by reason for retraction – Page 55

Spider researcher uses legal threats, public records requests to prevent retractions

The case of Jonathan Pruitt, a spider researcher suspected of fabricating data in potentially dozens of studies, keeps getting weirder.

Pruitt, according to our count, now has six retractions. Currently associate professor and Canada 150 Research Chair at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he made a name for himself by providing other scientists with field data — much of which now appears to be unreliable.

Among the latest developments in the case is a correction in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for a 2016 article titled “Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment.” That followed this April expression of concern, which read:

Apparent duplication from anesthesiology journal puts heart paper into intensive care

A heart journal has issued an expression of concern about a 2017 paper which looks suspiciously like a 2016 article by some of the same researchers that appeared in an anesthesiology publication.

The 2017 paper, “Efficacy of prophylactic dexmedetomidine in preventing postoperative junctional ectopic tachycardia after pediatric cardiac surgery,” was written by a group led by Doaa Mohamed El Amrousy, of Tanta University Hospital in Egypt.

Several months earlier, El Amrousy and two of his co-authors, Nagat S. El-Shmaa and Wael El Feky, published a similar article in the Annals of Cardiac Anesthesia, titled “The efficacy of pre-emptive dexmedetomidine versus amiodarone in preventing postoperative junctional ectopic tachycardia in pediatric cardiac surgery.”

How similar? Apparently too much.

Former Maryland researcher banned from Federal funding for misconduct

At least seven years after questions were first raised about work by a researcher at the University of Maryland Baltimore, School of Medicine, he has agreed to a three-year ban on Federal funding.

Anil Jaiswal, whose first retraction appeared in 2013, faked data in eight NIH grant applications and six papers supported by Federal grants, according to a new finding by the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). Jaiswal, the ORI said,

intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly: (a) used random blank background sections of film or empty boxes to falsely represent or fabricate western blot analyses; (b) used manipulated images to generate and report falsified data in figures; and (c) used mislabeled images to falsely report data in figures.

Drug abuse researcher faked data in grant applications, says Federal watchdog

A researcher at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) in Amarillo plagiarized or faked data in four different federal U.S. grant applications, according to a new finding by the agency responsible for oversight of research integrity at the National Institutes of Health.

Rahul Dev Jayant, according to the Office of Research Integrity, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally plagiarizing, falsifying, and/or fabricating data” in grant applications to the National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for work on alcoholism and opioid dependence. The applications were submitted late last year and early this year.

Jayant, the ORI found, plagiarized from papers by other authors in Nature Protocols and Nature Communications, falsified data in various figures, and fabricated nine bar graphs.

Diabetes-COVID-19 paper retracted for lack of ethical approval

An allegation of plagiarism in a paper about Covid-19 in people with diabetes led to a retraction, but not for lifted text.

Earlier this year, the journal Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics, a Mary Ann Liebert title, published “No deleterious effect of lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic on glycaemic control, measured by glucose monitoring, in adults with type 1 diabetes.” The author was Pilar Isabel Beato-Vi[accent over i]bora, of University Hospital Complex Badajoz, in Spain.

According to the article, the lockdown of Spain in response to the pandemic did not seem to make it harder for people with type 1 diabetes there to control their blood sugar.

The finding made at least one headline, in Medscape, which covered the paper when it appeared online in May.

But it also sounded alarms with at least one reader. As the retraction notice explains:

Paper earns expression of concern after author blames COVID-19 restrictions for not being able to find raw data

The pandemic ate our data.

A group of researchers in India whose findings in a 2015 paper evidently looked too good to be true have received an expression of concern because they claim Covid-19 restrictions have made it impossible to recover their raw data.

The article, “Possible role of P-glycoprotein in the neuroprotective mechanism of berberine in intracerebroventricular streptozotocin-induced cognitive dysfunction,” appeared in Psychopharmacology, a Springer Nature journal. The authors, led by Anil Kumar, were affiliated with the University Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Panjab University in Chandigarh.

Cancer researcher hit with 10-year ban on federal US funding for nearly 100 faked images

A former scientist at Wayne State University in Detroit who lost his PhD from the institution has agreed to a 10-year ban on any federally funded research after being found guilty of misconduct.

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity says Zhiwei Wang fabricated data in nine grants funded by the National Institutes of Health, as well as in three grant applications and his 2006 doctorate.

Wang’s bogus data was published in 15 14 papers, according to the ORI, 14 13 of which already have been retracted. Under the terms of the agreement, Wang will ask for the retraction or correction of the 15th article, a 2008 study in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics titled “Induction of growth arrest and apoptosis in human breast cancer cells by 3,3-diindolylmethane is associated with induction and nuclear localization of p27kip.”

Journal that published paper linking 5G to COVID-19 blames “substantial manipulation of the peer review”

The journal that allowed a bizarre article linking Covid-19 to 5G cell phone waves to “slip through the net” now blames rigged peer review for the fishy paper.

The article, which earned raspberries from the likes of Elisabeth Bik (who called it potentially the “worst” paper of the year) and others, was retracted shortly after publication in the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents.

As we reported last month, the journal initially simply withdrew the article without explanation. But the publisher, Biolife, then provided us with a few less-than-satisfying excuses, such as:

Cite yourself excessively, apologize, then republish the papers with fewer self-citations. Journal says: Fine.

A journal has allowed a geophysicist who cited his own work hundreds of times across 10 papers to retract the articles and republish them with a fraction of the self-citations.

From 2017 to 2019, Yangkang Chen published some of the papers in Geophysical Journal International, an Oxford University Press title, while he was a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the U.S., and some as a faculty member at Zhejiang University in China. In April, the journal subjected the works to expressions of concern.

On June 19, the journal published a retraction notice for the 10 papers, along with an editor’s note that read:

Journal retracted 46 articles in one fell swoop for faked peer review

In Retraction Watch world, it’s like finding long-buried and forgotten treasure.

A now-defunct journal retracted nearly four dozen papers in a single sweep, citing questions about the integrity of the peer review process for the articles.

The Open Automation and Control Systems Journal, formerly published by Bentham, released a list of 46 articles, which it published in 2015, by researchers from various institutions in China. Bentham dates the retractions to 2016. We learned about the case from a commenter to our recent post about a mysterious incident of plagiarism.

According to Bentham:

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