by reason for retraction – Page 49

Former UCSD prof who resigned amid investigation into China ties retracts paper for ‘inadvertently misidentified’ images

Kang Zhang, a formerly high-profile geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who resigned his post last July amidst an investigation into undisclosed ties to China, has retracted a paper because some of its images were taken from other researchers’ work.

The paper, “Impaired lipid metabolism by age-dependent DNA methylation alterations accelerates aging,” was submitted to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) last fall, months after Zhang’s resignation. One of Zhang’s fellow corresponding authors, Jian-Kang Zhu, used the journal’s “Contributed Submissions” process, in which “An NAS member may contribute up to two of her or his own manuscripts for publication in PNAS each year.”

PNAS published the paper on February 6 of this year. But on February 18, authors of a different paper, in Aging Cell, sent the editors of PNAS a letter, writing:

“I was shocked. I felt physically ill.” And still, she corrected the record.

Two years ago, Julia Strand, an assistant professor of psychology at Carleton College, published a paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review about how people strain to listen in crowded spaces (think: when they’re doing the opposite of social distancing).

The article, titled “Talking points: A modulating circle reduces listening effort without improving speech recognition,” was a young scientist’s fantasy — splashy, fascinating findings in a well-known journal — and, according to Strand, it gave her fledgling career a jolt.

The data were “gorgeous,” she said, initially replicable and well-received:

U Maryland group up to three retractions following investigation

A researcher at the University of Maryland, along with two former colleagues, has had three papers retracted in the past six months following an institutional investigation that found evidence of image manipulation.

The three retractions share three authors: Hua Zhou, Ying Hua Yang and John Basile, an associate professor of oncology and diagnostic sciences at the institution. The original papers appeared in Angiogenesis and PLOS ONE between 2011 and 2013.

Basile told Retraction Watch that he was prohibited from discussing the matter, based on statements from the university’s investigation committee, but that he did not think other papers from his lab co-authored with Zhou would be retracted.

One of the articles, “Semaphorin 4D cooperates with VEGF to promote angiogenesis and tumor progression,” has been cited 46 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. Here’s the retraction notice from Angiogenesis, which was published earlier this month:

Fake peer review, made-up author take down a paper

Manipulated peer review strikes again, this time with a 2015 article whose authors appear to have created a straw mathematician to make their work seem more legit.

The paper, “Fixed point theorems and explicit estimates for convergence rates of continuous time Markov chains,” appeared in Fixed Point Theory and Applications, a Springer Nature title.

Its authors, purportedly, were affiliated with institutions in China and Japan. According to the acknowledgements for the article:

Lancet journal retracts letter on coronavirus because authors say it “was not a first-hand account” after all

The Lancet Global Health has swiftly retracted a letter to the editor purportedly describing the experience of nurses treating coronavirus in Wuhan, China, just two days after it was published, because the authors are now saying it “was not a first-hand account.”

In the original letter, the authors write:

Michigan State museum director “vigorously” denies “virtually all” of university panel findings against him

Earlier this month, we broke the story of a misconduct inquiry against Mark Auslander, the director of the Michigan State University Museum in East Lansing. (That story was picked up by a number of news outlets in Michigan.)

Auslander was found guilty by a university committee of having plagiarized, falsified data and committed other offenses stemming from his involvement in the repatriation to Bolivia of a 500-year-old mummy. The claimant in the case was William Lovis, a professor emeritus of anthropology at MSU and curator emeritus of anthropology for the museum.

According to the report:

Retraction notice claims authors submitted ‘fictional’ science

Talk about a brutal retraction notice.

The Journal of Translational Medicine has retracted a 2017 paper after multiple investigations into the work concluded that the data were fabricated. At least two of the authors hotly dispute that conclusion, as you’ll see. [Warning: Colorful language ahead.]

The study, “Stromal vascular fraction cells for the treatment of critical limb ischemia: a pilot study,” came from a group of researchers in Lithuania led by Adas Darinskas. At the time of publication, Darinskas listed his affiliation as the National Cancer Institute of Lithuania, in Vilnius. Now he works at Innovita Research, a company trying to develop:

Disgraced Korea scholar, formerly of Columbia, loses paper for plagiarism

A former historian at Columbia University who resigned last year in the wake of a plagiarism scandal involving his award-winning book on North Korea has lost a 2005 paper for misusing his sources.

In 2017, Charles Armstrong, once a leading figure in Korean scholarship, returned the 2014 John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Society after allegations emerged that he had plagiziared widely in his book, “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992.”

At the time, Armstrong admitted to having made “citation errors” in the work. However, Balazs Szalontai, an academic in Korea, insisted that the the errors were in fact plagiarism and that they were sweeping.

Now, in what Szalotai told us was the earliest instance of Armstrong’s plagiarism that he has found, the journal Cold War History is retracting an article by Armstrong. According to the notice:

Michigan State committee finds misconduct by museum head in celebrated mummy case

An investigation into the director of the museum at Michigan State University has found him guilty of research misconduct and other behavior stemming from his meddling in efforts to repatriate a 500-year-old mummy of a young girl that came to the school from South America in the late 19th century.

A committee at the East Lansing institution determined that Mark Auslander, an anthropologist and historian misappropriated the work of other scholars, fabricated data and committed other misconduct in his handling of the mummy matter, which made headlines last year.

Although the case involves several years of misbehavior, at its core are two main events: a repatriation ceremony in Washington, D.C. for the relic, and an official letter in which Auslander, as director of the museum published the ill-gotten work.

According to a summary of the report provided to Retraction Watch which is consistent with official communications viewed by us:

Former grad student forges his supervisor’s authorship — and gets smacked down

On December 29, Jan Behrends, of the Institute of Physiology at the University of Freiburg, in Germany, was checking his Google Scholar profile when he saw his name on a paper — one he’d played no part in writing.

The article, “Microelectrochemical cell arrays for whole-cell currents recording through ion channel proteins based on trans-electroporation approach,” had appeared earlier that month in Analyst, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry. According to Behrends:

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