HHS takes three and a half years to tell us “there are no records responsive to your request”…for a letter we know exists

the waving cat, via Flickr

If you file public records requests regularly, you have likely become used to how long they can take, and how few documents you may end up with. We certainly have. But we’re prompted to share a particularly frustrating experience with the NIH.

Settle in. This is a three-and-a-half year tale — and counting.

On May 8, 2018, we made a public records request to the NIH under the Freedom of Information Act for “Any Correspondence between the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA) and officials at Duke University during the month of March 2018.” We did so because, as we reported on March 23, 2018 in Science, the NIH had:

Continue reading HHS takes three and a half years to tell us “there are no records responsive to your request”…for a letter we know exists

Weekend reads: “Passing the professor,” documented; “tortured phrases;” a “catastrophic failure of peer review”

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:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 188. There are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately?

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

Continue reading Weekend reads: “Passing the professor,” documented; “tortured phrases;” a “catastrophic failure of peer review”

Report by former Motherisk lab director of cocaine exposure in a child is subjected to an expression of concern

Gideon Koren

A pediatrics journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2007 paper by a group of Canadian researchers whose leader, Gideon Koren, resigned in 2015 under a cloud after concerns surfaced about the integrity of the data in hundreds of his published studies. 

Koren, once a prominent pediatrician and pharmacologist at the University of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, ran the institution’s Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory, which conducted hair testing for perinatal exposure to drugs and alcohol. In 2015, an investigation prompted by The Toronto Star found serious problems with the tests, which had been used in “used in thousands of child protection cases and several criminal cases.” 

Koren stepped down that year, and in 2019 relinquished his license to practice medicine in Ontario. Reporting by the Star prompted Koren’s institution to order a review of more than 400 of his published papers. To date, by our count, journals have retracted five of Koren’s papers, corrected four, and have now issued three expressions of concern. 

The newly flagged article, “Chronic cocaine exposure in a toddler revealed by hair test,” appeared in Clinical Pediatrics in 2007. Here’s the notice: 

Continue reading Report by former Motherisk lab director of cocaine exposure in a child is subjected to an expression of concern

Exclusive: Urology researcher demoted after misconduct investigation — then becomes chair at another school

Hari Koul

A urology researcher at Louisiana State University lost his post as department chair after a misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned. But he eventually moved on to be department chair at a different LSU campus — where he remains today.

In June, we reported that the work of urology researcher Hari Koul had been investigated by his former employer, the University of Colorado, following a recommendation by LSU. But between the time the misconduct investigation concluded in 2014 and the publication of our story, only three of nine papers by Koul that Colorado recommended for corrections or retractions had been amended in any way. More of those publications have been retracted following our story, the reporting of which was how some editors learned of the issues.

Now, via a public records request, we’ve gained access to the inquiry at LSU which led to the investigation at CU Denver and includes notes from interviews with Koul and his postdoc. The Denver investigation didn’t find Koul guilty of misconduct, but it found many errors in his published work, leading LSU’s Health Science Center in Shreveport to demote him in 2016. After several years of apparently unrelated legal battles with LSU’s Health Science Center in Shreveport, Koul moved to a different LSU institution, LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, last year.

Continue reading Exclusive: Urology researcher demoted after misconduct investigation — then becomes chair at another school

Plagiarism of a thesis earns authors a retraction — and a two-year-publishing ban

Enamul Haque, whose master’s thesis was plagiarized by other authors

In June of this year, Enamul Haque, a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, came across an article in the International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA). 

It looked familiar.

That’s because it was copied, in large part, from Haque’s master’s thesis, which he had completed at Canada’s McMaster University and submitted the previous year. Haque wrote to Kohei Arai, the journal’s editor in chief, on June 30, providing detailed evidence of plagiarism:

Continue reading Plagiarism of a thesis earns authors a retraction — and a two-year-publishing ban

Four years after anesthesiology society’s request, four articles remain unretracted

Three years ago, we wrote that the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists had in 2017 asked several journals to retract a total of nine papers by Yuhji Saitoh, formerly of Yachiyo Medical Center and Tokyo Women’s Medical University. 

According to the society, Saitoh had committed ethics violations in 10 articles, three of which had already been retracted and seven of which remained in the wild. (Saitoh had been a frequent co-author with Yoshitaka Fujii, currently our record holder for most retractions by a single researcher — 183 — but the JSA report found that he’d committed misconduct on his own, too. He has 53 retractions, according to our count, placing him seventh on our leaderboard.)

Four of those 10 articles appeared in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia and two others were published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.  (The seventh paper, in the Fukushima Journal of Medical Sciences, has since been retracted.)

Continue reading Four years after anesthesiology society’s request, four articles remain unretracted

COVID-19 vaccine-myocarditis paper to be permanently removed: Elsevier

A paper claiming that cases of myocarditis spiked after teenagers began receiving COVID-19 vaccines that earned a “temporary removal” earlier this month will be permanently removed, according to a publisher at Elsevier.

As we reported last week, the article, “A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products,” was published in Current Problems in Cardiology on October 1.

Sometime between then and October 17, the article was stamped “TEMPORARY REMOVAL” without explanation other than Elsevier’s boilerplate notice in such cases:

Continue reading COVID-19 vaccine-myocarditis paper to be permanently removed: Elsevier

When authors stop responding to requests for data, a journal retracts

via PubPeer

In 2016 Genetic Testing and Molecular Biomarkers published a paper on osteoarthritis by a group at Linyi People’s Hospital in China. Five years later, the authors contacted the journal asking for the correction of a pair of figures — but, as the publisher, Mary Ann Liebert, explained, the new files were “not workable.” 

In May 2021, the journal issued an expression of concern for the paper (which, we’ll note, unfortunately sits behind a paywall). And earlier this month, it was retracted. For the rest of the story, read the retraction notice (caution, the following text might contain trigger words for unethical researchers): 

Continue reading When authors stop responding to requests for data, a journal retracts

Weekend reads: Peer review during the pandemic; CEO out after doctored research; more on COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis

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:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 183. There are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately?

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

Continue reading Weekend reads: Peer review during the pandemic; CEO out after doctored research; more on COVID-19 vaccines and myocarditis

Publisher does a “thorough sweep” of alternative medicine journal after a paper is published in error

Last April, the The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine provisionally accepted  a paper on the role of music therapy in palliative care settings. Unfortunately for authors, the article did not grab the guest editors of the supplementary issue to which it had been designated.

So far, so good. But a production error caused the paper to appear online — necessitating a retraction when the journal learned that the authors, understandably, had already found another home for their work. 

According to the notice: 

Continue reading Publisher does a “thorough sweep” of alternative medicine journal after a paper is published in error