Last February, Richard Pollock was reading a review in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews — a prominent resource for evidence-based medicine — when he spotted an error.
In the first figure, which compared the effectiveness of two different treatments for the most common form of liver cancer, a label was switched. The error made it seem like the “worse” treatment was better than the more effective option.
Pollock, a health economist, was concerned enough to send an email to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the corresponding author, on February 20th. Abdel-Rahman, an oncologist at the University of Alberta, wrote back the next day, saying he would review the comments with experts at Cochrane, “and if there is any typos in the publication, it will be corrected immediately.” Emails seen by Retraction Watch show that, when replying to this email, Abdel-Rahman copied one of Cochrane’s editors, Dimitrinka Nikolova.
Months passed. Pollock sent another email to Abdel-Rahman and two Cochrane editors — Nikolova and Christian Gluud — on June 15th. Then, on November 16th, the journal pulled the review with a brief notice:
But while trying to replicate the findings, Slagter and a then-PhD student of hers, Leon Reteig, found a critical mistake in a statistical method first proposed in a 1986 paper. Slagter told us:
A math professor named as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics has had his third paper retracted after issues with it were flagged last year.
The mathematician, Abdon Atangana, is a professor at The University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and China Medical University, Taiwan.
Ali Nazari and Swinburne University vice-chancellor Linda Kristjanson, presenting him with a commendation in 2017
A construction researcher is watching his publishing edifice crumble, as more upcoming retractions of his papers will bring his total to 61.
Ali Nazari is believed to be a member of a ring of authors whom a whistleblower has claimed are churning out unreliable research — hundreds of papers, according to the sleuth, who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. Nazari lost his job at Swinburne University, in Australia, following a misconduct investigation in 2019.
According to the whistleblower (who laid out the case in a recent email to a journal editor):
As Antonella Longo was peer-reviewing a study for the journal Plant and Soil, she became “alarmed by one figure.” The figure’s title — ”Level2 GO terms of Melopsittacus_undulates” — seemed to be a misspelled reference to a bird species called Melopsittacus undulatus.
More commonly known as a budgie or parakeet, undulatus is a vibrantly colored parrot found in scattered parts of Australia. So what was a figure about a bird doing in a study about plants?
Concerned, Longo, of the BioDiscovery Institute at the University of North Texas, searched the internet for words used in the figure, “GO terms of Melopsittacus undulates.” She identified at least three additional studies that contained an image similar to the one in the study she was peer-reviewing, each with an identical title and color scheme, but with varying data. None of the studies are about birds.
It appears to be Paper Mill Sweeps Week here at Retraction Watch.
On Tuesday, we reported on an editor who believes one such operation was responsible for the withdrawals of at least two articles in her journal.
Now, the Royal Society of Chemistry is retracting 68 articles, across three of its titles, after an investigation turned up evidence of what it suspects was the “systemic production of falsified research.” The society said it is in the process of beefing up its safeguards against milled papers and plans to train its editors to have “extra vigilance in the face of emerging, sophisticated digital fraud.”
A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.
The articles, both of which were published last year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, came from a group at the Murdoch Applied Sports Science Laboratory, part of Murdoch University. The first author on both papers was Liam J. Hughes, a PhD student at Murdoch who was terminated as a result of the misconduct.
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2019 article by a Slovenian physicist who claims that both Creationism and Big Bang theory are wrong, and that black holes are the engines driving the universe.
In 2010, Šorli founded the Bijective Physics Institute, whose proponents — we’re not sure how many there are beyond him and a few others named on the site — believe:
An agriculture journal has put the “retraction” brand on a 2020 study about calving cattle after the editors learned that the researchers had misrepresented aspects of their work.
