We should have seen this one coming. Or, maybe, they should have.
A journal dedicated to the study of psychics, the paranormal and related fringe research has its first retraction, according to the editor.
The Journal of Scientific Exploration says it detected plagiarism in a 2017 paper by Alejandro Parra, a well-known figure in the world of parapsychology — marking the first retraction from its pages.
The JSE publishes:
Continue reading Journal of the paranormal has its first retraction
Observers describe the quantity of research information now produced variously as “torrent,” “overload,” “proliferation,” or the like. Technological advances in computing and telecommunication have helped us keep up, to an extent. But, I would argue, scholarly and journalistic ethics have not kept pace.
As a case in point, consider the journal article literature review. Its function is twofold: to specify where new information fits within the context of what is already known; and to avoid unknowingly duplicating research projects the public has already paid for. Paradoxically, however, information proliferation may discourage honest and accurate literature reviews. Research information accumulates, which increases the time required for conducting a thorough literature review, which increases the incentive to avoid it.
Most dismissive reviews that I have encountered are raw declarations. A scholar, pundit, or journalist simply declares that no research on a topic exists (or couldn’t be any good if it did exist). No mention is made of how or where (or, even if) they searched. Certain themes appear over and over, such as:
Continue reading Dismissive reviews: A cancer on the body of knowledge
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:
Continue reading Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers
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:
Continue reading Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off
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:
Continue reading Drug researchers retract two papers, one because “human stem cells were actually mouse stem cells”
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:
Continue reading An author loses a fifth paper because it “bears the hallmarks of plagiarism”
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:
Continue reading University of Tennessee investigation finds manipulated images in Science paper
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:
Continue reading University of New Mexico investigation finds manipulated data and images, prompts retractions
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
Continue reading “The right decision”: Group retracts Nature Chemical Biology paper after finding a key error
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:
Continue reading Third journal scammed by rogue editors