Retraction Watch

“The whole thing is yucky:” When you’re surprised to find yourself as an author on a paper

When David Cox noticed on Dec. 10, 2020 that two papers in the journal Cluster Computing listed him as an author, he didn’t think much of it at first.

I have a common name, so it is not unheard of to have an article written by another David Cox assigned to my profile. I thought that was what these papers must have been at first, but then I opened the articles and saw my affiliation, email, and picture in them.

Shocked, Cox tweeted that “the whole thing is yucky.” The corresponding author on the two studies now says that he plans to withdraw the papers, and that a co-author made the decision to include Cox’s name and has been fired from his research position over the incident. Yesterday, on January 25, the publisher flagged one of the papers.

Cox, who is the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, in Cambridge, Mass., learned about the articles after logging on to DBLP, a bibliography website that tracks articles published by computer scientists. “I check these sites from time to time to make sure everything is correct,” he said.

Here comes the judge, ready to plagiarize your paper

Not long ago, Amy Barnhorst opened an email from the editor of a journal to which she and a colleague submitted, but ultimately pulled, a paper on gun violence.

The cheery note — “thought you two might be interested to see what we came up with” — announced the publication of a recent article in the Journal of Health Service ~~Psychiatry~~ Psychology by a pair of authors. The title,“Collaborating with Patients on Firearms Safety in High-Risk Situations,” had an unpleasant whiff of irony to it — because the article was, in fact, Barnhorst’s own work. (Barnhorst told us she wanted to wait to name the paper until it was retracted, but the JHSP paper, identified by sleuth Elisabeth Bik, matches passages and descriptions tweeted by Barnhorst.)

As Barnhorst, the vice chair of psychiatry at UC Davis, and the director of the Bullet Points Project, a program to help clinicians prevent firearm injuries among their patients, tweeted:

“I don’t think I slept for a day and a half:” Bad news for study about bad news

A journal has retracted a 2018 paper that linked negative news coverage to physical and mental health problems.

The article, “When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health,” was published in Frontiers in Psychology in August 2018. The study has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. In March 2020, an article in The Conversation used the study’s findings to argue that kids should reduce their television intake during the coronavirus pandemic to ward off anxiety.

First author Jolie Wormwood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, said she decided to pull the study after revisiting the dataset. She found that some of the study participants—95 people in the Boston area—who completed a questionnaire three different times during a nine month period, gave inconsistent answers about their memory of an event. That normally might not be too worrying, since memories “shift over time”, according to Wormwood, but a bit more sleuthing revealed that the researchers had inadvertently mixed up the IDs that were assigned to study participants.

Wormwood explained the error in an email:

Weekend reads: Scientist in China cleared of plagiarism and fraud charges; “what my retraction taught me;” researcher sued for >$1.5 million for unpaid legal bills in failed defamation cases

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:

Exercise science grad student at Australian university dismissed after he admitted faking data, says supervisor
‘Striking’: Journal editor suspects paper mills behind rash of withdrawn manuscripts
Publisher retracting 68 articles suspected of being paper mill products
Why one biologist says it’s not too late to retract the “arsenic life” paper
The mill and the loss: Journal up to 39 retractions from paper mill articles

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 76.

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

The mill and the loss: Journal up to 39 retractions, just under half linked to paper mills

We’re rounding out the week with a third post about paper mills: A Taylor & Francis journal is up to 39 retractions, 18 of which appear to have been the work of at least one such operation.

Last March, The publication, “Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology,” issued an expression of concern for 13 of the articles, after a group of data sleuths pointed out problems with the papers.

As Science magazine pointed out at the time, the sleuths, including Elisabeth Bik, found evidence that more than 400 articles generated by the suspected mill contained fabricated images. All of the papers came from research teams based in China, they noted.

NIH researcher responds as sleuths scrutinize high-profile study of ultra-processed foods and weight gain

[This post has been updated since publication; see update note at end for details.]

In July 2019, Kevin Hall, of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and colleagues published a study in Cell Metabolism that found, according to its title, that “Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain.”

A year and a half after its publication, the paper is the subject of two critical blog posts, one by Nick Brown and one by Ethan and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. In the days since we first shared embargoed drafts of those posts with Hall, he and the sleuths engaged in a back and forth, and Brown and the Ludwin-Peerys now say they are satisfied that many of the major issues appear to have been resolved. They have also made changes to their posts, including adding responses from Hall.

In short, it seems like a great example of public post-publication peer review in action. For example, the Ludwin-Peerys write:

When we took a close look at these data, we originally found a number of patterns that we were unable to explain. Having communicated with the authors, we now think that while there are some strange choices in their analysis, most of these patterns can be explained…

In a draft of their post shared with us early last week — see “a note to readers” below — the Ludwin-Peerys said that some of the data in the study “really bothered” them. In particular, they write, the two groups of people studied — 20 received ultra-processed foods, while 20 were given an unprocessed diet — “report the same amount of change in body weight, the only difference being that one group gained weight and the other group lost it.” They were also surprised by the “pretty huge” correlation between weight changes and energy intake.

Brown’s draft post, which digs into the data, concludes:

Why one biologist says it’s not too late to retract the “arsenic life” paper

An anniversary has prompted this reconsideration of the revolution in biochemistry that wasn’t: the “arsenic bacteria.” Just over 10 years have passed since an infamous Dec. 2, 2010, NASA press conference, which promised the revelation of “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

Of course, nothing of the kind occurred. The carefully curated moment was less informative for its scientific value — in effect, nil — than for what it says about how years of attention-seeking and speculation in biology can drive an agenda. Equally concerning, despite the intervening decade in which other researchers debunked the overhyped result, is that the journal involved has yet to retract the article in question, allowing it to live in a zombie state.

The announcement at the press conference was, to the disappointment of many, the supposed “discovery” of a microbe that could grow on arsenate in the absence of phosphate and incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorus in macromolecules such as nucleic acids and proteins that was being published in Science. Steven Benner (referring to himself as a curmudgeon) was the only individual at the press conference who talked real sense by undermining the claims. Mary Voytek, NASA Senior Scientist for Astrobiology (a position she still occupies) employed a Star Trek analogy:

Publisher retracting 68 articles suspected of being paper mill products

It appears to be Paper Mill Sweeps Week here at Retraction Watch.

On Tuesday, we reported on an editor who believes one such operation was responsible for the withdrawals of at least two articles in her journal.

Now, the Royal Society of Chemistry is retracting 68 articles, across three of its titles, after an investigation turned up evidence of what it suspects was the “systemic production of falsified research.” The society said it is in the process of beefing up its safeguards against milled papers and plans to train its editors to have “extra vigilance in the face of emerging, sophisticated digital fraud.”

‘Striking’: Journal editor suspects paper mills behind rash of withdrawn manuscripts

Carol Shoshkes Reiss describes it as “especially striking.”

I have been Editor-in-Chief of DNA and Cell Biology for the last decade. It has been rare for authors to request withdrawal of a paper they have submitted. However, in the last two weeks, six papers have been withdrawn on request.

What really puzzled Reiss, a professor emerita at New York University, was that two of the withdrawals used identical language — down to the incorrect punctuation and stilted phrasing:

Exercise science grad student at Australian university dismissed after he admitted faking data, says supervisor

A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.

The articles, both of which were published last year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, came from a group at the Murdoch Applied Sports Science Laboratory, part of Murdoch University. The first author on both papers was Liam J. Hughes, a PhD student at Murdoch who was terminated as a result of the misconduct.

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