The publisher Frontiers has retracted at least a dozen papers in the last month, after announcing an “extensive internal investigation” into “potentially falsified research.”
Here’s an example of a notice, this one from Frontiers in Endocrinology for “Overexpression of microRNA-216a-3p Accelerates the Inflammatory Response in Cardiomyocytes in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus by Targeting IFN-α2,” which was originally published in November 2020:
The authors of a paper on “nudge experiments” published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) plan to correct it following questions about some of its conclusions and citations, Retraction Watch has learned.
Following up on comments by Aaron Charlton and Nick Brown, Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman, who is deeply skeptical of the findings, raised several questions about the paper in a post on January 7. Among them were that the paper cites 11 articles by food marketing researcher Brian Wansink, whom Retraction Watch readers may recall resigned from his post at Cornell following an investigation and has had 17 papers retracted, one of them twice.
Gelman also notes that the paper cites a paper by Dan Ariely and colleagues that was retracted in September. We’ll focus here on the inclusion of that reference.
Co-corresponding author Tobias Brosch, of the University of Geneva, responded within hours of Gelman’s post, writing in part:
As the journal, a Sage title, makes clear, the article went through the typical course of peer review and, presumably, some editing – which somehow managed to miss plagiarised text from not one but at least eight sources. Three of those involved rip-offs from unpublished university theses, while the rest were from published articles.
A journal has slapped an expression of concern on a 2021 paper reporting on the utility of self-administered “battlefield” acupuncture in soldiers, citing readers who said the FDA has not approved the devices for that use – a point the authors, who object to the move, dismissed as irrelevant and misleading.
The study, which appeared in Medical Acupuncture, looked at the experiences of a dozen veterans at an Ohio VA hospital who’d purportedly self-administered acupuncture to treat chronic pain. According to this 2010 article from the U.S. military:
A cancer journal with a history of batch retractions has pulled 15 articles dating back to 2014 after concluding that they contained manipulated or misused images.
As we reported in 2017, Tumor Biology was forced to retract 107 papers that had been corrupted by fake peer review – a record at the time. That move had followed a similar, if smaller, sweep in 2016 by the journal, which was owned by Springer but purchased by SAGE in December 2016 after the more massive cleanse.
A group of cancer researchers at the University of Rochester have now lost three papers over concerns about the data in the articles – issues that evidently did not rise to the level of misconduct, according to the institution.
The work came from the lab of Yuhchyau Chen, of the university’s Wilmot Cancer Institute. A common co-author was Soo Ok Lee, who is no longer affiliated with the University of Rochester. In addition to the three retractions, Lee has several corrections and an expression of concern.
Behrouz Pourghebleh is perplexed. And also exasperated.
Pourghebleh, of the Young Researchers and Elite Club at the Urmia branch of Islamic Azad University in Iran, noticed a paper published on December 15, 2020 in an IEEE journal that overlapped 80 percent with an article he’d co-authored the year before.
Pourghebleh wrote to Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, the associate editor who had handled the paper, on December 31, 2020, expressing concern. Bhuiyan responded the same day, saying the paper hadn’t been flagged in a similarity check, and that he would contact the authors for a response.
The first author, Karim Alinani, wrote to Pourghebleh less than two weeks later, admitting the plagiarism but citing personal circumstances:
2021 was – as is always the case – a busy year at Retraction Watch. How could it not be, with our database of retractions surpassing 30,000 – and then 32,000 – with ten percent happening this year alone?
Oh, and the pandemic. There were 72 retractions on our list of retracted COVID-19 papers when we wrote this end-of-year message in 2020. Today, there are 205.
Perhaps it was scrutiny of pandemic-related scientific claims, or recognition of paper mills and other industrialized fakery as a serious problem, or just gathering momentum as sleuths began to get their due in wider circles, but it did feel as though 2021 was a year in which retractions – and larger issues in scientific integrity – played a big role.
