Retraction Watch

Vice chancellor in Pakistan sues researcher whose work he plagiarized – and says he was the victim

In response to allegations of plagiarism, the vice chancellor of a university in Pakistan has brought a 500 million rupee (~$2,800,000USD) defamation suit against his accuser.

As we reported last July, Farukh Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, had discovered that a paper in the journal Fuel had lifted text from his master’s thesis.

Among the authors was Muhammad Suleman Tahir, the vice chancellor at Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, in Rahim Yar Khan.

Paper overestimated risk of COVID-19 to endangered apes

Carine06 from UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2021 article with dire news for mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park about the prospects of extinction on the spikes of SARS-CoV-2 after finding a fatal error in their model of the outbreak.

The article, “Exploring the potential effect of COVID-19 on an endangered great ape,” appeared in October in Scientific Reports and was written by a group at the University of Southern Denmark and the the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, in Atlanta. The Fund has been concerned – for good reason – about the potential of respiratory illnesses to decimate populations of great apes, whose social nature can foster transmission of infections.

According to the abstract of the paper:

‘Amateur bullshit’ is the price to pay for democratizing scholarly publishing, says editor

A case of author’s remorse immediately after publication of her paper has the editor of the journal calling “bullshit” on the decision to retract the work.

The paper, “Stopping the Revolving Door: Reducing 30-Day Psychiatric Readmissions With Post-discharge Telephone Calls,” was written by a trio of authors from AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, in southern New Jersey and appeared in Cureus on January 12.

Shortly after publication, the named first author, Antonia Phillip, contacted the journal to repudiate the paper. According to the retraction notice, dated January 14:

University recommends seven more retractions for psychology researcher

Two years after a psychology researcher in The Netherlands was found guilty of misconduct, including manipulating data and cutting co-workers out of publications, a new report says she deserves more retractions.

In November 2019, as we reported, Lorenza Colzato was found guilty by an investigation at Leiden University of having failed to obtain ethics ethics approval for some of her studies, manipulating her data and fabricating results in grant applications.

At the time, the institution – which Colzato had left for TU Dresden – called for the retraction of two of the researcher’s papers. Both were pulled, and we spoke to the three whistleblowers about lessons of the case.

However, the Leiden University weekly newspaper Mare has learned that a subsequent inquiry – a report on which appeared without announcement in November 2021– concluded that 15 of Colzato’s articles appeared to contain evidence of misconduct:

Weekend reads: Academia with and without peer review; bogus journals; rector found guilty of misconduct

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Paper on “suspicious activities” on India-China border retracted
‘[T]he authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but…retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors’
Court injunction forces gastro journal to slap expressions of concern on 40 articles about probiotics
Expressions of concern mount for heart researchers over data provenance
Wiley snafu costs an early-stage researcher his first paper

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 208. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Paper on “suspicious activities” on India-China border retracted

A journal has retracted a 2020 paper about looking for “suspicious activities” on the India-China border — including an incursion in which 20 Indian soldiers were reportedly killed – citing “legal reasons.”

The abstract in Springer Nature’s Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing, which alleges that the soldiers were “brutally killed,” is rife with grammatical and punctuation errors:

‘[T]he authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but…retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors’

In September 2018, I wrote to the managing editor of FEBS Letters with my concerns about the extensive textual overlap between a 2011 article by Sonia A. Melo and Manel Esteller and other articles, including some that were not cited, such as a 2009 article in the Annual Review of Pathology by Yong Sun Lee and Anindya Dutta.

The Melo and Esteller article has received considerable attention, and has been cited more than 375 times.

My initial efforts were met with a response that the iThenticate software they used only identified overlap with the published Melo and Esteller article. I then had to guide the editor in the proper use of the program – including searching for partial overlap – that would lead to the finding of a 29% overlap with Lee and Dutta.

On October 4, 2018, after seeing the results, the journal said they would look into the matter.

In April 2019 I asked for an update. There was no answer.

Court injunction forces gastro journal to slap expressions of concern on 40 articles about probiotics

A gastroenterology journal has issued expressions of concern for forty articles about a probiotic formulation that has been at the center of a long-running legal saga in the United States and Europe.

The articles appeared in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis, the official journal of the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation (ECCO) and date back to 2007. All mention a proprietary formulation of probiotics – and therein lies the tale.

Expressions of concern mount for heart researchers over data provenance

A group of heart researchers in China now have four expressions of concern, along with a retraction, for questions about the reliability of their data.

The latest expressions of concern for the team, led by Bu Lang Gao, of Shijiazhuang First Hospital of Hebei Medical University, involves a 2019 paper in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports titled “Asymmetrical middle cerebral artery bifurcations are more vulnerable to aneurysm formation.”

Here’s the notice for the article, which has been cited 4 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:

Wiley snafu costs an early-stage researcher his first paper

Through no fault of his own, Martin Bordewieck is oh-for-one in his publishing career.

The psychology researcher at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany, published his very first paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology in August 2020 – only to lose the article to retraction because of a screw-up by the journal.

Malte Elson, Bordewieck’s co-author – whose name might be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch for his work as a data sleuth – called the situation “a weird one”:

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