by reason for retraction – Page 6

‘Lab shenanigans’: TikTok influencer faked data, feds say

A well-known content creator and former lab technician at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas admitted taking “several shortcuts” in work that has been found to contain falsified data funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to a U.S. government watchdog.

Darrion Nguyen, who has more than a half-million followers on his TikTok account “lab_shenanigans,” engaged in research misconduct while working at Baylor by “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating experimental data and results” of several research records, two manuscript figures, a research progress report, a poster, and a presentation, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said.

Journal taking ‘corrective actions’ after learning author used ChatGPT to update references

An interdisciplinary journal says it will take “corrective actions” on a paper following a thorough investigation on a paper for which one author used ChatGPT to update the references.

Krithika Srinivasan, an editor of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space and a geographer at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, confirmed to Retraction Watch her journal is finalizing what actions need to be taken. After the probe concluded, Srinivasan says she submitted her recommendations to Sage, the journal’s publisher, who will take actions in line with their policy.

What’s clear from the probe, she says, is that “none of the incorrect references in this paper were ‘fabricated’ in the sense of being made up or false.” She notes that the original manuscript was submitted to the journal with the correct references but “the errors were generated when one of the other authors (without the knowledge of the submitting author) used chatGPT (instead of regular referencing software) to insert the citations and reference list.”

Nature earns ire over lack of code availability for Google DeepMind protein folding paper

A group of researchers is taking Nature to task for publishing a paper earlier this month about Google DeepMind’s protein folding prediction program without requiring the authors publish the code behind the work.

Roland Dunbrack, of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, peer-reviewed the paper but was “not given access to code during the review,” the authors of a letter submitted today, May 14, to Nature – including Dunbrack – write, “despite repeated requests.”

A Nature podcast said AlphaFold3 – unlike AlphaFold2 – “can accurately predict protein-molecule complexes containing DNA, RNA and more. Although the new version is restricted to non-commercial use, researchers are excited by its greater range of predictive abilities and the prospect of speedier drug discovery.”

Professor, former dean earns nearly 100 expressions of concern for citation manipulation

A professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia who once served as a dean at the Stevens Institute of Technology in the United States, has received expressions of concern on 93 of his conference proceedings for what a publisher said were irrelevant self-citations and “artificially inflating the number of citations.”

The notes by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on the work of Yehia Massoud, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, take two forms. One reads:

Concussion researcher McCrory up to 17 retractions

More than two years after retracting an article by one of its former editors in chief for plagiarism, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has retracted six more pieces by the editor, Paul McCrory, a noted concussion researcher in Australia.

The retractions join 11 more of McCrory’s works, including 10 from BJSM and one from Current Sports Medicine Reports.The BJSM, published by The BMJ, is also correcting two additional articles by McCrory.

Troubles for McCrory – for decades “the world’s foremost doctor shaping the concussion protocols that are used by sports leagues and organizations globally,” according to the New York Times – began in 2021 when Steve Haake, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, told the BJSM McCrory had plagiarized a 2000 article by Haake in Physics World. (It would not be the only time the work was plagiarized.)

Cureus retracts paper for plagiarism following Retraction Watch inquiries

The journal Cureus has retracted a 2022 paper on cancer and the environment just weeks after Retraction Watch raised questions about apparent plagiarism in the article.

As we reported in early April, the paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors”, had a bit of a twinsies thing going with a 2005 article in The Lancet – sharing a title, figures, and wording that “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” according to the anonymous tipster who informed us of the issue.

The April 19 retraction notice states:

Controversial rocket scientist in India threatens legal action after journals pull papers

A professor of aerospace engineering in India who developed a scientific theory critics call “absolute nonsense” said he is suing journal editors and publishers for pulling three papers he claims could help protect “millions of lives.”

The articles, one in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports and two in Wiley’s Global Challenges, described a highly technical concept eponymously dubbed “Sanal flow choking.” The first was retracted last summer, the other two in March.

“The retractions of our papers are unjustified,” V. R. Sanal Kumar of Amity University in New Delhi told Retraction Watch. “Our legal representatives are actively pursuing a defamation lawsuit against these editors and their illicit agents who were responsible for retracting articles crucial for safeguarding countless lives.”

Exclusive: Wiley journal editor under investigation for duplicate publications

An academic editor at Wiley who vowed to “uphold publication ethics” is being investigated by the company for allegedly publishing three of his papers twice, in violation of journal policies, Retraction Watch has learned.

One of the duplicates, which appeared last year in Nurse Education in Practice, an Elsevier title, has already been slated for retraction, according to emails we have seen. The other offending articles were published in Wiley journals.

The editor, Daniel Joseph Berdida, is a nurse and faculty member at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, the Philippines. He joined the editorial board of Wiley’s Journal of Nursing Management four months ago, announcing on LinkedIn that he would “be serving with integrity and uphold publication ethics.”

The dean who came to visit – and added dozens of authors without their knowledge

Earlier this year, a group of lecturers in Malaysia received a WhatsApp message from a colleague who had made a disturbing discovery.

The colleague, who wished to remain anonymous for this story, was looking through Google Scholar and noticed their name, and many others from their department, repeatedly appeared alongside that of an unfamiliar author: Kumba Digdowiseiso, dean of the economics and business faculty at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“We didn’t even know who this person was,” said Safwan Mohd Nor, an associate professor of finance at the university, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, adding that he was “extremely angry” when he first found out his name had been used.

Embattled researcher Didier Raoult earns more than 100 expressions of concern and another retraction

An Elsevier journal has issued just over 100 expressions of concern for papers published by a group of researchers led by the French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who also notched a new retraction – his tenth – in a separate publication.

As we and others have reported, Raoult’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic drew intense scrutiny from data sleuths, most notably Elisabeth Bik – whose critiques, which extended beyond his COVID studies, were met with vicious online trolling and a legal complaint filed by Raoult himself.

The allegations prompted an ethics investigation by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products into Raoult’s research during his tenure at the IHU Méditerranée Infection, in Marseille, which he led between 2011 and his retirement as director in 2022. That inquiry found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”

The 101 expressions of concern come for papers Raoult and his colleagues published in New Microbes and New Infections. Here’s an example of one of the EoC’s, for “Genome sequence and description of Anaerosalibacter massiliensis sp. nov.,” which Raoult’s group published in March 2016:

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