The authors of a 2017 paper on resistance to cancer chemotherapy have retracted and replaced the article after learning that it included duplicated material from previously published work by one of the duo.
Richard Sever, the editor of the journal, told us that sometime after publication, a reader alerted his office that the paper included passages of text that were identical to those in a 2015 paper in Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), by Gatenby and two other co-authors:
A black hole, not at the center of the Earth (via Wikimedia)
The Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences, which retracted five papers recently, including one claiming that there was a black hole at the center of Earth, will no longer be indexed in a heavily used U.S. government database of journals.
According to the journal’s index page at PubMed Central (PMC), part of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “The journal no longer participates in PMC.” Volumes of the journal from 2019 and earlier will remain.
Mirko Spiroski, the founding editor of the journal, did not respond to a request for comment.
Journals have flagged more than three dozen articles by a team of authors in Iran for concern over the integrity of their data. The moves have come in the 15 months since data sleuths raised questions about the data in more than 170 papers from the group.
Among the most recent moves, a nutrition journal has issued expressions of concern for three of the team’s articles. The papers, which appeared in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (JACN), from Taylor & Francis, were published in 2015 and 2017. The senior author on all three articles was Zatollah Asemi (also listed as Zatolla Asemi), a specialist in metabolic diseases who sits on the faculty of Kashan University of Medical Sciences.
Concerns about the findings from Asemi’s shop have been circulating for several years. The group came under scrutiny on PubPeer three years ago, when a commenter noticed apparent irregularities in the data in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology. That paper has yet to be flagged in any way.
Brain Research Bulletin, an Elsevier journal, has retracted a 2017 article which duplicated a substantial amount of previously published papers by some of the same authors. But unlike many journals, which merely point out the overlap, BRB explains to readers why the copying matters.
The article, “Erythropoietin rescues primary rat cortical neurons from pyroptosis and apoptosis via Erk1/2-Nrf2/Bach1 signal pathway,” was written by Rui Li, Li-Min Zhang and Wen-Bo Sun, anesthesiologists at Cangzhou Central Hospital in China.
Here’s a Halloween tale that will drive authors batty.
A psychology journal has retracted two papers from the same group of authors in Spain because it published the articles inadvertently. But in doing so, the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, where the two articles were never supposed to appear but did, managed to botch the retractions, too.
If you’re looking for more evidence that researchers are flooding the zone with COVID-19 papers that do little to advance the state of the science, we present Psychology, Health & Medicine.
Evidently, that wasn’t enough time to run a plagiarism check — or, as you’ll see, other due diligence — because now the journal has retracted the article for being a duplicate of two other papers in different journals. The move came after a staffer at Elsevier — a competing publisher — alerted a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis about the issue.
In part, PHM can be considered the victim of what looks to be a scheme that took advantage of gaps in the ability to check manuscripts prior to publication.
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.
