by reason for retraction – Page 44

‘Conference organizers have ignored this:’ How common is plagiarism and duplication in abstracts?

Harold “Skip” Garner has worn many hats over the course of his career, including plasma physicist, biologist, and administrator. One of his interests is plagiarism and duplication the scientific literature, and he and colleagues developed a tool called eTBLAST that compares text passages to what has already been published to flag potential overlap.

A new paper in Research Integrity and Peer Review by Garner and colleagues estimates “the prevalence of text overlap in biomedical conference abstracts.” We asked Garner some questions about the paper.

Retraction Watch (RW): You used a “text similarity engine” called eTBLAST. What is eTBLAST, and what does it do?

Eleven papers corrected after nutrition prof fails to disclose patent, company ties

Eight journals have corrected a total of eleven papers after one of the authors failed to list potential financial conflicts of interest. Two additional journals have also told Retraction Watch that they plan to issue corrections, which will bring the total to 13 or more.

Stuart Phillips is a professor and director of the Centre for Nutrition, Exercise, and Health Research at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The corrected studies — which now reflect Phillips’ links to companies or patents — are all related to his research on nutritional supplements and exercise.

One journal, Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, issued a single correction for four studies authored by Phillips:

Editors decide not to retract microplastics article but “they feel that it is barely justified”

Chemosphere has issued an expression of concern for a 2019 paper on microplastics in the ocean with an uncomfortable degree of similarity to a previously published article in another journal.

However, the editors decided that they could find enough daylight between the two papers that leaving their version unretracted was “barely justified” — a less-than-hearty endorsement of the article and one that’s likely to leave readers with more questions than answers about the integrity of the work.

The article, titled ‘‘Prevalence of microplastic pollution in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean,” came from a group led by Zhong Pan, of the Laboratory of Marine Chemistry and Environmental Monitoring Technology, part of the State Oceanic Administration in Xiamen, China.

According to the notice:

Why “good PhD students are worth gold!” A grad student finds an error

Researchers in the Netherlands have retracted and replaced a 2015 paper on attention after discovering a coding error that reversed their finding.

Initially titled “Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over Left Dorsolateral pFC on the Attentional Blink Depend on Individual Baseline Performance,” the paper appeared in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience and was written by Heleen A. Slagter, an associate professor of psychology at VU University in Amsterdam, and Raquel E. London, who is currently a post-doc at Ghent University. It has been cited 19 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But while trying to replicate the findings, Slagter and a then-PhD student of hers, Leon Reteig, found a critical mistake in a statistical method first proposed in a 1986 paper. Slagter told us:

Litigious OSU professor loses appeal in federal defamation case

Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has had 10 papers retracted and at least as many subject to corrections or expressions of concern, has lost another court appeal.

Croce brought the case against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017 for statements that Sanders had made in stories in The New York Times and Lafayette Journal Courier. Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, ruled against Croce in the case last year. Croce filed an appeal, and yesterday three judges in the Sixth Circuit of Appeals upheld the earlier ruling.

The judges note:

Journal pulls two studies that listed an author without his permission

David Cox

Springer Nature has removed two studies that were published in its journal Cluster Computing and included a co-author who didn’t know that the papers existed until December 2020, years after they were published.

The move follows reporting by Retraction Watch last week about the papers, which listed David Cox, the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, as a co-author.

The studies–“A FCM cluster: cloud networking model for intelligent transportation in the city of Macau,” and “Mobile network intrusion detection for IoT system based on transfer learning algorithm,” disappeared from the publisher’s website on January 29th, without any retraction notices.

A spokesperson for Springer Nature told Retraction Watch:

Former Texas postdoc earns 10-year federal funding ban for faking authors and papers to boost metrics

A former postdoc at the University of Texas Health Science Center has been found guilty of misconduct stemming from efforts to rig preprint servers to boost the postdoc’s publication metrics.

The findings about Yibin Lin include the fabrication and falsification of data, as well as plagiarism in six published papers that have since been retracted from the preprint server bioRxiv. On none of those articles does the name “Yibin Lin” appear as an author.

Lin also admitted to making up author names on submitted articles — none of which was published — to dupe preprint servers to “improve his citation metrics,” according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

“The whole thing is yucky:” When you’re surprised to find yourself as an author on a paper

David Cox

When David Cox noticed on Dec. 10, 2020 that two papers in the journal Cluster Computing listed him as an author, he didn’t think much of it at first.

I have a common name, so it is not unheard of to have an article written by another David Cox assigned to my profile. I thought that was what these papers must have been at first, but then I opened the articles and saw my affiliation, email, and picture in them.

Shocked, Cox tweeted that “the whole thing is yucky.” The corresponding author on the two studies now says that he plans to withdraw the papers, and that a co-author made the decision to include Cox’s name and has been fired from his research position over the incident. Yesterday, on January 25, the publisher flagged one of the papers.

Cox, who is the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, in Cambridge, Mass., learned about the articles after logging on to DBLP, a bibliography website that tracks articles published by computer scientists. “I check these sites from time to time to make sure everything is correct,” he said.

Here comes the judge, ready to plagiarize your paper

Not long ago, Amy Barnhorst opened an email from the editor of a journal to which she and a colleague submitted, but ultimately pulled, a paper on gun violence.

The cheery note — “thought you two might be interested to see what we came up with” — announced the publication of a recent article in the Journal of Health Service ~~Psychiatry~~ Psychology by a pair of authors. The title,“Collaborating with Patients on Firearms Safety in High-Risk Situations,” had an unpleasant whiff of irony to it — because the article was, in fact, Barnhorst’s own work. (Barnhorst told us she wanted to wait to name the paper until it was retracted, but the JHSP paper, identified by sleuth Elisabeth Bik, matches passages and descriptions tweeted by Barnhorst.)

As Barnhorst, the vice chair of psychiatry at UC Davis, and the director of the Bullet Points Project, a program to help clinicians prevent firearm injuries among their patients, tweeted:

“I don’t think I slept for a day and a half:” Bad news for study about bad news

A journal has retracted a 2018 paper that linked negative news coverage to physical and mental health problems.

The article, “When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health,” was published in Frontiers in Psychology in August 2018. The study has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. In March 2020, an article in The Conversation used the study’s findings to argue that kids should reduce their television intake during the coronavirus pandemic to ward off anxiety.

First author Jolie Wormwood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, said she decided to pull the study after revisiting the dataset. She found that some of the study participants—95 people in the Boston area—who completed a questionnaire three different times during a nine month period, gave inconsistent answers about their memory of an event. That normally might not be too worrying, since memories “shift over time”, according to Wormwood, but a bit more sleuthing revealed that the researchers had inadvertently mixed up the IDs that were assigned to study participants.

Wormwood explained the error in an email:

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