Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Attacks on scientists; NAS ousts researcher; how much it costs to publish

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal distances itself from cash for citations scheme after Retraction Watch report
‘We have done a terrible job’: Journal retracts, replaces paper on mosquito-borne infections
A correction is retracted (sort of)
Publisher retracts paper with ethics committee discrepancy after question from Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 166. And there are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database.

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

Publisher retracts paper with ethics committee discrepancy after question from Retraction Watch

Dove, a publisher owned by Taylor & Francis, has retracted a paper published last year after a Retraction Watch reader pointed out that the authors’ statements on ethical approval made no sense.

Dove’s Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome and Obesity: Targets and Therapy published the article, “Serum Human Epididymis Protein 4 is a Potential Biomarker for Early Chronic Kidney Disease in an Obese Population,” in April 2021. In August, we received an email from a puzzled reader which read, in part:

A correction is retracted (sort of)

Thanks to a publisher’s error, a group of infectious disease researchers has experienced a double negative for their 2020 article on tick-borne illness in South Africa.

The paper, “Serum-free in vitro cultivation of Theileria annulata and Theileria parva schizont-infected lymphocytes,” appeared in Transboundary and Emerging Diseases, a Wiley title. The authors were affiliated with institutions in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the United States.

Earlier this year, the authors corrected their article. The notice, dated May 26, reads:

‘We have done a terrible job’: Journal retracts, replaces paper on mosquito-borne infections

A virology journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 article on mosquito-borne infections in Africa after one of the authors identified errors in the publication — an episode that has prompted a change in practice at the journal to avoid similar issues in the future.

The article, “Mosquito-borne arboviruses in Uganda: history, transmission and burden,” was written by a group in the United Kingdom and Uganda and appeared in the Journal of General Virology last June.

According to the retraction notice:

Journal distances itself from cash for citations scheme after Retraction Watch report

A journal that appeared to be involved in a scheme in which authors were paid bonuses to cite its papers has said it “will not entertain cash requests from the individuals who claim to have cited our articles, nor shall we pay up.”

The comments come about a month after a Retraction Watch post detailing the scheme by Innoscience Research listing five journals, one of which was the International Journal of Bioprinting. Innoscience, who has not responded to requests for comment, does not publish the IJB; Whoice does. It’s unclear whether there is a relationship between the two companies.

In a statement dated October 9, the IJB wrote:

Weekend reads: A lawsuit over a cell line; criminal charges for a science agency; nonsense in prestigious journals

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper
How one US organization hopes to make retractions more visible
Here’s what happened when a publisher looked more closely at a paper milled paper
Retraction of review of broccoli’s health benefits is 22nd for deceased author, 5th for one of his postdocs
Author defends paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save
Elsevier corrects a retraction notice following questions from Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 162. And there are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database.

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

Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper

A marine ecologist at Oregon State University now helping lead the Biden White House’s climate and environmental initiatives violated the conflict of interest policy at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when she edited a paper in the journal last year.

Jane Lubchenco, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2009 to 2013 under President Obama, joined the White House in March of this year as Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Last year, while still at Oregon State, Lubchenco, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was the handling editor for an article titled “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” by Reniel Cabral and Steven Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues. Such marine protected areas, aka MPAs, have come under scrutiny, as Yale’s E360 noted in 2019:

How one US organization hopes to make retractions more visible

As Retraction Watch readers likely know, there’s ample evidence that retracted papers — 2,500 per year and growing — continue to attract citations that do not mention the fact the paper has been retracted. Some of that may be because it’s not clear on publishers’ sites and databases that these papers have been retracted or flagged. (That is one of the main reasons we created our database, which now contains more than 30,000 retractions.)

The U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) project would like to make things better. We spoke to Todd Carpenter, NISO’s executive director in Baltimore, Maryland, about the new project, which aims to address the lack of visibility of notices added to published papers.

Retraction Watch (RW): You recently launched the ‘Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern’ project. Why did you do this, and what do you hope to achieve?

Here’s what happened when a publisher looked more closely at a paper milled paper

Although it’s never too late to say sorry, sometimes the apology turns out to be worse than keeping quiet.

Consider the case of a group in China, who admitted that their 2020 paper on brain tumors was the work of a paper mill.

The article, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” came from a group led by Fangen Kong, of the Department of Neurosurgery at The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, in Zhuhai.

Missing from the list of authors, however, was another…well, something, as the retraction notice points out:

Retraction of review of broccoli’s health benefits is 22nd for deceased author, 5th for one of his postdocs

Broccoli almost certainly is good for you — but just how good might have taken a bit of a hit with the retraction of a 12-year-old review on the vegetable’s health benefits by a notorious fraudster.

By our count, the retraction, which appeared in July, marks the 22nd for Das, formerly of the University of Connecticut, who died in 2013.

It’s also the fifth retraction for Das’ co-author, and former postdoc, Hannah Vasanthi; four of those papers were collaborations with Das but the most recent, in Carbohydrate Polymers, was not. Several other papers by Vasanthi have been flagged on PubPeer — over concerns about plagiarism, image issues and problematic data — and she has had at least four corrections and one expression of concern. (One article by Vasanthi that Elisabeth Bik identified in 2019 appears to contain text lifted from a 2010 article by Bharat Aggarwal, formerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose name may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers.)

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