Retraction Watch

Exclusive: Embattled dean accused of plagiarism in NSF report

Erick Jones, the dean of engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno, appears to have engaged in extensive plagiarism in the final report he submitted to the National Science Foundation for a grant, Retraction Watch has learned.

The $28,238 grant partially supported a three-day workshop that Jones and his wife, Felicia Jefferson, held for 21 students in Washington, DC, in April 2022 titled “Broadening Participation in Engineering through Improved Financial Literacy.” Jefferson received a separate award for $21,757.

Jones submitted his final report to the agency in May 2023. Retraction Watch obtained a copy of that report through a public records request to Jones’s previous employer, the University of Texas at Arlington, and identified three published sources of extended passages he used without citation or quotation marks.

Saudi university dean has 20 retractions in two years

A prolific Saudi pharmacy professor published over 200 papers in the last four years, but in recent months the quality of these papers has come into question.

Nabil Alhakamy, a dean of research and higher education at King AbdulAziz University’s Faculty of Pharmacy, has had more than 20 articles retracted — the most recent of which came on January 30 in AAPS PharmSciTech.

The journal analyzed the images and figures in the article and found three had been published previously and that an outside lab used to collect some of the data had “made a mistake by sending images of other work in the service lab,” according to the retraction notice.

A cardiac surgeon’s tortuous efforts – including three lawsuits – to get the scientific record corrected

For the past 14 years, a cardiac surgeon in Italy has been trying to blow the whistle on a study written by his former colleagues that has been the subject of several investigations – with two of them finding problems with the data. And despite defeating three defamation lawsuits, two which were brought by authors of the paper, he’s not giving up yet.

The 2006 paper, ‘Relationship between atrial histopathology and atrial fibrillation after coronary bypass surgery’, written by several of cardiac surgeon Vittorio Mantovani’s colleagues at the Ospedale di Circolo in Varese, was published in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery. To date, the paper – which has been cited 57 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – has been investigated by at least two institutions as well as the journal. None have resulted in a retraction, despite one university finding that only a little more than half of the patients in the dataset could be matched unambiguously with biopsy samples. One university is also waiting on the journal to act before it considers reopening its own investigation.

For Mantovani, the red flags started appearing in 2010, when he came across a minor discrepancy between two other papers written by him and his colleagues. He thought it was odd that in one dataset, patients were identified by name, but in the other, they were identified using numbers.

Weekend reads: Cash for error detection; problems with MDPI papers; retractions in abortion science

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 47,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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

Medical society takes millions from company that sued it for defamation – and lost

When the American Society of Anesthesiologists last October announced the receipt of a $2.5 million donation from a drug company – “to advance education and innovation for our members” – the news could have been dismissed with a shrug. After all, such gifts from industry to medical societies are commonplace.

What makes this case noteworthy is that until the donation, the ASA and the drug maker, Pacira BioSciences, were better known as adversaries embroiled in a bitter lawsuit over three articles about the company’s flagship product the society had published in 2021 in its main scientific journal.

The papers, which questioned the effectiveness of Exparel, an anesthetic intended for the treatment of patients undergoing orthopedic surgery and other procedures. As we reported in May 2021, as part of a larger suit against the ASA, Pacira demanded in legal filings that the ASA and its journal, Anesthesiology, retract the papers, which it considered libelous.

The company didn’t hold that stance long, however. We wrote then:

Science ‘Majorana’ particle paper earns another editor’s note as expert committee finds no misconduct

A paper that led to hopes that Microsoft might one day build a quantum computer has “shortcomings” that do not rise to the level of misconduct, according to an expert panel convened by the University of Copenhagen.

The paper, originally published in March 2020 in Science, earned an expression of concern in 2021 following critiques of the work from two researchers, Sergey Frolov and Vincent Mourik. This week, Science editor in chief Holden Thorp replaced the expression of concern with an editor’s note referring to a new report from a panel of experts at the University of Copenhagen, saying “we are alerting readers to this report while we await a formal decision on the matter from the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct.”

The panel’s report, dated Feb. 15, 2024, describes several of what it calls “shortcomings” but says “the excluded data did not undermine the paper’s main conclusions.” They also conclude the authors did not engage in “gross negligence” or scientific misconduct.

The last author of the Science paper, Charles Marcus, of the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues followed the recommendations by posting:

Exclusive: Elsevier to retract paper by economist who failed to disclose data tinkering

A paper on green innovation that drew sharp rebuke for using questionable and undisclosed methods to replace missing data will be retracted, its publisher told Retraction Watch.

Previous work by one of the authors, a professor of economics in Sweden, is also facing scrutiny, according to another publisher.

As we reported earlier this month, Almas Heshmati of Jönköping University mended a dataset full of gaps by liberally applying Excel’s autofill function and copying data between countries – operations other experts described as “horrendous” and “beyond concern.”

Heshmati and his coauthor, Mike Tsionas, a professor of economics at Lancaster University in the UK who died recently, made no mention of missing data or how they dealt with them in their 2023 article, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” Instead, the paper gave the impression of a complete dataset. One economist argued in a guest post on our site that there was “no justification” for such lack of disclosure.

How (not) to deal with missing data: An economist’s take on a controversial study

Nearly 100 years ago, Muriel Bristol refused to drink a cup of tea that had been prepared by her colleague, the great British statistician Ronald Fisher, because Fisher had poured milk into the cup first and tea second, rather than tea first and milk second. Fisher didn’t believe she could tell the difference, so he tested her with eight cups of tea, half milk first and half tea first. When she got all eight correct, Fisher calculated the probability a random guesser would do so as well – which works out to 1.4%. He soon recognized that the results of agricultural experiments could be gauged in the same way – by the probability that random variation would generate the observed outcomes.

If this probability (the P-value) is sufficiently low, the results might be deemed statistically significant. How low? Fisher recommended we use a 5% cutoff and “ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level.”

His 5% solution soon became the norm. Not wanting their hard work to be ignored entirely, many researchers strive mightily to get their P-values below 0.05.

Paper claiming ‘extensive’ harms of COVID-19 vaccines to be retracted

A journal is retracting a paper on the purported harms of vaccines against COVID-19 written in part by authors who have had similar work retracted before.

The article, “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign,” appeared late last month in Cureus, which used to be a stand-alone journal but is now owned by Springer Nature. (It has appeared frequently in these pages.)

Graham Parker, Director of Publishing and Customer Success at Cureus, told Retraction Watch:

I can confirm we will be retracting it by the end of the week, as we have provided the authors with a deadline to reply and indicate whether they agree or disagree with the retraction.

The senior author on the work was Peter McCullough, a cardiologist at the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge who lost his board certification after the American Board of Internal Medicine found he had “provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public.”

Weekend reads: That paper (yes, that one) is retracted; China reviewing 17,000 retractions; a Columbia surgeon and flawed data

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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

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