A paper published in Science two years ago has been flagged with an expression of concern while the editors give the authors a chance to correct a data issue identified by two different readers.
The publisher PLOS is marking nearly 50 articles by Didier Raoult, the French scientist who became controversial for promoting hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, with expressions of concern while it investigates potential research ethics violations in the work.
PLOS has been looking into more than 100 articles by Raoult, but determined that the issues in 49 of the papers, including reuse of ethics approval reference numbers, warrant expressions of concern while the publisher continues its inquiry.
Mere days after tweets went viral pointing out that the purported error bars in one figure of a paper were really just the capital letter T, the publisher has marked it with an expression of concern. [12/22/22: The paper has now been retracted; see an update on this post.]
And that’s not all that’s strange about the paper.
An early and influential paper on long COVID that appeared in The Lancet has been flagged with an expression of concern while the journal investigates “data errors” brought to light by a reader.
An editorial that accompanied the paper when it was published in January of last year described it as “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19. The article has received plenty of attention since then.
Priscilla K. Coleman testifying before U.S. Congress in 2007
The author of an article on unwanted pregnancies that has received an expression of concern for reasons that remain unclear says she has hired lawyers to defend herself against “defamation.”
Priscilla K. Coleman, a professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio – whose controversial work on the link between abortion and mental health problems has come under scrutiny – told us that she plans “to actively pursue all options available including legal avenues to rectify the situation” after Frontiers in Social Health Psychology slapped the EoC on her 2022 article.
The paper in question was titled “The Turnaway Study: A case of self-correction in science upended by political motivation and unvetted findings.” The Turnaway Study is an ongoing look by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco at the effects on women – including the physical, emotional, and economic toll – of carrying unwanted pregnancies. The main finding, according to its site, “is that receiving an abortion does not harm the health and wellbeing of women, but in fact, being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health and family outcomes.”
A paper with scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik as a co-author now has an expression of concern. It dated back to her time at the now-defunct startup uBiome and described research that the company used to develop a clinical test of bacteria living in the human gut – and that she raised concerns about some years ago.
The expression of concern detailed the journal’s investigation into allegations that some of the samples in the paper weren’t suitable for determining a healthy baseline of the human gut microbiome — being from infants, people who might have recently taken antibiotics, and pets — and the authors’ responses.
It’s a long notice, but this paragraph sums up the concerns:
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a federally-funded paper on Alzheimer’s disease after a sleuth on PubPeer noted potentially duplicated figures in the article.
We shouldn’t forget to mention, as the paper did, that one of the authors – a prominent scientist who happens also to be a co-editor in chief of the journal – has financial ties to a company with interest in the work. That author said the fault lies with the corresponding author.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, it seems, when it comes to neurofibrillary tangles. And we’ve seen at least one other case of a paper failing to disclose conflicts of interest in a paper he’d published in his own journal. (This is a subject that has been taken up elsewhere.)
Has Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports been targeted with an authorship for sale scheme? At least one expert in such matters thinks so.
The journal has issued two recent expressions of concern for papers by researchers from Indonesia, Iran and Russia with highly unusual – and oddly similar – constellations of authors.
An Elsevier journal has issued a rather remarkable expression of concern for a 2021 paper on rabbit husbandry after learning that the lead author misrepresented the authorship of the article – and possibly more.
But as the journal explains, the article wasn’t the first rabbit rodeo for Imbabi, of the department of animal production at Benha University. According to the notice, the researcher had failed repeatedly to publish his manuscript in other journals, so he turned to “third parties” for help.
Those contributors did the bulk of the work – but wanted none of the credit. Meanwhile, Imbabi appears to have found other authors willing to join the list.
A psychiatry journal has issued expressions of concern for four papers by a group of researchers in Russia after questions surfaced about the integrity of the data.
The first author on all of the papers was Ilya D. Ionov, of the Centre On Theoretical Problems in Physical and Chemical Pharmacology, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The co-authors are affiliated with Timpharm LTD, a drug company without much in the way of an online presence.
The papers appeared in Psychopharmacology, a Springer Nature title.
