exclusive – Page 5 – Retraction Watch

Exclusive: Researcher outs Indian university’s publishing scam after it fails to pay him

On March 12, a senior administrator at a university in India sent a business proposal to a prolific economist in Ethiopia. If he joined the school’s stable of adjunct professors, the administrator promised, easy money could be made.

All the economist had to do was “add our affiliation for incentives in your papers,” explained Lakshmi Thangavelu, dean of international affairs at Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences (SIMATS), in Chennai, in a written exchange.

“Surely I will do that. Not a big deal,” replied Mohd Asif Shah, an associate professor at Kebri Dehar University, in eastern Ethiopia.

But the deal turned sour. Although Shah listed SIMATS as an affiliation on at least two research papers he published this fall, in December he still hadn’t received any payments from the school, he complained. Then he turned to LinkedIn to share his frustration in a post that included screenshots of his conversation with Thangavelu, who is also a professor at Saveetha Dental College, part of SIMATS.

Exclusive: Whistleblower fired after raising concerns about journal articles on LinkedIn

A business school in Pakistan has fired a marketing professor after finding he had “damaged the repute” of the university and its scholarly journal, Retraction Watch has learned.

In a LinkedIn post, Muhammad Mohsin Butt, the now-fired professor, shared a picture of the table of contents of a 2015 issue of Business Review, published by the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), in Karachi. The contents listed seven case studies authored by two other professors at the school:

Exclusive: Editor caught plagiarizing resigns as more concerns emerge

A radiology professor in France who plagiarized others’ work in a review article has resigned from his role as deputy editor of a medical journal amid new concerns about his publications, Retraction Watch has learned.

The professor, Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne, was first and corresponding author of the offending review, which included large amounts of text from two earlier papers without appropriate citation, as we reported last month.

When confronted with evidence of the plagiarism, Loffroy put the blame on an alleged undisclosed ghostwriter, then proceeded to tone down the offense, saying he wouldn’t mind it if his own work had been plagiarized.

Exclusive: NYU cancer center director suspended

The director of one the nation’s premier cancer centers has been suspended amid concerns over several of his papers – but he tells Retraction Watch it is unrelated to comments about that work on PubPeer.

An email Wednesday to employees at New York University’s medical center – and a subsequent message to staff at the institution’s Perlmutter Cancer Center – explained that Benjamin Neel, the former director of the center, had been suspended.

The letter, signed by Steven Abramson, a rheumatologist and executive vice president at NYU Langone Health, did not state the reason for the move:

Exclusive: Professor in France blames alleged ghostwriter for plagiarism

A professor of interventional radiology in France pointed the finger at an alleged ghostwriter after he was caught plagiarizing large portions of text in a review article, Retraction Watch has learned.

“After careful checking, I noticed that I am not the author of this paper despite my first authorship since it has been written by our previous medical writter [sic],” Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne wrote in an email seen by Retraction Watch.

Loffroy also toned down the offense, saying he wouldn’t care if others had plagiarized his work.

Exclusive: Author threatened to sue publisher over retraction, then sued to block release of emails

An education researcher who had four papers flagged for plagiarism and citation issues threatened to sue the publisher and editors who decided to retract one of the articles, Retraction Watch has learned.

We obtained the emails containing legal threats by Constance Iloh, formerly an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, through a public records request. Iloh, who was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” top figures in education in 2016 and briefly taught at Azusa Pacific University after leaving Irvine, sued to prevent the university from giving us the emails, but after a two-year legal battle, a state appeals court affirmed the records should be released. That battle is described in more detail in this post.

Following our reporting in August 2020 on the retraction of one of Iloh’s articles for plagiarism, the disappearance of another, and the correction of two more, we requested post-publication correspondence between UCI, Iloh, and the journals where the papers had appeared.

The emails UCI released to us in May of this year shed light on the processes three journals took after concerns were raised about Iloh’s work, and how she responded.

Exclusive: Probe suggests new retraction awaiting embattled Korean heart doctor

A prominent physician-scientist in South Korea may soon be facing his fourth retraction. Last month, Hui-Nam Pak of Yonsei University was found guilty of duplicate publication, a form of academic misconduct, according to a report from the school’s committee on research integrity Retraction Watch has obtained.

Pak, a cardiologist, has had dozens of papers flagged on PubPeer. As we reported in February, journals pulled two of his papers the previous month after a whistleblower pointed out problems with the articles. One was retracted for “a number of issues related to scientific misconduct,” while the other was a duplicate publication. A third paper by Pak was retracted years earlier after mistakenly being published twice by the same journal.

Our February story triggered a flood of comments, many of them malicious. Some likened whistleblowing to “academic vandalism.” Others asserted that “whistleblowers deserve strong legal penalties” and that “immoral whistleblowers” seemed bent on ruining Pak’s “outstanding career.” Many comments were rejected for not adhering to our commenting policies, in particular making unsubstantiated claims.

The September 12 report from Yonsei University (in Korean) explains that an “informant” reported two of Pak’s papers to the school’s Research Ethics Integrity Committee on March 7.

Exclusive: UCSF and VA found “pervasive” manipulation in lab of former center director

Two institutional investigations that concluded in 2016 and 2019 found scientific misconduct in multiple publications from the lab of a leading urologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Retraction Watch has learned.

The investigations could not determine who had manipulated the published images of experimental data, but the 2019 report concluded that Rajvir Dahiya, also director of the urology research center at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, “was senior/last author on all these publications and therefore responsible for the results.” Dahiya retired in 2020.

The two investigation reports, which we obtained through a public records request, along with the reports from the preliminary inquiries preceding the investigations, recommend notifying the journals that published eight papers of the issues identified. Four have so far been retracted, one corrected, and two marked with expressions of concern. One of those expressions of concern was published last month.

In comments to Retraction Watch, Dahiya blamed the findings that research misconduct occurred in his lab on the age of the papers. He said the VA destroyed notebooks with original data that had been stored in a central facility after the required data retention period had lapsed:

Exclusive: World-renowned biologist accused of bullying student, stealing his work

One of the world’s foremost conservation biologists is being accused of plagiarism and bullying by a former PhD student, Retraction Watch has learned.

The biologist, Stuart Pimm of Duke University, strongly denies the charges, but he and his colleagues have acknowledged the existence of “closely related” work following an internal investigation by Duke.

The allegations surfaced late last month on X, formerly known as Twitter, in a thread that quickly went viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views and drawing comments from a broad swath of scientists.

In the thread, Ruben Dario Palacio claimed his former academic advisor “threatened to kick me out of Duke” to make him work faster. Palacio decided to change labs due to the alleged “bullying and harassment,” he said, and three months later, in April 2020, published his research as a preprint. The article appeared in the journal Diversity and Distributions in October 2021.

Exclusive: How a dean went about correcting the scientific record even when at least one journal said he didn’t need to

Less than a year after he became dean of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Dentistry, an uncomfortable email landed in Russell Taichman’s inbox.

Overlapping and duplicated panels in one of Taichman’s 2005 papers were among a list of complaints relayed by the publisher of Cellular Signalling in the April 2020 correspondence – complaints which were publicly posted on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik.

“The substance of the complaint is image manipulation, which if true, would violate our publishing policies,” the email stated. “Please note that if we do not have an adequate and timely response, we may be forced to conclude that the allegations are truthful.”

The paper, “Diverse signaling pathways through the SDF-1/CXCR4 chemokine axis in prostate cancer cell lines leads to altered patterns of cytokine secretion and angiogenesis”, eventually became the first of five of Taichman’s papers to be retracted. We first reported on the retractions last September. Since then, following a public records request, we’ve obtained 20 pages of redacted emails that reveal the story behind the retractions.

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