Category: cardiovascular research

Doctor who participated in fake chocolate study fined for violating code of conduct

Source: AKA
Source: AKA

A German district attorney has fined a doctor who participated in a bogus study showing chocolate helps weight loss, designed to illustrate how shady science can make the news, arguing it was unethical to ask people to participate unknowingly in such a scam.

As soon as the study was published, critics raised questions over whether it was appropriate to include volunteers in a bogus clinical trial, which included giving blood. Recently, a German district attorney for professional conduct of physicians ruled that it was not.

In an anonymized version of a decision from the district attorney – who investigates on possible violations of the physicians’ professional law – he fined the doctor who participated in a bogus study about the health benefits of chocolate 500 Euros for not obtaining proper consent from the people who volunteered to participate, and for not involving an ethics committee. Continue reading Doctor who participated in fake chocolate study fined for violating code of conduct

Author objects to retraction of heart study, implies industry played role

JACC

The Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) has retracted a recently published paper that questioned the effectiveness of a treatment for irregular heartbeat, against the last author’s wishes. 

Andrea Natale, the study’s last and corresponding author and Executive Medical Director of Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia at Austin, took to social media today to express his frustration in the retraction of the July paper, which showed electrical rotors were less effective at fixing irregular heartbeat than other treatments. On Twitter, Natale implied industry played a role in its demise.

However, according to the retraction notice, the paper was felled by problems with randomization; Natale has admitted that some patients were removed from the analysis after one center included them incorrectly.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Impact of Rotor Ablation in Nonparoxysmal Atrial Fibrillation Patients Results From the Randomized OASIS Trial:” Continue reading Author objects to retraction of heart study, implies industry played role

Professor forced to retire after threatening co-author

jialalI-bio
Ishwarlal “Kenny” Jialal

As the University of California Davis is reeling from the resignation of Chancellor Linda Katehi over alleged ethical violations, we’ve learned of more drama at the school: The fallout from a single retraction back in 2012 pushed one UC Davis professor into early retirement this summer without professor emeritus status.

What’s more, a UC Davis committee had recommended that former professor Ishwarlal “Kenny” Jialal retire early but maintain his professor emeritus status, and Katehi overruled that decision, deciding to strip Jialal of any future emeritus status.

Here’s the story: Jialal was found innocent of any research misconduct after Nutrition Reviews journal editors found portions of a 2008 review paper contained writing from the Linus Pauling Institute website, according to an internal investigation. However, after the first author — former postdoc Uma Singh, now an adjunct professor at Valencia College in Orlando — admitted to plagiarizing a passage, the investigation found Jialal sent her threatening emails in reaction to the perceived smear of the retraction on his reputation.

For instance, Continue reading Professor forced to retire after threatening co-author

Author lifts from one paper in two different articles. Why does one journal retract, while the other corrects?

circ resAre there instances when similarities between papers should be fixed by a correction, rather than a retraction?

We’re asking ourselves that question after seeing two journals take very different approaches to a somewhat similar situation. Last year, Frontiers in Physiology retracted a paper by Anastasios Lymperopoulos at Nova Southeastern University in Florida because of an “an unacceptable level of similarity” to a 2009 review article by different authors. But more recently, after Circulation Research discovered another paper co-authored by Lymperopoulos also contained similar text from the same 2009 review, it decided to correct the passages.

The last author of the Circulation Research paper told us the overlap between the two papers was less than 5%, and the journal never suggested the authors retract the paper.

Here’s the correction notice in Circulation Research:

Continue reading Author lifts from one paper in two different articles. Why does one journal retract, while the other corrects?

U Colorado’s former “golden boy” up to 7 retractions

University of Colorado DenverA former graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver has gained three retractions and two expressions of concern (EOC), following an institutional probe into his work. 

Last year, we reported on an investigation by the University of Colorado Denver into the research of Rajendra Kadam, which recommended retracting 10 papers. The report also flagged eight additional papers co-authored by Kadam whose data could not be validated, raising “concerns as to the scientific validity and integrity” of the material. A few months later, we reported on some of the notices — four retractions and an EOC — that had begun to appear for Kadam’s manuscripts.

We’ve since discovered more notices, bringing his total to seven retractions and three EOCs. 

Kadam was once a prominent member in the lab of Uday Kompella, and often referred to by colleagues as the “golden boy,” according to the institution’s report. In 2012, he won a graduate student symposium award from the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.

A University of Colorado Denver spokesperson told Retraction Watch: Continue reading U Colorado’s former “golden boy” up to 7 retractions

A retraction cluster? Two papers retracted for overlap with other retractions

molecular biology reportA cluster of papers by different authors has been retracted for sharing text, even though some papers were submitted at the same time.

How is that possible? A spokesperson for Springer told us that they have reason to believe a third-party company may have helped prepare the papers for publication, and in the process might have spread the material around to multiple manuscripts.

The details of the cluster are a bit perplexing, so bear with us. Two of the papers — that were published only months apart — have already been retracted, as we reported in April. Now, two other papers have been retracted from Molecular Biology Reports — and both notices cite the previously retracted papers. The new notices also say that there’s reason to believe that the peer-review process was compromised.

All papers conclude that a certain polymorphism could signal a risk for coronary artery disease among Chinese people.

We’ll start with the retraction notice for “Fibroblast growth factor receptor 4 polymorphisms and coronary artery disease: a case control study,” which cites the two papers that were retracted previously:

Continue reading A retraction cluster? Two papers retracted for overlap with other retractions

Author loses five papers, most for “compromised” peer review

PLOS OnePLOS ONE has retracted three papers after the first author admitted to submitting the manuscripts without co-authors’ consent, and an investigation suggested that two out of the three papers had received faked reviews.

Last August, the same author — Lishan Wang of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University — lost two more papers (one in Tumor Biology and the other in Gene), also after the peer review process was found to be compromised. All five papers — which share other authors in common — were originally published in 2013, and four list Wang as the first author. The retractions follow an investigation by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Here’s the retraction notice for two of the PLOS ONE papers, issued on July 26: Continue reading Author loses five papers, most for “compromised” peer review

You’ve been dupe’d: Results so nice, journals published them twice

With so many retraction notices pouring in, from time to time we compile a handful of straight-forward retractions.

Once again, this list focuses on duplications — but unlike other duplications, these authors were not at fault. Rather, these retractions occurred because the publishers mistakenly published the same paper twice — the result of a transfer between publishers, for instance, or accidentally publishing the unedited version of the paper. We’re forced to wonder, as we have before, whether saddling researchers’ CVs with a retraction is really the most fair way to handle these cases.

So without further ado, here’s five cases where the journal mistakenly duplicated a paper, and had to retract one version: Continue reading You’ve been dupe’d: Results so nice, journals published them twice

Nutrition study pulled after statistical flaws emerge

Nutrition JournalA paper that suggested that eating flaxseed could reduce inflammation in men at risk of heart disease has been retracted, after researchers pointed out the paper’s flaws.

The retraction is part of a large initiative on the part of nutrition researcher David Allison and colleagues to clean up the literature, which we’ve previously covered. Regarding this paper, he told us:

When we looked at the study…it was very clear that the statistical methods used were not correct. These are not matters of debate or opinion, these are just…verifiably incorrect.

The Nutrition Journal published the paper in January 2015, and retracted it in June 2016, one day after publishing a letter by Allison and a colleague critiquing the paper. 

Here’s the retraction notice for “Impact of weight loss diet associated with flaxseed on inflammatory markers in men with cardiovascular risk factors: a clinical study:” Continue reading Nutrition study pulled after statistical flaws emerge

Second retraction for researcher who faked 70+ experiments

Journal of Biological ChemistryTwo researchers found to have faked data by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) have lost a paper that they co-authored.

According to the ORI report issued on May 25, Ricky Malhotra, one of the researchers in question, admitted to fabricating 74 experiments, and falsifying well over 100 Western blots while at the Universities of Michigan (UM) and Chicago (UC). One week later, the ORI issued additional findings about Karen D’Souza, a colleague of Malhotra’s at the UC, concluding that she had also falsified some data.

Both researchers agreed to the retraction of a 2010 paper published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), the reports note.

Here’s the retraction notice, issued on July 1: Continue reading Second retraction for researcher who faked 70+ experiments