by reason for retraction – Page 55

Crossfit wins $4 million sanction in lawsuit stemming from now-retracted paper

A Federal court in California has ruled in favor of the popular training program CrossFit in its lawsuit against a nonprofit group — a competitor in fitness training — awarding the workout company nearly $4 million in sanctions.

Why are you reading about this case on Retraction Watch, you might ask? Well, at the heart of the suit, first filed in 2014, was a now-retracted 2013 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research — published by the NSCA — showing, erroneously, that CrossFit was linked to an increased risk for injuries. The journal initially corrected the article, but as CrossFit noted, the publication never acknowledged fabrication of data.

The senior author of that paper, Steven Devor, resigned his position at The Ohio State University after the retraction in mid-2017. As we reported at the time, the institution had demanded:

Journal retracted at least 17 papers for self-citation, 14 with same first author

A medical journal in Italy has retracted at least 17 papers by researchers in that country who appear to have been caught in a citation scam. The journal says it also fired three editorial board members for “misconduct” in the matter.

The retractions, from Acta Medica Mediterranea, occurred in 2017 and 2018, but we’re just finding out about them now; 14 involve roughly the same group of neuroscientists, while three are by different authors from some of the same institutions as the first team.

The journal last year issued two statements on its website about the cases, which it began investigating in 2018. The first, on Feb. 1, 2019 (we think), declared:

Nobel winner retracts paper from Science

A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results.

Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 prize for her work on the evolution of enzymes, tweeted the news earlier today:

Psychiatrist who stole grant funds also engaged in research misconduct, says ORI

Alexander Neumeister. Source: Yale School of Medicine

Retraction Watch readers may recall the name Alexander Neumeister.

In 2016, The New York Times reported on his dismissal from the New York University School of Medicine following claims of misconduct in a trial Neumeister was running.

A lot has happened in the case since, including embezzlement charges for which he pleaded guilty. Now, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity has found that Neumeister also committed research misconduct.

‘Disbelief’: Researchers, watch out for this new scam involving journal special issues

We’ve seen authors fake peer review by creating fake email addresses, and even companies that use photos of celebrities to lure unsuspecting authors. Now along comes a new scam, this one involving special issues of journals. In “Predatory publishing, hijacking of legitimate journals and impersonation of researchers via special issue announcements: a warning for editors and authors about a new scam,” Jamie Trapp, of Queensland University of Technology, describes what happened when scammers tried to snare the journal he edits — Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine. We asked Trapp to answer a few questions about the scheme.

Retraction Watch (RW): You recently wrote about what you call “a new scam.” Tell us about this scam.

How a plagiarized eye image in the NEJM was discovered

The Images in Clinical Medicine section of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is prime real estate for physicians and others wanting to share a compelling picture with their colleagues. But earlier this month, an eye specialist in Michigan saw double when he looked at the Dec. 5, 2019, installment of the feature.

Depicted was a picture from a pair of eye specialists in India who claimed to have seen a case of a person who’d suffered retinal bleeding after having been struck in the eye by a tennis ball:

A ‘stress test’ for journals: What happened when authors tried to republish a Nature paper more than 600 times?

Journal stings come in various shapes and sizes. There are the hilarious ones in which authors manage to get papers based on Seinfeld or Star Wars published. There are those that play a role in the culture wars. And then there are some on a massive scale, with statistical analyses.

That’s how we’d describe the latest paper by Ottawa journalologists Kelly Cobey, David Moher and colleagues. We asked Cobey and Moher to answer some questions about the recently posted preprint, “Stress testing journals: a quasi-experimental study of rejection rates of a previously published paper.”

Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to do this study?

Neuroscience group retracts Science paper

A group of neuroscientists in Switzerland have retracted a 2019 paper in Science whose first author they say falsified data in the study.

The article, “Insular cortex processes aversive somatosensory information and is crucial for threat learning,” came from the lab of Ralf Schneggenburger, of the Ecole Polytechniqe Federale De Lausanne (EPFL). The first author was Emmanuelle Berret, then a post-doc in the lab.

EPFL issued a press release about the study when it appeared. According to the release, the research showed that the insular cortex — a region “deep within the lateral sulcus” — is in charge of processing how mice and humans (pace, James Heathers) apparently learn from painful stimuli:

Embattled cancer researcher loses legal bid to be reinstated as department chair at OSU

Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has waged legal battles against those he feels have wronged him, has lost another of those fights.

A judge in Franklin County, Ohio, ruled against Croce in a case he brought against OSU to stop them from removing him as chair of his department. Croce had filed the suit late last year. Details are scant, but an order to terminate the case appeared in court records earlier this week.

An OSU spokesperson told Retraction Watch:

“Commendable”: Researchers retract a paper when they find gene sequence errors

Researchers in Italy have retracted a 2019 paper on the genetics of a form of herpes virus after determining that the genomic sequences they thought they’d been analyzing proved to be something else.

The paper, “A complex evolutionary relationship between HHV-6A and HHV-6B,” appeared in July in Virus Evolution, an Oxford University Press title. The authors came from the Scientific Institute IRCCS in Lecco, and the University of Milan.

The article purported to find that:

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