A journal of the UK-based Biochemical Society is retracting 25 papers after finding “systematic manipulation of our peer-review and publication processes by multiple individuals,” according to a statement provided to Retraction Watch.
The batch of retractions for Bioscience Reports is “the first time that we have issued this many retractions in one go for articles that we believe to be connected,” managing editor Zara Manwaring said in an email.
As academic publishing grapples with its papermill problem, many firms are retracting articles by the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands after discovering foul play.
Bioscience Reports already had retracted 20 papers this year, by our count. The latest batch means the journal’s yearly total will surpass 2023, when it pulled 32 papers, and the year before, when it pulled 26.
JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a controversial 2023 paper on the incidence of long COVID in children after the authors discovered a raft of “coding” errors in their analysis that greatly underestimated the risk of the condition.
The article – a research letter titled “Post–COVID-19 Condition in Children” – was written by a group of researchers in Canada led by Lyndsey Hahn, of the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and garnered significant attention on mainstream and social media sites, including by critics who said the authors fatally botched the definition of long COVID.
According to the authors, the incidence of long covid in kids was “strikingly low”, occurring in just 0.4% of young patients. Symptoms of infection in kids typically resolve within two weeks, they added.
But those reassuring findings hinged on several errors in the analysis that made the incidence of long COVID in children look less than a third of what the researchers should have reported.
–Limerick attributed to University of Illinois president George Stoddard and University of Illinois provost Coleman Griffith, both of whom would lose their jobs over Krebiozen
It is a story that resonates with the present: A 1950s cancer treatment hoax that showed “charges of conspiracy, elitism, and un-Americanism directed against the educational, scientific, and medical establishment are nothing new; neither is uncritical news coverage of what turns out to be quackery.” We’re pleased to share an adapted excerpt from Matthew Ehrlich’s The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine, out today.
On March 26, 1951, one of America’s most respected scientists called a meeting at Chicago’s Drake Hotel to make a dramatic announcement: he and a Yugoslavian refugee doctor had found a drug that showed great promise in treating cancer. The scientist was Andrew Ivy, vice president of the University of Illinois (U of I) and designated spokesperson for medical ethics at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. Time magazine had gone as far as to pronounce him “the conscience of U.S. science.” Ivy’s Yugoslavian collaborator was Stevan Durovic, said to have discovered the new drug in Argentina after the Nazis forced him to flee his homeland. The drug itself was called Krebiozen, a name that was supposed to connote “cancer suppressor” or “regulator of growth.”
A physiology journal has retracted two papers after an institutional investigation found a heart researcher falsified data and figures in the articles.
A committee at the Ohio State University found Govindasamy Ilangovan, an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the school, falsified figures and reused data, according to the retraction notices published in Heart and Circulatory Physiology, a journal of the American Physiological Society.
The notices detail how Ilangovan repurposed and relabelled Western blots from both published and unpublished works. One of the figures also was “inaccurate” due to “addition of false bands” in a Western blot, but the notice did not explicitly attribute the problems with the figure to Ilangovan.
When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work.
Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere.
“I had imagined they would just keep submitting it to new journals until it got accepted, because it was so brazenly plagiarized that they clearly didn’t care,” Payne told Retraction Watch.
Months later, Payne’s worry was justified. The paper, by researchers at First Moscow State Medical University, in Russia, appeared in Wiley’s Proteomics in May.
A team of physicists has retracted a paper from Science after they discovered mistakes in their data and statistical analysis when following up on their work.
The paper “A room-temperature single-photon source based on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms” published in 2018, garnered 117 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Of these, 97 citations came after the authors corrected the paper in 2020 to adjust for updated calibrations, which they said did not affect the conclusions of the article.
This correction was unrelated to the reasons for retraction, said corresponding author Tilman Pfau, a professor of physics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.
A paper that cited a single researcher’s work in 53 of 64 references will be retracted following our inquiries, the publisher of the journal has told Retraction Watch.
The article, ‘Culturally-informed for designing motorcycle fire rescue: Empirical study in developing country’, published in June in AIP Advances, overwhelmingly cites the work of Muhammed Imam Ammarullah, a lecturer at Universitas Pasundan in West Java, Indonesia, sometimes without obvious relevance to the text.
An anonymous tipster came across the soon-to-be retracted paper on Google Scholar, then alerted the editors at AIP Advances in June to the strange citation pattern. The journal investigated, but didn’t acknowledge a problem with the excessive citations to Ammarullah’s work in their initial response to the complaint. Instead, they identified issues with six other, unrelated citations, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.
A former department chair engaged in research misconduct in work funded by 19 grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.
Richard Eckert, formerly the chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and deputy director of the university’s Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, faked data in 13 published papers and two grant applications, ORI found.
The ORI finding stated Eckert “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by” every NIH grant on which he served as principal investigator, totaling more than $19 million. The finding also lists multiple “Center Core Grants” worth hundreds of millions for shared resources and facilities at research centers.
Two decades later, much has changed. I am reassured by the heightened awareness of this issue and the numerous efforts to address it by various stakeholders in the publication process, but I am disappointed that image manipulation remains such an extensive problem in the biomedical literature. (Note: I use the term “image manipulation” throughout this piece as a generic term to refer to both image manipulation (e.g., copy/paste, erasure, splicing, etc.) and image duplication.)
In 2002, I was the managing editor of The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), and STM journals were transitioning away from paper submissions. We had just implemented online manuscript submission, and authors often sent figure files in the wrong file format. One day, I assisted an author by reformatting some figure files. In one of the Western blot image panels, I noticed sharp lines around some of the bands, indicating they had either been copied and pasted into the image or the intensity of those bands had been selectively altered.
Mike Rossner
I vividly recall my reaction, which was, “Oh shit, this is going to be a problem. We’re going to have to do something about this.” With the blessing of then editor-in-chief, Ira Mellman, I immediately instituted a policy for the journal to examine all figure files of all accepted manuscripts for evidence of manipulation before they could be published. We began using simple techniques, which I developed along with three of my colleagues at the time, Rob O’Donnell, Erinn Grady, and Laura Smith. The approach involved visual inspection of each image panel using adjustments of brightness and contrast in Photoshop, to enhance visualization of background elements.
