhong first rose to prominence during the 2003 SARS outbreak for developing “a controversial steroid treatment that cured many SARS patients but left some with debilitating bone issues,” according to NPR. In 2020, TIME named him to the magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. He was appointed to lead China’s National Health Commission investigation into COVID-19 early last year, and in February 2020 Harvard announced that Zhong would share in a $115 million effort with university scientists to develop therapies for COVID-19.

Last May, Zhong published results from a clinical trial that tested whether a traditional Chinese medicine could be used to treat COVID-19 patients. That paper, titled “Efficacy and safety of Lianhuaqingwen capsules, a repurposed Chinese herb, in patients with coronavirus disease 2019: A multicenter, prospective, randomized controlled trial,” was published in Phytomedicine. It has been cited 67 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and has two corresponding authors: Zhong, of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health, and Zhen-hua Jia of Hebei Yiling Hospital, in China.

On the perils of scientific collaboration from thousands of miles away

Collaborations can be fraught. Ask David Ojcius.

Ojcius, an emeritus professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Merced, and a department chair at the University of the Pacific, is up to four retractions, five corrections and an expression of concern in papers he wrote with collaborators in China and elsewhere.

Ojcius is the editor-in-chief of Microbes and Infection, which has retracted one of his papers and corrected another.

Elsevier journal to retract widely debunked masks study whose author claimed a Stanford affiliation

A study that warned of the perils of using face masks as a precaution against contracting Covid-19 appears slated for retraction, Retraction Watch has learned.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The 2020 paper, “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis,” was written by Baruch Vainshelboim, who listed his affiliation as Stanford University and the VA Palo Alto Health System. But the study gained wide circulation earlier this month, thanks in part to some conservative politicians, and became the subject of fact-checks by the Associated Press and Snopes, which pointed out that

The paper was published by an exercise physiologist with no academic connection to Stanford University or the NIH in a journal that accepts “radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas.”

Among the claims in the article are that:

Editor declines to correct paper with duplicated image after earlier study disappears

*Figure 6b in a* *2015 paper* *(left) in Construction and Building Materials, showing a material with copper oxide nanoparticles. Figure 6 (right) is from a* *separate study, published in the Journal of American Science, showing a material with titanium dioxide nanoparticles.*

Possession is nine-tenths of the law — at least, it seems, for one journal editor, who is refusing to retract a study despite learning that one of its images previously appeared in another journal. The reason? The other study has been removed from the web.

The paper is among 40 articles in Construction and Building Materials flagged by a whistleblower who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. The whistleblower says that most of the issues are serious, and are:

Pharma company demands retraction, damages in lawsuit against journal

A drug company that manufactures a painkiller used for surgery patients has sued an anesthesiology journal along with its editor and publisher and the authors of articles that it says denigrated its product unfairly.

In a complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, Pacira Biosciences claims that “In the February 2021 issue of Anesthesiology, the ASA, reflecting a bias against EXPAREL amongst the editorial staff at Anesthesiology, published three articles, and other related content, that seriously disparage Pacira’s product EXPAREL,” an FDA-approved drug which they say is “a non-opioid pain medication proven to prolong post-surgery pain relief.”

In seeking retractions, compensatory and punitive damages exceeding $75,000 — the threshold for U.S. federal court — and lawyers’ fees, the company’s attorneys at Latham & Watkins write:

You want to do what? Paper on anal swabs for COVID-19 retracted for ethical issues

An article claiming that anal swabs can be used to detect SARS-CoV-2 in patients cured of Covid-19 has been retracted after the journal found that the authors failed to get permission from the patients to conduct the study.

To be clear: We’re not sure if the researchers — from Weihai Municipal Hospital, in Shandong, China — didn’t tell the patients they were taking anal swabs (which seems, well, unlikely) or that they didn’t tell them they would be using the results of the swabs in a study (the more reasonable interpretation). But the notice is vague on that point.

You may recall that in January the Chinese government in January launched a program to implement widespread anal swabbing to look for SARS-CoV-2 — a plan that, as the Washington Post reported, did not meet with cheers from the local population.

The article, “Anal swab as the potentially optimal specimen for SARS-CoV-2 detection to evaluate the hospital discharge of COVID-19 patients,” appeared in July in Future Microbiology. According to the abstract:

University in Japan revokes doctorate for plagiarism of text, image

A researcher in Japan has been stripped of his doctorate after a university investigation found that his thesis contained seven lines of plagiarized text and an image pulled from the internet without attribution.

Takuma Hara received his PhD in medical sciences from Tsukuba University in March 2019, writing a thesis about a genetic mutation’s role in certain brain tumors. Allegations of misconduct against Hara first emerged on April 6, 2020, according to a report released by the school.

The university launched an investigation, interviewed Hara and found that the thesis contained two plagiarized snippets: a microscopy image was pulled from the web without attribution and, on page 6, Hara took seven lines of text from a 2016 paper, titled “Clinicopathological features of craniopharyngioma and the endoscopic endonasal surgery,” published in a Japanese journal called Progress in Neuro-Oncology. The university revoked Hara’s degree last month.

Apparent HeLa cell line mixup earns a paper an expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper after recognizing that the researchers may have been using contaminated cell lines.

The article, “Downregulation of NIN/RPN12 binding protein inhibit [sic] the growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma cells,” appeared in Molecular Biology Reports, a Springer Nature title. In it, the authors, from China Medical University Shengjing Hospital, sought to find:

whether the suppression of Nob1 by short hairpin RNA (shRNA) inhibits the growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells. Recombinant lentiviral shRNA expression vector carrying Nob1 was constructed and then infected into human HCC cell line SMMC-7721

Perhaps they did, and the paper has been cited 21 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. However, experimental lines of SMMC-7721 cells are among the many cell lines known to have been contaminated by HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks — highly proliferative cervical cancer cells that have overrun labs worldwide. So perhaps they didn’t.

As the EoC states:

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