by reason for retraction – Page 6

‘Still angry’: Chemist finds his name on a study he didn’t write

Last October, Martin McPhillie, a lecturer in organic chemistry at the UK’s University of Leeds, received an email alert from his institution about a new article bearing his name.

The article, “Docking Study of Licensed Non-Viral Drugs to Obtain Ebola Virus Inhibitors,” appeared in the Journal of Biochemical Technology, a title of Istanbul, Turkey-based Deniz Publication. The journal is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science database.

The study was within McPhillie’s area of expertise, and aligned with work he and the other listed coauthors had previously published. But he knew the new study wasn’t his.

The 14 universities with publication metrics researchers say are too good to be true

Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences

More than a dozen universities have used “questionable authorship practices” to inflate their publication metrics, authors of a new study say. One university even saw an increase in published articles of nearly 1,500% in the last four years.

The study, published January 5 in Quantitative Science Studies, “intends to serve as a starting point for broader discussions on balancing the pressures of global competition with maintaining ethical standards in research productivity and authorship practice,” study authors Lokman Meho and Elie Akl, researchers at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, told Retraction Watch.

Biotech company agrees to pay $4 million to settle data falsification allegations

A biotech company whose CEO faced allegations of manipulating data in papers used in NIH grant applications will pay a settlement of $4 million to resolve those allegations, the Department of Justice announced January 6.

The settlement is the latest installment in a series of allegations surrounding research by Leen Kawas, the former CEO of the company, Bothell, Wash.-based Athira Pharma. In October 2021, four months after placing cofounder and then-CEO Kawas on leave, an internal investigation found she falsified images in her doctoral dissertation and at least four research papers.

But concerns had been raised about the images as early as 2016, and Athira failed to report them, the DOJ statement noted. Those papers “were referenced in several grant applications submitted to NIH, including in a grant that NIH funded in 2019,” the statement continued.

Bribery offers from China rattle journal editors. Are they being scammed?

On November 12, Richard Addante, an associate editor at the journal Frontiers in Psychology, received an alarming email from someone purporting to be a faculty member at a university in China.

“I have a lot of papers to publish, papers on computers, medicine, materials, and so on,” the email, signed by a “Wei Yang” of Zhengzhou College of Business and Industry, stated. “If you can help me publish my paper, I’ll pay you $1500 as a referral fee.”

To Addante, a psychologist at Florida Institute of Technology, in Melbourne, the message suggested the field of scientific publishing needed a thorough clean-up.

Science places expressions of concern on two articles as Toronto’s Sinai Health investigates

Science has issued expressions of concern for two articles from the lab of Daniel Durocher, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto.

The notices, and two more editor’s notes on Nature articles, follow PubPeer comments on several of Durocher’s papers pointing out potentially duplicated images, as described by ForBetterScience. Durocher has responded to many of the comments promising to look into the issues.

Besides his academic positions at Toronto and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health, Durocher co-founded Repare Therapeutics, a biotech company with five ongoing clinical trials of potential treatments for cancer.

The two Science articles, “Mitosis inhibits DNA double-strand break repair to guard against telomere fusions” from 2014, and “Orchestration of the DNA-damage response by the RNF8 ubiquitin ligase,” from 2007, together have been cited nearly 1,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

‘Relieved’: BMJ retracts and replaces article on unexpected weight loss as a sign of cancer

The British Medical Journal has retracted an article examining when unexpected weight loss could be a warning sign of cancer after the authors found an error in their work. The journal published an updated version of the analysis with different conclusions, which the authors think could influence patient care.

The retracted paper, “Prioritising primary care patients with unexpected weight loss for cancer investigation: diagnostic accuracy study,” appeared Aug. 13, 2020. The researchers, led by Brian D. Nicholson, a general practitioner and associate professor in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, England, used electronic health records data to look for people diagnosed with cancer within six months after a recording of unexpected weight loss.

The authors were attempting to replicate their results in another dataset when they found “some differences in the study findings and study population that we could not easily explain,” Nicholson told Retraction Watch. He continued:

Complaint from engineering software company prompts two retractions

An engineering journal has retracted two papers after a company complained the authors of the articles used its software without a valid license.

Both retracted papers were published by Ain Shams Engineering Journal in the last couple of years by different authors based in Egypt. Both papers used FLOW-3D, software that is used to simulate the dynamics of liquids and gasses, which is developed by the firm Flow Science, Inc., in Santa Fe, N.M.

Tom Jensen, vice president of Flow Science, told Retraction Watch the firm offered the authors of both studies to legalize their version of the software by purchasing a license.

But the company didn’t receive a response, Jensen said, despite informing the researchers a retraction would be sought from the journal without a valid license. “We offer greatly reduced prices for licenses for academic institutions and we have numerous academic users around the world,” he added.

Plagiarizing papers retracted from engineering journal after Retraction Watch report

An Elsevier journal has retracted three papers for plagiarism after more than a year of inaction.

As we reported in August, the editor of the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in June 2023 promised to retract the articles, but they remained intact more than a year later.

The following papers have now been retracted:

Journal pulls pesticide article a year after authors engaged lawyer to fight retraction decision

A public health journal has retracted an article on unintentional pesticide poisonings a year after the authors enlisted a lawyer’s help to fight the decision.

Last year, we reported BMC Public Health had decided to retract the article, “The global distribution of acute unintentional pesticide poisoning: estimations based on a systematic review,” which appeared in December 2020. The article has been cited nearly 300 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, including more than 100 since the journal told the authors it would be retracted.

The authors listed affiliations with the Pesticide Action Network, a collection of organizations opposed to pesticides. In their review, they declared unintentional pesticide poisoning “a problem that warrants immediate action.”

The retraction notice cites a letter to the editor from employees of pesticide manufacturer Bayer, and the trade organization CropLife International, which criticized the analysis. The authors stood by their findings in a response, stating the critics “do not seem to have understood our estimation method.”

Exclusive: Cancer researchers in Iran under investigation as questions swirl around dozens of studies

Year after year, a husband-and-wife team at a university in Iran has been publishing studies involving research on cell lines ostensibly purchased from the Pasteur Institute of Iran, in Tehran.

But the couple may never have been in possession of the cells. In correspondence obtained by Retraction Watch, the Pasteur Institute told their employer, Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, only three of the many cell lines described in their publications had been available at the national cell bank over the past decade.

A university official confirmed the two researchers – Fraidoon Kavoosi, an associate professor in the department of anatomical science, and his wife Masumeh Sanaei, an assistant professor in the same department – were under investigation.

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