Mathematician ranked as Clarivate “highly cited researcher” has third paper retracted

A math professor named as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics has had his third paper retracted after issues with it were flagged last year.

The mathematician, Abdon Atangana, is a professor at The University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and China Medical University, Taiwan. 

Atangana’s article, “Derivative with two fractional orders: A new avenue of investigation toward revolution in fractional calculus,” was published in The European Physical Journal Plus — where Atangana is an editor — on Oct. 24, 2016, and has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

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Okinawa university suspends researcher for six months following findings of plagiarism and faked data

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST)

A materials scientist in Japan was found guilty of plagiarism and fabrication of data in a May 2019 paper, resulting in a six-month suspension, according to her institution. 

Ye Zhang, of the Bioinspired Soft Matter Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), was the senior author of “Enzyme-mediated dual-targeted-assembly realizes a synergistic anticancer effect,” which appeared in Chemical Communications on May 9, 2019. The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

According to OIST’s report on the case, five days after publication of the paper, a post-doc at the university filed a complaint with the school’s hotline, alleging that the article contained fabrication and plagiarism.  

A month later, Zhang submitted a revised version of the paper to the journal, which issued the following correction: 

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Researcher to overtake Diederik Stapel on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, with 61

Ali Nazari and Swinburne University vice-chancellor Linda Kristjanson, presenting him with a commendation in 2017

A construction researcher is watching his publishing edifice crumble, as more upcoming retractions of his papers will bring his total to 61. 

Ali Nazari is believed to be a member of a ring of authors whom a whistleblower has claimed are churning out unreliable research — hundreds of papers, according to the sleuth, who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. Nazari lost his job at Swinburne University, in Australia, following a misconduct investigation in 2019. 

According to the whistleblower (who laid out the case in a recent email to a journal editor): 

Continue reading Researcher to overtake Diederik Stapel on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, with 61

Journal pulls two studies that listed an author without his permission

David Cox

Springer Nature has removed two studies that were published in its journal Cluster Computing and included a co-author who didn’t know that the papers existed until December 2020, years after they were published. 

The move follows reporting by Retraction Watch last week about the papers, which listed David Cox, the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, as a co-author.

The studies–“A FCM cluster: cloud networking model for intelligent transportation in the city of Macau,” and “Mobile network intrusion detection for IoT system based on transfer learning algorithm,” disappeared from the publisher’s website on January 29th, without any retraction notices. 

A spokesperson for Springer Nature told Retraction Watch:

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Springer Nature to retract chapter on sign language critics call “unbelievably insulting”

Julie Hochgesang

Springer Nature is retracting a book chapter describing conference research after scholars in the deaf community blasted it for being “unbelievably insulting.”

The chapter, “Implementation of Hand Gesture Recognition System To Aid Deaf-Dumb People,” appeared in Advances in Signal and Data Procesing: Select Proceedings of ICSDP 2019. The authors were  Supriya Ghule and Mrunalini Chavaan, of the MIT Academy of Engineering in Pune, India. 

According to the abstract: 

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Weekend reads: Women’s authorships bounce back?; scientists go to court; demoted for plagiarism

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 81.

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: Women’s authorships bounce back?; scientists go to court; demoted for plagiarism

What is a figure about budgies doing in four different plant papers?

via Scientific Reports

As Antonella Longo was peer-reviewing a study for the journal Plant and Soil, she became “alarmed by one figure.” The figure’s title — ”Level2 GO terms of Melopsittacus_undulates” — seemed to be a misspelled reference to a bird species called Melopsittacus undulatus. 

More commonly known as a budgie or parakeet, undulatus is a vibrantly colored parrot found in scattered parts of Australia. So what was a figure about a bird doing in a study about plants?

Concerned, Longo, of the BioDiscovery Institute at the University of North Texas, searched the internet for words used in the figure, “GO terms of Melopsittacus undulates.” She identified at least three additional studies that contained an image similar to the one in the study she was peer-reviewing, each with an identical title and color scheme, but with varying data. None of the studies are about birds.

Continue reading What is a figure about budgies doing in four different plant papers?

Former Texas postdoc earns 10-year federal funding ban for faking authors and papers to boost metrics

A former postdoc at the University of Texas Health Science Center has been found guilty of misconduct stemming from efforts to rig preprint servers to boost the postdoc’s publication metrics.

The findings about Yibin Lin include the fabrication and falsification of data, as well as plagiarism in six published papers that have since been retracted from the preprint server bioRxiv. On none of those articles does the name “Yibin Lin” appear as an author.

Lin also admitted to making up author names on submitted articles — none of which was published — to dupe preprint servers to “improve his citation metrics,” according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

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A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title

What a difference a D makes. 

Ask Kevin Pile. Pile edits the International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases (let’s call it the IJRD), a Wiley publication. Last year, he published a guest editorial by Vaidehi Chowdhary, a rheumatologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on a form of kidney disease. 

But it turns out that Chowdhary, a member of Pile’s editorial team, had intended to submit her article, “When doing the right thing is wrong: Drug efflux pumps in steroid‐resistant nephrotic syndrome,” to a different journal, the Indian Journal of Rheumatology, or IJR. We think you can see how this all went down. 

According to Pile, the episode was “a tail of consecutive mistakes”:

Continue reading A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title

‘Immortal time bias’ fells JAMA journal asthma paper

via Lévesque et al, BMJ

One of the many fun things about reporting on retractions is that we get to expand our statistical knowledge. To wit, follow along as we explore the concept of immortal time bias.

A JAMA journal has retracted and replaced a paper by authors at the University of Massachusetts after another researcher identified a critical statistical error in their study. 

The paper, “Association of Antibiotic Treatment With Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized for an Asthma Exacerbation Treated With Systemic Corticosteroids,” was written by a group led by Mihaela Stefan, the associate director of the Institute for Healthcare Delivery and Population Science at UMass, and appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019. 

The study purported to find that:*

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