by reason for retraction – Page 42

A year after a federal misconduct finding, a cancer researcher loses a paper

A cancer specialist formerly affiliated with Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska who was found to have committed misconduct in nearly 20 grant applications and papers has lost an article in Scientific Reports — a year after his misconduct case became public.

According to the journal, which, to its credit, flagged the paper with an editor’s note last February, the delay stemmed from efforts to verify information that was not part of the official inquiry.

The article, “Type IV collagen α1-chain noncollagenous domain blocks MMP-2 activation both in-vitro and in-vivo,” was written by a group led by Yakkanti Akul Sudhakar, whose name — last, at least — might be familiar to RW readers.

In November 2019, Sudhakar — who also has published as Sudhakar Yakkanti and Akulapalli Sudhakar — was sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for:

Stem cell researchers lose two more papers, making three

A Hindawi journal has retracted two 2013 papers by a group of stem cell researchers in China over issues with the images in the articles, bringing their count to three.

Here’s the notice for “Side-by-Side comparison of the biological characteristics of human umbilical cord and adipose tissue-derived mesenchymal stem cells,” by Lili Chen and colleagues from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan:

Subtraction by addition: A journal expresses concern again — but this time, with feeling

A journal published by the Royal Society in the United Kingdom has issued an updated expression of concern for a 2018 paper by a mathematician whose work has been the subject of intense scrutiny on this website and elsewhere. But the notice is less of a statement of problems than a rationalization.

The paper, “Quantum correlations are weaved by the spinors of the Euclidean primitives,” was written by Joy Christian, of the “Einstein Centre for Local-Realistic Physics in Oxford.” In May 2018, the journal issued an initial EoC about the article, stating:

Former Harvard cancer researcher faked a dozen images, say Feds

A cancer researcher faked a dozen images in three papers and a conference presentation while employed at Harvard teaching hospitals, according to a new report by a federal U.S. watchdog.

The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that David Panka

Author blames “multitasking dementia” for duplicated cancer paper

The authors of a 2017 paper on resistance to cancer chemotherapy have retracted and replaced the article after learning that it included duplicated material from previously published work by one of the duo.

The article, “The evolution and ecology of resistance in cancer therapy,” was written by Robert Gatenby and Joel Brown, of the Moffitt Cancer Center, in Tampa, Fla. It appeared in Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine.

Richard Sever, the editor of the journal, told us that sometime after publication, a reader alerted his office that the paper included passages of text that were identical to those in a 2015 paper in Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), by Gatenby and two other co-authors:

Journal that published paper about a black hole at the center of Earth sinks into the void at a leading government database

A black hole, not at the center of the Earth (via Wikimedia)

The Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences, which retracted five papers recently, including one claiming that there was a black hole at the center of Earth, will no longer be indexed in a heavily used U.S. government database of journals.

According to the journal’s index page at PubMed Central (PMC), part of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “The journal no longer participates in PMC.” Volumes of the journal from 2019 and earlier will remain.

Mirko Spiroski, the founding editor of the journal, did not respond to a request for comment.

Journals flag concerns in three dozen papers by nutrition researchers

Journals have flagged more than three dozen articles by a team of authors in Iran for concern over the integrity of their data. The moves have come in the 15 months since data sleuths raised questions about the data in more than 170 papers from the group.

Among the most recent moves, a nutrition journal has issued expressions of concern for three of the team’s articles. The papers, which appeared in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (JACN), from Taylor & Francis, were published in 2015 and 2017. The senior author on all three articles was Zatollah Asemi (also listed as Zatolla Asemi), a specialist in metabolic diseases who sits on the faculty of Kashan University of Medical Sciences.

Concerns about the findings from Asemi’s shop have been circulating for several years. The group came under scrutiny on PubPeer three years ago, when a commenter noticed apparent irregularities in the data in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology. That paper has yet to be flagged in any way.

Why duplicate publications matter: A retraction notice goes above and beyond

Here’s a retraction notice after our own hearts.

Brain Research Bulletin, an Elsevier journal, has retracted a 2017 article which duplicated a substantial amount of previously published papers by some of the same authors. But unlike many journals, which merely point out the overlap, BRB explains to readers why the copying matters.

The article, “Erythropoietin rescues primary rat cortical neurons from pyroptosis and apoptosis via Erk1/2-Nrf2/Bach1 signal pathway,” was written by Rui Li, Li-Min Zhang and Wen-Bo Sun, anesthesiologists at Cangzhou Central Hospital in China.

According to the notice:

Our bads: Publisher error leads to double retractions for psych researchers

Here’s a Halloween tale that will drive authors batty.

A psychology journal has retracted two papers from the same group of authors in Spain because it published the articles inadvertently. But in doing so, the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, where the two articles were never supposed to appear but did, managed to botch the retractions, too.

One of the articles, “Sudden complex hallucinations in a 14-year-old girl: schizophrenia spectrum disorders versus dissociative disorders-the influence of early life experiences on future mental health,” was published online in June.

The other, “Abrupt and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder in an 11-year-old girl-PANDAS/PANS syndrome: an entity to be considered-management implications,” appeared in the June/July print issue of the journal. The authors were Parisá Khodayar-Pardo and Laura Álvarez-Bravos, of the Universiy of Valéncia.

The retraction notices, which arrived in September, read identically:

Researchers publish the same COVID-19 paper three times

If you’re looking for more evidence that researchers are flooding the zone with COVID-19 papers that do little to advance the state of the science, we present Psychology, Health & Medicine.

The journal, a Taylor & Francis title, in April published “Mental health burden for the public affected by the COVID-19 outbreak in China: Who will be the high-risk group?,” by a pair of authors in China. The researchers submitted their manuscript on March 19, received acceptance on April 6 and saw the work published on April 14.

Evidently, that wasn’t enough time to run a plagiarism check — or, as you’ll see, other due diligence — because now the journal has retracted the article for being a duplicate of two other papers in different journals. The move came after a staffer at Elsevier — a competing publisher — alerted a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis about the issue.

In part, PHM can be considered the victim of what looks to be a scheme that took advantage of gaps in the ability to check manuscripts prior to publication.

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