A medical journal has retracted two papers by a researcher with a penchant for fabricating co-authors.
According to the Singapore Medical Journal and earlier news reports, Shunjie Chua published the articles with two fictitious authors: Mark Pitts and Peter Lamark, whom he placed at Duke University and the University of Chicago.
The articles, “A simple, flexible and readily applicable method of boundary construction to prevent leech migration,” and “A handy way to handle hemoclips® in surgeries,” appeared in 2015. Per the retraction notice for the former:
Exhibit A: The journal Current Medical Chemistry has retracted a 2012 paper for plagiarizing from a 2011 article — and the senior authors of each article share the same last name.
Ho hum, you say. But that name is one that might be familiar to RW readers.
We receive occasional demand letters from attorneys here at Retraction Watch. Perhaps the most memorable was one in 2013 from an attorney claiming to represent Bharat Aggarwal. That prompted Popehat’s Ken White to enlarge our vocabulary by using the word “bumptious” in a post about the letter.
Duke, as Retraction Watch readers may recall, settled a False Claims Act case last year for $112.5 million following allegations about how various members of its Department of Medicine’s Pulmonary Division responded to alleged misconduct in the department beginning in 2013. As Duke acknowledged in a court filing, “Kraft was a Principal Investigator for some research projects conducted within the Pulmonary Division and was Division Chief from January 1, 2013 through September 30, 2014.”
The facts in the previous two paragraphs are, as best we can tell, all uncontested. That is also true of all of the facts in the Dec. 20, 2019 post that Weinstein requested we remove.
Steven Trubow and Donald Morisky made a small fortune through a controversial company that licensed, often at what researchers thought were exorbitant rates, a tool to scientists, wielding the cudgel of costly legal action if they balked at payment.
Now, in what critics of the pair will doubtless find a delicious irony, the pair is embroiled in a lawsuit over … licensing of the licensing business.
Morisky, of UCLA, is the developer of the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), a proprietary research instrument he rents out to scholars and institutions — often at fees that have, in some cases, exceeded $100,000. Many researchers who don’t obtain permission have been forced to pay up or retract their work.
A group of veterinary researchers at the University of California, Davis, has received an expression of concern for their May 2020 study on heart disease in dogs, for failing to adequately disclose conflicts of interest and for other aspects of the article.
Oh, those insufferably progressive Scandinavians, always doing the right thing.
A group of alcoholism researchers in Denmark has retracted a 2020 paper on gender and alcohol treatment after finding errors in their results. And they’ve set up a system to avoid similar problems in the future.
The paper, “Gender differences in alcohol treatment,” appeared in Alcohol & Alcoholism in July, with authors from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. The paper found that:
Science has issued an expression of concern for a paper it published earlier this summer after readers pointed out suspect images in the work.
The July 10 article, titled “Proton transport enabled by a field-induced metallic state in a semiconductor hetero-structure,” came from a group in China and the United Kingdom. The corresponding authors were Bin Zhu and Huaibing Song, of China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. Zhu also is affiliated with the Southeast University School of Energy and Environment in Nanjing.
Shortly after publication, data-sleuth Elisabeth Bikposted on PubPeer that she’d been alerted by a reader to potential problems with two of the figures in the paper:
Nine strikes in a row in bowling is called a “golden turkey.” So what do you call 10 papers on poultry pulled at once for plagiarism?
We first wrote about Sajid Umar in July 2018, when he’d lost a 2016 article in Scientifica for plagiarism and other sins, and then again earlier this summer when he notched two more retractions from Poultry Science for “grave mistakes.”
Now, the World’s Poultry Science Journal, a Taylor & Francis title, has pulled 10 more of Umar’s articles — bringing his total to 14, by our count. According to the retraction notice for the 2017 paper “Mycoplasmosis in poultry: update on diagnosis and preventive measures”:
A researcher in Bangladesh who fabricated a list of co-authors — and possibly her data, too — in a paper on dengue fever that was recently retracted has published the same article in a different journal.
