by reason for retraction – Page 46

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Lin include the fabrication and falsification of data, as well as plagiarism in six published papers that have since been retracted from the preprint server bioRxiv.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:

Journal expresses concern over study of potential treatment for autism

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on a study of a potential treatment for autism.

The article, by a group in Slovakia, purported to show for the first time that the drug ubiquinol — a form of the compound coenzyme Q₁₀ — could improve the ability of children with autism to communicate with their parents, communicate verbally, play games with other children and help with other behaviors.

The paper was published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, a Hindawi journal. The first author was Anna Gvozdjáková, of Comenius University in Bratislava, and the last author was Fred Crane, a former biologist at Purdue University in Indiana. Crane, who died in 2016, is credited with being the discoverer of coenzyme Q10 in mitochondria in 1957. The 2014 article — which has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was among the last of his 400-plus papers to appear in print.

Per the EoC:

Journal becomes “victim of an organized rogue editor network”

We’re not accustomed to seeing journal article titles that end in exclamation points. But that’s what a title did earlier this month: “The Journal of Nanoparticle Research victim of an organized rogue editor network!”

The journal, a Springer Nature title, wrote the editors, “has been attacked in a new way by a sophisticated and organized network.” (It turns out not to be entirely new, but more on that in a moment.) As the editors explain:

‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers

Earlier this month, we reported on how Susanne Stoll, a graduate student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University College London, discovered an error that toppled a highly-cited 2014 article — and which might affect hundreds of other papers in the field of perception.

We spoke with Stoll about the experience.

Retraction Watch (RW): What did it feel like to find such a significant error? Did you doubt yourself at first, and, if so when did you realize you’d found something both real and important?

After legal threats from Herbalife, Elsevier journal retracts — and then removes — a paper

Bowing to legal pressure from the supplement maker Herbalife, Elsevier earlier this year retracted — and then removed — a paper which claimed that a young woman in India died of liver failure after using the company’s products. The move has led to more legal threats.

In August 2018, a group of researchers in India published a report in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hepatology about the death, involving a 24-year-old woman who had taken a variety of supplements produced by Herbalife, a massive, and massively controversial, maker of nonprescription diet aids.

The group, led by Cyriac Abby Philips, of Cochin Gastroenterology, in Kerala, India, asserted that tests of Herbalife products similar to those the woman had been taking revealed the presence of heavy metals, bacteria and, in most samples, “undisclosed toxic compounds including traces of psychotropic recreational agent.”

The case report — titled “Slimming to the death: Herbalife®-associated fatal acute liver failure-heavy metals, toxic compounds, bacterial contaminants and psychotropic agents in products sold in India” — is far from the first time scientists have linked Herbalife products to liver damage. They’ve done so here, here and here, to cite just a few instances.

Texas bone researcher faked data in Nature paper, says federal watchdog, as university rescinds professorships

A pharmacologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who lost a highly cited 2014 paper in Nature for questions about the integrity of her data has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — and UT Southwestern has rescinded two professorships she previously held.

According to ORI, Yihong Wan, an associate professor of pharmacology at UT Southwestern:

‘I dropped the ball’: Magic bullet falls short of target

A sports medicine journal has retracted a widely circulated 2019 meta-analysis which purported to find that interval training was the “magic bullet” for weight loss, after the analysis proved to be riddled with holes.

The paper, “Is interval training the magic bullet for fat loss? A systematic review and meta-analysis comparing moderate-intensity continuous training with high-intensity interval training (HIIT),” was a collaboration by researchers in Brazil and James Steele, an exercise scientist at the Solent University School of Sport, Health and Social Sciences, in Southampton, England.

Steele has some cred when it comes to research integrity, and part of that cred comes from another retraction. He was part of a team of data sleuths who have called for the retraction of seven papers by Matheus Barbalho, a Brazilian exercise scientist.

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