Retraction Watch

Paper claiming presence of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy in 2019 earns expression of concern

When researchers in Italy published a paper last November claiming to have found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 in that country as early as September 2019 — four months before the first official case of Covid-19 — the World Health Organization took immediate notice.

According to Reuters, the WHO asked the group — with ties to Italy’s National Cancer Institute (INT) — for more information and a chance

“to discuss and arrange for further analyses of available samples and verification of the neutralization results”.

As WebMD reported then:

If the initial history of the pandemic shifts, public health officials may need to consider new screening tools to test people who don’t have COVID-19 symptoms. Better screening could contain future waves of the pandemic and asymptomatic spread, the authors wrote.

Now, Tumori Journal, which published the study, has expressed concern about the findings. More precisely, the journal says it has doubts about the peer review process that vetted the paper.

A journal retracts a paper called “transparently ridiculous” — and an author says thank you

An Elsevier journal has retracted a 2020 paper on the heritability of temperament that a prominent critic derided as “transparently ridiculous,” after concluding that the peer review process — which it initially defended — was not up to snuff.

The journal, Meta Gene, says it has changed that way it considers manuscripts to “ensure that this” — read, accept bullshit papers — won’t happen again. And, in a further and rather endearing admission of culpability, it apologized to the authors for accepting their manuscript despite a complete lack of “scientific data.”

Meanwhile, one of the authors of the paper tells Retraction Watch that he “would like to thank you and also Elsevier that all these discussions” have helped popularize the work.

The article, “Temperament gene inheritance,” by the husband-wife team of Azer Israfil, of Mikhwa General Hospital, in Saudi Arabia, and Natiga Israfil, of OsmanGazi University, in Turkey, appeared in September.

As we reported back then, the authors claimed that:

Dismissive reviews: A cancer on the body of knowledge

Observers describe the quantity of research information now produced variously as “torrent,” “overload,” “proliferation,” or the like. Technological advances in computing and telecommunication have helped us keep up, to an extent. But, I would argue, scholarly and journalistic ethics have not kept pace.

As a case in point, consider the journal article literature review. Its function is twofold: to specify where new information fits within the context of what is already known; and to avoid unknowingly duplicating research projects the public has already paid for. Paradoxically, however, information proliferation may discourage honest and accurate literature reviews. Research information accumulates, which increases the time required for conducting a thorough literature review, which increases the incentive to avoid it.

Most dismissive reviews that I have encountered are raw declarations. A scholar, pundit, or journalist simply declares that no research on a topic exists (or couldn’t be any good if it did exist). No mention is made of how or where (or, even if) they searched. Certain themes appear over and over, such as:

“Riddled with errors”: Study of cell phones and breast cancer retracted

A journal has retracted a study that said exposure to radiofrequency radiation increased the risk of breast cancer after an epidemiologist found that some of the papers it relied upon did not measure radiofrequency radiation at all, in a decision that the lead author has called “unfair.”

The study, titled “Exposure to radiofrequency radiation increases the risk of breast cancer: A systematic review and meta‑analysis,” was published in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine on November 9th. The paper analyzed eight prior studies — four case‑control and four cohort studies — concluding “that radiofrequency radiation exposure significantly increased the risk of breast cancer, especially in women aged ≥50 years and in individuals who used electric appliances, such as mobile phones and computers.”

In early December, Frank de Vocht, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol, decided to investigate the study. He explained in an email to Retraction Watch:

Weekend reads: The fake author with more than 200 papers; accusations of ‘heinous plagiarism’; PETA requests a retraction

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers
University clears scientist of logging industry’s misconduct allegations
Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off
After grad student suicide, misconduct findings, university suspends professor
“Falsifying elements” prompt retraction of three more papers by former “Peorian of the Year”
Bad blood at a lab leads to retraction after postdoc publishes study without supervisor’s permission

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 89.

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

Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers

The pantheon of husband-wife teams in science includes Marie and Pierre Curie, Gerty and Carl Cori, even Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the founders of BioNTech, which collaborated with Pfizer on a Covid-19 vaccine.

To that list we hesitatingly add Ahmed Elkhouly and his spouse.

Elkhouly, a medical resident at St. Francis Medical Center, in Trenton, N.J., has lost five papers from the journal Cureus over a rather curious (ahem) domestic arrangement. According to the journal, Elkhouly used his unnamed wife as a peer reviewer on the articles, whose topics ranged from a case study on appendicitis to the neurological manifestations of COVID-19 infection.

Here’s the retraction notice for the COVID paper — which, by the way, raises our tally of retracted papers on the pandemic to 89:

University clears scientist of logging industry’s misconduct allegations

The University of Tasmania has cleared one of its scientists of wrongdoing after she was accused by the Australian logging industry of publishing flawed research linking logging to increased forest flammability and of having a conflict of interest with an environmental group.

The university then implemented mandatory research integrity training for its school of geography, which Jennifer Sanger, the researcher who worked in that school, suggests is due to the university’s “very strong ties with the forestry industry.”

In May 2020, Sanger published a study titled, “Propensities of Old Growth, Mature and Regrowth Wet Eucalypt Forest, and Eucalyptus Nitens Plantation, to Burn during Wildfire and Suffer Fire-Induced Crown Death,” in the journal Fire. The study found that logged forests were generally more flammable than those left unlogged, a finding that has been upheld in recent research.

On August 13, Sanger requested that Fire pull the study, according to Alistair Smith, the journal’s editor-in-chief. Sanger asked for a retraction after a reader went through the study’s dataset and found issues with its analysis, she explained in an email:

Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off

We’re always on the lookout for papers with that fillip of irony that lets us wonder if the Great Comedian in the Sky enjoys our little project. This week, we found two such articles.

One involves a 2008 paper in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research titled “Examining Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis as One of the Main Views on the Relationship Between Language and Thought.” The author was Iman Tohidian, an Irani scholar. Except, in fact, the author was not Iman Tohidian, who appears to have what we might consider a rather appropriative view of the relationship between language and thought.

According to the retraction notice:

After grad student suicide, misconduct findings, university suspends professor

Nearly two years after a doctoral student hanged himself in a building on the campus of the University of Florida, in Gainesville, his supervisor has been placed on paid leave, a move that follows a report released last month that found evidence of misconduct at three different computing conferences.

Huixiang Chen was found dead in June 2019, while working in the research group of Tao Li, a computing engineer. A few months before his suicide, Chen wrote a paper for a prestigious, annual conference in computing, the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, or ISCA, which is one of the three mentioned in the report.

Chen’s paper was accepted, but his death, before the conference began, sparked allegations that the peer-review process had been unfairly compromised and that Li had coerced his student to publish faulty results. The University of Florida launched an investigation into the circumstances of Chen’s death shortly after his suicide, but those findings have not been publicly released.

Li did not respond to requests for comment. The report on the conferences, released February 8 by a “joint investigative committee” from two organizations that sponsored the ISCA meeting, reached four main conclusions, starting with:

“Falsifying elements” prompt retraction of three more papers by former “Peorian of the Year”

Jasti Rao, a former star scientist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria whose career flamed out over concerns about misconduct, gambling and allegations that he had mistreated employees, is now up to 16 retractions.

The International Journal of Oncology, a Spandidos title, has retracted three of Rao’s papers dating back to 2011, citing the presence of “falsifying elements” in the images.

Here’s the notice for the 2011 paper “Oncogenic role of p53 is suppressed by si‑RNA bicistronic construct of uPA, uPAR and cathepsin‑B in meningiomas both in vitro and in vivo”:

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