exclusive – Page 6 – Retraction Watch

Exclusive: City of Hope cancer researcher goes to court to fight misconduct finding

An alumna of the lab of Carlo Croce, a high-profile cancer researcher at The Ohio State University with 14 retractions, has sued the institution over the results of its investigation that found she committed research misconduct.

Flavia Pichiorri is now a principal investigator with her own lab researching potential therapies for multiple myeloma at City of Hope – a cancer center that also owns Cancer Treatment Centers of America – in Duarte, Calif.

She worked at Ohio State from 2004-16, first as a postdoctoral researcher in Croce’s lab, then as a research scientist, and finally as an assistant professor of hematology. She has been a PI on grants that garnered millions of dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health since switching jobs.

Exclusive: Researcher has “ceased employment” at university amid investigation and retraction

A neurology researcher in Australia is no longer employed at his former university in the midst of a research misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned. And the work of a co-author at another institution also is being assessed for possible research misconduct after sleuths alerted the university to comments on PubPeer about potential data issues in his papers.

The retracted article, “Changes in Cathepsin D and Beclin-1 mRNA and protein expression by the excitotoxin quinolinic acid in human astrocytes and neurons,” was published in Metabolic Brain Disease in 2014 and has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal’s editor-in-chief, Gregory Konat, retracted the paper because several of the western blots appeared to be duplicated and he no longer had confidence in the results, according to the retraction notice. The six authors are researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Macquarie University and St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.

Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned.

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

Exclusive: Top-tier university in Japan investigating prof’s alleged misconduct

Tokyo’s Waseda University is investigating alleged misconduct by an assistant professor at the institution, Retraction Watch has learned.

The probe is focusing on at least three works by Woohyang Sim, of the Faculty of International Research and Education, including her 2020 doctoral dissertation, titled “What is Higher Education For? Educational Aspirations and Career Prospects of Women in the Arab Gulf.” Two of Sim’s published papers are also under scrutiny, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

In June 2022, an anonymous commenter on PubPeer flagged several problems with these publications, as well as with Sim’s master’s thesis and another one of her papers. That same month, a whistleblower notified the Japanese government about the concerns, according to the source.

Exclusive: Former Tufts researcher suspended from animal work after abuse

A researcher and former faculty member at Tufts School of Medicine in Boston has been banned from working with animals for a year following repeated cases of abuse under his supervision, according to documents obtained by an animal-rights group.

In an Oct. 26, 2022, letter to the federal Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare, the university reported “serious and continuing noncompliance with” animal-welfare regulations. These breaches included “injections in mice via an unapproved route/location, failure to provide required analgesia, inadequate supportive care and monitoring, and failure to euthanize mice upon reaching the approved humane endpoints,” Tufts said.

When asked for his comments, the researcher “refuted most of the allegations and took no responsibility for his actions,” the university added.

Exclusive: Committee recommended pulling several papers by former Cornell med school dean

Following an investigation launched by Cornell University, a committee recommended pulling several papers by lung-disease researcher Augustine M. K. Choi, who served as dean of Weill Cornell Medicine until this year, Retraction Watch has learned.

Choi’s latest retraction, which brings him up to three so far, came on March 15, when The Journal of Clinical Investigation pulled “UCP2-induced fatty acid synthase promotes NLRP3 inflammasome activation during sepsis.” The paper has been cited 178 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice reads:

Exclusive: Australia space scientist made up data, probe finds

A space scientist formerly based at the University of Sydney made up data in an unpublished manuscript, an investigation by the institution has found.

The researcher, Joachim Schmidt, “utilised Adobe Photoshop to make up results,” according to a letter dated Feb. 15, 2023, from Emma Johnston, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of Sydney, to scientists at the University of Michigan who reported complaints in late 2019 about work by Schmidt and his former professor Iver Cairns to the Australian institution.

“Given the above, the Panel found there had been breaches of the Research Code on the part of Dr Schmidt. The breaches were viewed as serious, and the Panel considered them to be sufficiently serious to warrant a finding of research misconduct as defined in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research,” the letter, obtained by Retraction Watch, stated.

Exclusive: Prof stole former student’s identity to edit two journal special issues

A university investigation in Hong Kong found that a professor used the email account of a former student to conduct all the correspondence needed to edit special issues of two journals, Retraction Watch has learned.

The two special issues, which were published last year, are full of articles with the hallmarks of paper mills, said Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford psychologist and scientific sleuth who flagged the matter to the institution involved in the case.

Last November, Bishop emailed the president of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) with the information that Kaifa Zhao, a PhD student at the university, was listed as the lead editor for two special issues of the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, both journals published by Hindawi. The nearly 300 articles in the special issues were “mostly meaningless gobbledegook” that suggested they came from a paper mill, she wrote.

The episode is the latest of many problems involving questionable peer review of special issues – and subsequent retractions – we’ve covered.

Exclusive: Deepfake pioneer to lose two papers after misconduct finding of faked data

Two papers coauthored by a computer scientist whose work on visual effects has been credited in big-name Hollywood movies will soon be retracted after a publisher’s investigation found falsification of data in the articles.

Retraction Watch has also learned that the University of Southern California (USC) found that Hao Li “falsely presented his research” in the two publications while he was a professor there. The articles, both published in journals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), describe a system to create a 3D digital avatar head from a person’s photo using artificial intelligence.

Li co-founded and is CEO of Pinscreen, a startup which is commercializing that technology. On its website, Pinscreen touts its products as “the most advanced AI-driven versatile avatars.” Besides personalized avatars for use in virtual or augmented reality systems, Pinscreen offers the ability to replace a person’s face in videos, creating what’s known as “deepfakes.”

Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report

A few years ago, funding for the UCLA pathology lab where Janina Jiang had worked since 2010 was running out.

The head of the lab was grateful when another scientist offered to chip in $50,000 to keep Jiang on for six more months.

But some of the experiments Jiang – perhaps feeling that her job was on the line, a colleague speculated – ran for that scientist raised suspicions. Other experiments didn’t corroborate her results, and Jiang failed to provide all her raw data.

Jiang’s benefactor asked another staff scientist to review and reanalyze her work.

What he found spurred an institutional investigation, which in July 2021 found Jiang faked data representing flow cytometry experiments in several figures included in 11 grant proposals, resulting in 19 counts of research misconduct.

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