Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Fringe race science and journals; flags for Stanford president’s papers; rise and fall of peer review

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission
Penn says access to former Twitter employee’s thesis was ‘mistakenly closed off’ following Elon Musk tweets
PLOS flags nearly 50 papers by controversial French COVID researcher for ethics concerns
Cancer researcher banned from federal funding for faking data in nearly 400 images in 16 grant applications
‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 279. There are more than 37,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, 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):

‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review

A retired professor of education has lost three papers – which he said he helped edit for a former student – after the publisher discovered manipulated peer review led to their acceptance.

Roger Shouse, an associate professor emeritus at Penn State College of Education, spent the 2018-2019 academic year at Sichuan University in China as a professor of public administration. While there, he helped several students write research articles in English, and advised one who listed him as a coauthor on three papers even though Shouse didn’t ask for authorship, he told us.

Those papers – on land use, climate vulnerability and disaster response among rural communities in Bangladesh – were retracted from the journal Land Use Policy this past August, after an investigation revealed the peer review process had been manipulated.

Shouse was listed as the last author, and researcher Md Nazirul Islam Sarker of Neijiang Normal University was the first author. A fourth paper retracted at the same time, with an identical retraction notice, listed Sarker as second author but did not include Shouse.

The retracted papers are:

Cancer researcher banned from federal funding for faking data in nearly 400 images in 16 grant applications

A former associate professor at Purdue University faked data in two published papers and hundreds of images in 16 grant applications, according to a U.S. government research watchdog.

Alice C. Chang, whose publications and grants listed her name as Chun-Ju Chang, received nearly $700,000 in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through grant applications that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said contained fake data. She will be banned from receiving federal grants for a decade – a more severe sanction than ORI has typically imposed in recent years.

In its findings, ORI said Chang, who was an associate professor of basic medical sciences at Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine:

PLOS flags nearly 50 papers by controversial French COVID researcher for ethics concerns

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.

In August of 2021, scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik wrote on her blog about a series of 17 articles from IHU-Méditerranée Infection that described different studies involving homeless people in Marseille over a decade, but all listed the same institutional ethics approval number. One of those papers, “Distinguishing Body Lice from Head Lice by Multiplex Real-Time PCR Analysis of the Phum_PHUM540560 Gene,” about which Bik also posted on PubPeer, was published in PLOS ONE in 2013, and is receiving an expression of concern today.

Penn says access to former Twitter employee’s thesis was ‘mistakenly closed off’ following Elon Musk tweets

An Ivy League university is blaming an “error” for the brief disappearance of the doctoral dissertation of a former Twitter employee whose writings on gay dating apps drew public scorn from Elon Musk.

As Fox News first reported, on Saturday the PhD thesis by Yoel Roth, who until November had been Twitter’s head of trust and safety, seemed to have been removed from the University of Pennsylvania’s ScholarlyCommons website.

A Penn official told Fox:

Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission

Twenty-four years after submitting a manuscript on quantum algebra to the preprint server arXiv, a mathematician has now withdrawn it.

Boris Shoikhet, then of the Independent University of Moscow, posted “Lifting formulas, Moyal product, and Feigin spectral sequence,” to arXiv on Oct. 28, 1998, proposing new conjectures in the field of quantum algebra.

Last month, he withdrew the article, with the comment, “The paper has been withdrawn due to a crucial mistake in the arguments.”

Weekend reads: Errors in clinical trials; GPT-3 and scientific papers; paleontologist accused of faking data

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 278. There are more than 37,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, 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):

Professor emeritus loses fourth paper after UCSF-VA investigation, five years after other retractions

A former research center director and professor emeritus of urology has lost a fourth paper after a joint investigation by the University of California San Francisco and the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center found faked data in several of his articles.

The other three retractions for Rajvir Dahiya, who directed the UCSF/VAMC Urology Research Center from 1991 until his retirement in 2020, date from 2017. In addition, a paper of his in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was corrected in 2018, and one in Clinical Cancer Research received an expression of concern last year.

The latest retraction is for “Knockdown of astrocyte-elevated gene-1 inhibits prostate cancer progression through upregulation of FOXO3a activity,” published in Oncogene in 2007. It has been cited 191 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction note, like some of the other editorial notes for Dahiya’s papers, cites the findings of a joint investigation by UCSF and the VA Medical Center:

Publisher retracts 400 papers at once for violations of ‘peer-review process policies’

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted more than 400 papers “due to violations of IEEE’s peer-review process policies” after “a comprehensive internal investigation.”

The papers formed the proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Cities and Systems Engineering from 2016 through 2018. All of the meetings were reported as being held in cities in China.

The retraction notices read:

A paper used capital T’s instead of error bars. But wait, there’s more!

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.

The July 2022 article, “Monitoring of Sports Health Indicators Based on Wearable Nanobiosensors,” was published in a special issue of the journal Advances in Materials Science and Engineering, a Hindawi title.

The article purports to show that using nanoparticles can better measure the biochemical fitness levels of elderly people than other methods.

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