A cancer journal with a history of batch retractions has pulled 15 articles dating back to 2014 after concluding that they contained manipulated or misused images.
As we reported in 2017, Tumor Biology was forced to retract 107 papers that had been corrupted by fake peer review – a record at the time. That move had followed a similar, if smaller, sweep in 2016 by the journal, which was owned by Springer but purchased by SAGE in December 2016 after the more massive cleanse.
A group of cancer researchers at the University of Rochester have now lost three papers over concerns about the data in the articles – issues that evidently did not rise to the level of misconduct, according to the institution.
The work came from the lab of Yuhchyau Chen, of the university’s Wilmot Cancer Institute. A common co-author was Soo Ok Lee, who is no longer affiliated with the University of Rochester. In addition to the three retractions, Lee has several corrections and an expression of concern.
Behrouz Pourghebleh is perplexed. And also exasperated.
Pourghebleh, of the Young Researchers and Elite Club at the Urmia branch of Islamic Azad University in Iran, noticed a paper published on December 15, 2020 in an IEEE journal that overlapped 80 percent with an article he’d co-authored the year before.
Pourghebleh wrote to Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, the associate editor who had handled the paper, on December 31, 2020, expressing concern. Bhuiyan responded the same day, saying the paper hadn’t been flagged in a similarity check, and that he would contact the authors for a response.
The first author, Karim Alinani, wrote to Pourghebleh less than two weeks later, admitting the plagiarism but citing personal circumstances:
2021 was – as is always the case – a busy year at Retraction Watch. How could it not be, with our database of retractions surpassing 30,000 – and then 32,000 – with ten percent happening this year alone?
Oh, and the pandemic. There were 72 retractions on our list of retracted COVID-19 papers when we wrote this end-of-year message in 2020. Today, there are 205.
Perhaps it was scrutiny of pandemic-related scientific claims, or recognition of paper mills and other industrialized fakery as a serious problem, or just gathering momentum as sleuths began to get their due in wider circles, but it did feel as though 2021 was a year in which retractions – and larger issues in scientific integrity – played a big role.
Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style.
I did accidentally run in the Cureus paper while I was looking for my original publication on JID and I did report it immediately to Cureus and JID editorial offices.
The journal acted with what we’d consider to be remarkable haste. Within a few weeks came the following retraction notice:
A Nature journal has retracted a 2021 paper which made a bold claim about certain chemical reactions after several researchers raised questions about the analysis – but not before another group pulled their own article which built on the flawed findings.
After publication, at least three groups of researchers published Matters Arising letters in the journal questioning the validity of the results, all of which appeared on December 2:
A major Canadian medical journal has retracted a letter to the editor by a prominent surgeon in Quebec who expressed reservations about a photo the journal had published of two young girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab.
The photo in question (above) ran on the cover of the November 8, 2021 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.The image prompted a letter from Sherif Emil, an endowed chair of surgery at Montreal Children’s Hospital of McGill University. Published December 20, the letter voiced concern that the photograph used “an instrument of oppression [the headcovering] as a symbol of diversity and inclusion.” (That’s in the title of the letter, which the journal now acknowledges writing, not Emil.)
In September 2015, after a lengthy investigation, the Committee on Scientific Integrity (CSI) of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) advised the LUMC Board of Directors to ask for retraction of two publications because of major data manipulation in images. The case involved Maria Fousteri, who by then had left LUMC.
In the Netherlands it is possible to ask a second opinion, as a non-binding but influential appeal procedure, from the national LOWI (Landelijk Orgaan Wetenschappelijke Integriteit). Fousteri did so. In May 2016, after careful deliberations and a hearing of individuals directly involved, the LOWI fully supported the conclusion of the CSI.
This led the Board to inform several parties, including the defendant’s current employer, and agencies that had provided grants based on the fraudulent work, and to formally ask the journal Molecular Cell to retract two publications. They would not do so for more than five years, with retractionnotices published only this month that list data manipulations in several figures.
