A breast cancer researcher at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn has sued the university for sex discrimination and retaliation after an institutional investigation found she committed research misconduct.
Stacy Blain, an associate professor in the departments of pediatrics and cell biology at Downstate, has alleged that the university violated the Equal Pay Act by paying her less than her male colleagues; discriminated against her based on her sex since she joined the faculty in 2002, including by conducting multiple investigations into her lab’s work; and used the latest investigation and its finding that she committed research misconduct to retaliate against her for accusing the university of sex discrimination.
At more than 16,000 words and more than 200 references, the article was submitted on February 9th and accepted on April 8th. It claims that “billions of lives are potentially at risk” with Covid-19 vaccines.
Such an important statement should be supported by facts. But this is not at all the case. And yet the paper has been shared more than 45,000 times on social media, in ways that decrease trust in science and the COVID-19 vaccine, despite the robust evidence that it is both safe and efficient.
Groups of researchers from around the world have racked up a total of 14 retractions for faked authorship. And one author seems to have been up to those and other shenanigans for a decade.
All of the 14 papers include David Ross, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. There was just one problem: Ross retired in 2003.
We first reported on two of the retractions in March 2021. At the time, we noted that two papers in journals published by Emerald also included Ross’ name somewhat improbably. Emerald apparently retracted those two articles in June of this year, along with four others. (Emerald does not date the retraction notices, nor does it give the notices their own DOIs. Both steps are considered best practice.)
That retraction was the second for the paper’s first author, Harald Walach, who also lost an affiliation with a university in Poland. Walach tells us that he let the editor know about the JAMA Pediatrics retraction before he submitted the manuscript:
The American Journal of Public Health is the flagship publication of the American Public Health Association, which has more than 25,000 members worldwide. The AJPH boasts that it is “a highly influential publication,” which is why I accepted an invitation from editor-in-chief Alfredo Morabia in 2020 to comment in a journal forum on FDA regulation of e-cigarettes. At that time Morabia invited a range of experts, both advocates and supporters of FDA tobacco regulation and critics.
Notably, I and Derek Yach, former president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, acknowledged our conflicts of interest with the tobacco industry. My commentary, which was critical of FDA actions, was published here. (I had first published in AJPH a quarter century before.)
At the time of the forum, AJPH editors wrote, “we will invite everyone to reassess the situation in a year.” After a delay perhaps caused by Covid, on March 16, 2022 I was invited by Morabia to submit a commentary by April 1. Neither AJPHinvitation email provided any guidance as to form or content for my submission.
I did so, and you can read the draft here. On April 22, Morabia summarily rejected my commentary. That same day, I wrote to him, expressing my confusion and asking for reconsideration (available here). There was no response.
A chemistry database of crystal structures has marked nearly 1000 entries with expressions of concern after finding they were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill.
The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) added notes to 992 structures in its database, according to a notice posted to its website in May. And a crystallography researcher tells us the impact on the field could be significant.
The University of Wyoming has requested that journals retract 33 papers by a former associate dean and “highly cited researcher” at the institution.
The news came just a week after we broke the story that heart researcher Jun Ren had been demoted following an earlier investigation. At the time, a university spokesperson told us that “Based on the findings of this examination, the university is recommending retraction of several publications due to concerns regarding data irregularities inconsistent with published conclusions.”
A university investigation found an emeritus professor had committed research misconduct after reviewing dozens of allegations, culminating in a recommendation to retract 10 papers and revoke his emeritus status.
The Ohio State University investigated 20 manuscripts by the cancer research group of Samson Jacob after the university received allegations in 2017 of image manipulation stretching over years of work, according to a misconduct investigation report we obtained via a public records request.
The 209-page report, dated February 9, 2021, tells the story of an investigation spanning more than a decade of Jacob’s lab’s work that encountered “dishonesty” from the lab members interviewed.
After determining that Jacob had committed research misconduct, the investigation committee recommended sanctions and asked for the immediate retraction of 10 papers in addition to the 10 that had already been addressed (nine retracted and one corrected) prior to the close of the inquiry. The school revoked Jacob’s emeritus position in May 2021, the OSU Lantern reported at the time.
The investigation committee reviewed 67 allegations, but declined to probe many more concerns that surfaced for the sake of time, according to the report.
Researchers in Iran have lost a paper on Covid-19 infection in a two-month-old boy after the journal learned that they’d fabricated ethics approval for the article.
“Coronavirus disease 2019 in a 2-month-old male infant: a case report from Iran” appeared in December 2020 in Clinical and Experimental Pediatrics. The senior author of the paper was Sajjad Ahmadpour, of the Gastroenterology and Hepatology Diseases Research Center at Qom University of Medical Sciences.
