by subject – Page 12 – Retraction Watch

Professor emeritus loses fourth paper after UCSF-VA investigation, five years after other retractions

A former research center director and professor emeritus of urology has lost a fourth paper after a joint investigation by the University of California San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center found faked data in several of his articles.

The other three retractions for Rajvir Dahiya, who directed the UCSF/VAMC Urology Research Center from 1991 until his retirement in 2020, date from 2017. In addition, a paper of his in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was corrected in 2018, and one in Clinical Cancer Research received an expression of concern last year.

The latest retraction is for “Knockdown of astrocyte-elevated gene-1 inhibits prostate cancer progression through upregulation of FOXO3a activity,” published in Oncogene in 2007. It has been cited 191 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction note, like some of the other editorial notes for Dahiya’s papers, cites the findings of a joint investigation by UCSF and the VA Medical Center:

Paper about “sexual intent” of women wearing red retracted seven years after sleuths raised concerns

A psychologist whose controversial publications on human behavior have attracted scrutiny for their implausible workload and impossible statistics has lost a third paper – seven years after sleuths first began questioning it.

The 2012 article, “Color and Women Attractiveness: When Red Clothed Women Are Perceived to Have More Intense Sexual Intent,” was published in the Journal of Social Psychology, a Taylor & Francis title. It has been cited 53 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Nicolas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France is listed as the paper’s sole author. We’ll let him describe the article, as he did in its abstract:

Buzzy Lancet long COVID paper under investigation for ‘data errors’

An early and influential paper on long COVID that appeared in The Lancet has been flagged with an expression of concern while the journal investigates “data errors” brought to light by a reader.

An editorial that accompanied the paper when it was published in January of last year described it as “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19. The article has received plenty of attention since then.

Titled “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study,” the paper has been cited nearly 1,600 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Altmetric finds references to it in multiple documents from the World Health Organization.

Mathematician requests two retractions for “subtle inaccuracies”

A mathematician has requested the retraction of two recently published articles “claiming proofs of big results in number theory,” as one observer put it.

After publication, the author said he “found some subtle inaccuracies” in the work.

The editor-in-chief of the mathematics journal Studia Logica, where the papers were published, posted a notice to the publication’s website weeks ago stating that it had retracted the two articles.

But the online versions of the papers still show no signs of having been retracted, as the editors wait on their publisher, Springer Nature, to process the retractions.

Journal editor in chief who published controversial Covid papers resigns

The editor in chief of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) has resigned with more than a year left of his term, according to an email announcing his move to colleagues.

In the email, first reproduced in Steve Kirsch’s Substack newsletter, the editor, Jose L. Domingo, cited “deep discrepancies” with the journal’s direction under publisher Elsevier as the reason for his early resignation. He shared the email with us when we reached out for comment.

Domingo, a professor of toxicology and environmental Health at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, listed three main points of contention: an agreement for the journal to publish documents for the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials, which Domingo believed to be a “drag” on the journal’s impact factor; FCT’s recent designation as the official journal of the Chinese Society of Toxicology; and a February editorial he wrote requesting submissions “on the potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines.”

He wrote:

How many ducks do you need to line up to get a publication retracted?

In July 2017, we notified the Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism (JBMM) of concerns about a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in rats which featured, among other problems, extensive duplication of data in a separate publication, large numbers of discrepancies in the methods and results between the publications, and serious concerns about the governance and conduct of the research.

The journal sought an explanation from the authors, Jun Iwamoto and Yoshihiro Sato, who currently have 119 retractions between them. The response avoided addressing most of the concerns and attributed all the discrepancies to minor errors, and was accepted by JBMM.

In the intervening years, however, evidence about problems in the group’s work has mounted. And yet the paper remains neither retracted nor corrected. It has become just another in a long list of studies, along with ten others in the journal, that we have beaten our heads against the wall to have journals fix.

Catch and kill: What it’s like to try to get a NEJM paper corrected

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a letter to the editor and a response reflecting a quite modest correction. Essentially, the three letters “miR” will be removed from throughout a manuscript as the data, to date, do not support there being a human novel microRNA blood-based biomarker for myocarditis, as the original manuscript claimed.

At the time of this posting, however, that change – which itself is well over a year in the making – has not yet occurred. And we really don’t understand why. This is our story of the arduous journey to improve the medical and scientific literature.

In May of 2021 the NEJM published “A novel circulating microRNA for the detection of acute myocarditis.” One of us (Marc Halushka), a practicing cardiovascular pathologist and microRNA researcher, recognized this paper was squarely in his wheelhouse. The concept of a novel microRNA blood-based biomarker was exciting, but also curious.

What happened when a psychology professor used a peer-reviewed paper to praise his own blog – and slam others’

A psychology professor has lost a paper for failing to disclose a crucial conflict of interest about one of the subjects of the work, which critiqued various blogs.

That’s because one of those blogs was written by none other than the author of the paper, Peter Kinderman, a professor at the University of Liverpool and a former president of the British Psychological Society.

The paper’s comments about Kinderman’s Blog ‘F’ were generally positive, with phrases such as:

In 1987, the NIH found a paper contained fake data. It was just retracted.

Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues.

Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted.

A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.

The recent retraction came through the efforts of psychologist Russell Warne, who unearthed the report with the help of a couple librarians, posted it on his blog, and contacted journals about its findings.

In a blog post about the report, Warne summed up the case:

‘A big pain’: Professor up to six retractions for plagiarism and manipulated peer review

A business professor has now had six papers retracted, resulting from a combination of plagiarism and manipulated peer review.

All six retractions for Bilal Afsar, an associate professor of management sciences at Hazara University in Pakistan, have come since last February. He is the only common author on all the papers, which were published in 2019 and 2020 – and in comments to Retraction Watch, blamed a research assistant whom he declined to name for the problems.

The most recent paper to be retracted, in August of this year, was “Does thriving and trust in the leader explain the link between transformational leadership and innovative work behaviour? A cross-sectional survey.” It was originally published in the Journal of Research in Nursing in December of 2019 and has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to the retraction notice:

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