Retraction Watch

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According to the society, Saitoh had committed ethics violations in 10 articles, three of which had already been retracted and seven of which remained in the wild.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 (The seventh paper, in the Fukushima Journal of Medical Sciences, has since been retracted.)

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:

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

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 And earlier this month, it was retracted.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):

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:

Company fires employee, ends cash for citation scheme following Retraction Watch post
Another journal distances itself from cash for citations after Retraction Watch report
Paper linking COVID-19 vaccines to myocarditis is temporarily removed without explanation
Lancet retracts 10-year-old case report
Publisher investigating paper a lucrative scale is based on following Retraction Watch reporting
When ‘out of print’ really means ‘retracted’
Scientist blames grad student for gibberish book chapter — a charge she calls ‘crazy’
Publisher does a “thorough sweep” of alternative medicine journal after a paper is published in error

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):

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:

Scientist blames grad student for gibberish book chapter — a charge she calls ‘crazy’

Guillaume Cabanac

The senior author of a book chapter in the 2020 volume that Springer Nature has retracted for plagiarism has blamed a former grad student from Cuba in the affair — a charge she dismisses as “crazy.”

The chapter was retracted nearly 10 months after readers pointed out passages that had appeared to have been churned out by the fake paper generator Mathgen.

Titled “Ethnic Characterization in Amalgamated People for Airport Security Using a Repository of Images and Pigeon-Inspired Optimization (PIO) Algorithm for the Improvement of Their Results,” the material was ostensibly written by a group at Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez led by Alberto Ochoa-Zezzatti. It appeared in “Applications of Hybrid Metaheuristic Algorithms for Image Processing,” which belongs to the 982-volume (and counting) Studies in Computational Intelligence series.

Last December, commenters on PubPeer including Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé — who will be familiar to readers of this blog for their exposure of nonsensical papers with “tortured” language showing signs of plagiarism — pointed out at least one problematic passage in the chapter:

When ‘out of print’ really means ‘retracted’

Image by eberhard grossgasteiger from Pixabay

We’ve taken publishers to task for disappearing articles without providing readers an explanation for the move. Turns out, they do the same with books, too.

In September 2014, Springer Nature published “Beekeeping for Poverty Alleviation and Livelihood Security Vol 1: Technological Aspects of Beekeeping,” described as:

Publisher investigating paper a lucrative scale is based on following Retraction Watch reporting

The publishing firm Wiley says it is investigating a pivotal paper about a controversial public health tool after Retraction Watch reported on a robust critique of the article which highlighted a number of potentially serious flaws with the research.

We’re talking about the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), whose developer, Donald Morisky, has been hitting researchers with hefty licensing fees — or demands to retract — for nearly two decades.

One of the key papers supporting the validity of the MMAS-8 (the second iteration of the MMAS) was a 2008 article by Morisky and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Hypertension.

Lancet retracts 10-year-old case report

The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work.

The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming behaviors they ultimately attributed to a previously undetected neuroendocrine tumor called a pheochromocytoma.

According to the retraction notice, however, the tumor wasn’t the only thing about the paper that was hidden. The authors also misled the Lancet when they said they hadn’t published about the case when they submitted their writeup about the case — a fact unknown to the journal until this summer:

Company fires employee, ends cash for citation scheme following Retraction Watch post

A company that had offered payment for citations of articles in various journals has ended the practice, and fired the staffer it said was responsible, following reporting by Retraction Watch.

On August 31, we reported that Innoscience Innoscience Research, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was offering $6 per citation of papers in five different journals, and up to five cites, or $30, per paper, or $150 in total across all five journals. Since then, two journals have distanced themselves from the scheme.

Yesterday, Innoscience told us by email:

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