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An article claiming that anal swabs can be used to detect SARS-CoV-2 in patients cured of Covid-19 has been retracted after the journal found that the authors failed to get permission from the patients to conduct the study.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