veterinary science – Retraction Watch

Veterinary journal retracts pet food company’s paper about copper in dog food

leisergu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A veterinary journal has retracted a paper from a major pet food company after criticism prompted the authors to re-examine their data.

The retraction is the first in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s 180 years of publication, Lisa Fortier, the journal’s editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. But veterinary researchers who wrote to the journal with concerns about the article say the retraction doesn’t address all the issues they raised.

The article, “Sixteen years of canine hepatic copper concentrations within normal reference ranges in dogs fed a broad range of commercial diets,” appeared online March 7. Most of the authors are affiliated with Hill’s Pet Nutrition.

Within weeks of the article’s publication, the journal got the first of seven letters “crying foul,” Fortier said.

Exclusive: How a researcher faked data and gaslit a labmate for years

Sometime in early 2019, a postdoc in a veterinary microbiology lab at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman came to suspect that a research assistant in her lab was fabricating data.

The postdoc had noticed that the research assistant’s experiments always produced positive results, while hers were always negative. And the experiments she performed with materials from the assistant gave “alarmingly inconsistent” results for no apparent reason, she said in an interview with an investigation committee.

She brought her concerns to a senior researcher, and the research assistant, Ryan Evanoff, was asked to “detail what he had done,” but apparently nothing came of it.

The supervisor indicated that the postdoc’s initial message outlining her concerns “was not clear enough,” but the postdoc thought she’d been clear and says she’d been “extremely careful” due to the severity of the situation.

Paper on canine gastrointestinal illness dogged by lack of disclosures

A veterinary journal has retracted — in a big way — a 2021 paper about bowel disease in dogs by a group of authors who failed to disclose key conflicts of interest and then appear to have lied about the omission when pressed.

The article, “Utility of the combined use of 3 serologic markers in the diagnosis and monitoring of chronic enteropathies in dogs,” appeared in the Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, an official title of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine.

The first author was Juan Estruch, of Vetica Labs, a rather opaque company based in San Diego and of which Estruch is listed in securities documents as having been the CEO back in 2015.

Holy cow: “The article as written contains misleading information and omits important details.”

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.

“Changes in rumen fermentation, bacterial community, and predicted functional pathway in Holstein cows with and without subacute ruminal acidosis during the periparturient period,” appeared in March in the Journal of Dairy Science. The senior author of the article was Shigeru Sato, of the Graduate School of Veterinary Sciences at Iwate University in Japan.

According to the retraction notice (which is only mentioned at the very bottom of the original article’s page, as a “linked article”):

‘Caught in the act’: Veterinary researcher caught fabricating gene data, resigns from university job

A research technician at Washington State University resigned after his colleagues caught him fabricating data earlier this year, Retraction Watch has learned.

Ryan Evanoff was working in veterinary microbiology at the Pullman campus when members of the department discovered that he had been falsifying sequencing data in gene studies. According to Robert Mealey, the chair of the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State:

Going cold turkey: Infectious disease-poultry researcher up to 14 retractions

Nine strikes in a row in bowling is called a “golden turkey.” So what do you call 10 papers on poultry pulled at once for plagiarism?

We first wrote about Sajid Umar in July 2018, when he’d lost a 2016 article in Scientifica for plagiarism and other sins, and then again earlier this summer when he notched two more retractions from Poultry Science for “grave mistakes.”

Now, the World’s Poultry Science Journal, a Taylor & Francis title, has pulled 10 more of Umar’s articles — bringing his total to 14, by our count. According to the retraction notice for the 2017 paper “Mycoplasmosis in poultry: update on diagnosis and preventive measures”:

“[A] painful step”: Authors retract paper on fatal poultry virus

The authors of a 2019 paper on a lethal type of poultry virus in Asia have retracted the article because of problems with the data collection. But the researchers stand by their findings, which, they say, suggest the pathogen could be harmful to humans.

The paper, titled “Novel orthobunyavirus causing severe kidney disease in broiler chickens, Malaysia, 2014-2017,” appeared in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The authors were affiliated with Ceva-Phylaxia Veterinary Biologicals Co. Ltd., and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, both in Budapest. The lead author was Vilmos Palya, a prominent veterinary scientist.

According to the abstract of the article:

Fowl play? Poultry researcher has two more papers retracted for “grave mistakes”

The journal Poultry Science has retracted two papers for authorship issues.

The first author on both articles was Sajid Umar, of the Arid Agriculture University, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, who now has lost at least four papers for similar reasons.

One article, from 2016, was titled “Synergistic effects of thymoquinone and curcumin on immune response and anti-viral activity against avian influenza virus (H9N2) in turkeys.” According to the retraction notice:

Cock and bull story leads to retraction of bovine herpesvirus paper

The ancients had a thing for hybrids (think animals, not cars): half goat-half humans, horses with human torsos, winged horses and lions, you get the picture. But a chicken-cow mix wasn’t on that list … until now.

A group of researchers in Brazil has lost a paper in a veterinary journal for trying to reuse data from a poultry study in their paper on herpesvirus infections in cattle.

The article, “Bovine Herpesvirus 5 promotes mitochondrial dysfunction in cultured bovine monocyte-derived macrophages and not affect virus replication,” appeared in February in the journal Veterinary Microbiology.

According to the retraction notice:

Caught Our Notice: Make love, not fake reviews — semen papers retracted

Titles:

1) Study of enzyme activities and protein content of beluga (Huso huso) semen before and after cryopreservation

2) Determination of some blood and seminal plasma ions in the beluga, Huso huso (Linnaeus, 1758)

3) Effects of multiple collections on spermatozoa quality of Persian sturgeon, Acipenser persicus: Motility, density and seminal plasma composition

What Caught Our Attention: We won’t lie — any retractions of papers about fish semen (OK, any kind of semen) will make us stop and look. In this case, the journal retracted three papers submitted by the same researcher over concerns of fake review. In the end, the journal was concerned the papers were okayed by reviewers who weren’t “suitably qualified” to review the papers about the content and quality of semen from different fish species. (In fairness, we imagine the pool of qualified reviewers is relatively small.)

Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Make love, not fake reviews — semen papers retracted

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