by subject – Page 27 – Retraction Watch

Seven barred from research after plagiarism, duplications in eleven papers

A retired Nepali professor and six others have been barred from research after plagiarism and duplicated images were found in 11 of their papers.

Parashuram Mishra, a retired crystallographer at Tribhuvan University, in Nepal, is the lead author on all the studies. Most of the papers contain image duplications; the same figures were reused across multiple studies. But two figures that Mishra published, according to the university’s findings, were plagiarized from a 2010 study by a British team, and a 2020 study by researchers at the University of Monastir, in Tunisia.

Last December, Armel Le Bail, crystallographer at the Université du Maine in Les Mans, France, began flagging Mishra’s studies on PubPeer and his personal website. He reported his findings to the vice-chancellor of Tribhuvan University, Dharma Kant Baskota, on January 4th.

A longtime whistleblower explains why he’s spent more than a decade trying to get a paper retracted

Since the report of the MIST Trial was published in Circulation in 2008, I have repeatedly written to the journal to express concern about the paper.

Most recently, on February 22, I wrote to the editor-in-chief of Circulation, which is owned by the American Heart Association (AHA), requesting that they retract the 2008 MIST Trial paper, the revised version of the paper, the correction and the data supplement. The response two days later was from the senior attorney of the AHA: “AHA respectfully declines any further involvement. We consider this matter closed and we will not pursue additional comment or review.”

Let me explain how I got involved, and why I have persisted. I was the principal cardiologist in the MIST Trial sponsored by NMT Medical. Another member of the steering committee (Simon Nightingale) and I refused to be authors of the paper because NMT had refused to allow any investigator to see all the data but even without access to the data it was clear that the paper made false claims. In November 2007, a few days after we refused to be authors, NMT started legal proceedings for libel and slander against me. They also instructed their lawyers to sue Nightingale, but did not start the legal proceedings against him.

Paper claiming Muslim patients are “particularly sensitive” retracted

A paper about medical treatment for migrant patients in Germany has been retracted after the authors made unsupported claims that Muslims are “particularly sensitive” to pain.

The paper, titled “Diversität im klinischen Alltag der Augenheilkunde,” or “Diversity in everyday clinical practice in ophthalmology,” in English, was published in Der Ophthalmologe, a German medical journal, in November 2019. It has not yet been cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The original article, penned by ophthalmologists at the Cologne University Eye Clinic, is in German. We ran it through Google Translate to get a sense of its content. The paper begins with a case study of a 52 year-old Turkish migrant, explains how to use smartphone speech translators to overcome language barriers, and highlights cultural differences that physicians should consider while treating migrants.

“Falsifying elements” prompt retraction of three more papers by former “Peorian of the Year”

Jasti Rao, a former star scientist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria whose career flamed out over concerns about misconduct, gambling and allegations that he had mistreated employees, is now up to 16 retractions.

The International Journal of Oncology, a Spandidos title, has retracted three of Rao’s papers dating back to 2011, citing the presence of “falsifying elements” in the images.

Here’s the notice for the 2011 paper “Oncogenic role of p53 is suppressed by si‑RNA bicistronic construct of uPA, uPAR and cathepsin‑B in meningiomas both in vitro and in vivo”:

Bad blood at a lab leads to retraction after postdoc publishes study without supervisor’s permission

A former postdoc at Stony Brook University who was moonlighting in a different lab has lost a study after a university investigation found issues with the work, including “overlap” with prior grants and an earlier study that her supervisor had published, as well as misreported data.

The supervisor — neuroscientist Joshua Plotkin, who was the complainant in the investigation — said that the study was published without his permission, according to an email seen by Retraction Watch. The former postdoc, Catarina Cunha, has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a “witch hunt,” claiming that the university ignored her exculpatory evidence and that the paper’s findings are valid and original.

Legal researcher who claimed false affiliation up to 31 retractions

A law researcher who has falsely claimed to have been affiliated with several institutions has lost eight more publications, bringing his retraction total to 31 and earning him a spot in the top 20 of our leaderboard.

The most recent retractions for Dimitris Liakopoulos include The Regulation of Transnational Mergers in International and European Law, an entire book he co-authored. They also include three papers from Homa Publica and two from Lex et Scientia International Journal. An example:

What happened when a group of sleuths flagged more than 30 papers with errors?

Jennifer Byrne

Retraction Watch readers may recall the name Jennifer Byrne, whose work as a scientific sleuth we first wrote about four years ago, and have followed ever since. In a new paper in Scientometrics, Byrne, of New South Wales Health Pathology and the University of Sydney, working along with researchers including Cyril Labbé, known for his work detecting computer-generated papers, and Amanda Capes-Davis, who works on cell line identification, describe what happened when they approached publishers about errors in 31 papers. We asked Byrne several questions about the work.

Retraction Watch (RW): You focused on 31 papers with a “specific reagent error.” Can you explain what the errors were?

Former Cleveland Clinic researcher’s papers “more likely than not” included falsified images, says investigation

A former researcher at the Cleveland Clinic who studied cardiac genetics has lost three papers for what an institutional investigation concluded was “more likely than not” a case image falsification.

As we reported last year, the work of Subha Sen, once a highly funded scientist at Cleveland Clinic but who left the institution in 2011, has come under scrutiny on PubPeer (note: a researcher with the same name, but at a different institution, also appears in these search results). With the latest papers, Sen now has ~~nine~~ seven retractions for issues including questions about the integrity of the data and the validity of the images.

The three newest removals involve studies published in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology between 2004 and 2009. The notices are very similar while referring to different images.

Here’s the statement for the 2005 article, “Inhibition of NF-κB induces regression of cardiac hypertrophy, independent of blood pressure control, in spontaneously hypertensive rats”:

Widely shared vitamin D-COVID-19 preprint removed from Lancet server

A preprint promoted by a member of the UK Parliament for claiming to show that vitamin D led to an “80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths” has been removed from a server used by The Lancet family of journals.

The preprint, “Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes,” was posted to Preprints with The Lancet on January 22. On February 13, David Davis, a Conservative member of UK’s Parliament, tweeted:

Leading evidence-based group blames pandemic for 9-month delay pulling flawed cancer review

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:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: