Retraction Watch

How well do databases and journals indicate retractions? Hint: Inconsistently.

Retraction Watch readers may recall the work of Elizabeth Suelzer, a librarian at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Two years ago, she and colleagues published a study on why the infamous — and fraudulent — 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield alleging a link between vaccine and autism had been cited more than 1,000 times. As Suelzer notes in the Q&A below, that work led to more questions about how well bibliographic databases and journal publishers display retraction status, when appropriate. The answer, they report in JAMA Network Open this week: They were inconsistent.

Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to do this study?

“If the data were not [correct], whose fault is this?” Authors of highly criticized COVID-19 vaccine study defend it

Earlier this week, we reported that a paper claiming that two deaths resulted from COVID-19 vaccination for every three cases that were prevented had earned an expression of concern.

[Please see an update on this post; the paper has been retracted.]

The authors, including Harald Walach, who was also co-author of a just-published paper in JAMA Pediatrics questioning the safety of masks in children, had used data from the Dutch national registry of side effects. That registry carries a warning label about its use. The editors of Vaccines, which published the study last month, wrote that there were concerns over “misrepresentation of the COVID-19 vaccination efforts and misrepresentation of the data.”

A scientist critic was sued, and won — but did not emerge unscathed. This is his story.

Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the name David Sanders. Sanders, a biologist at Purdue University, has become a scientific sleuth, ferreting out problems in numerous papers. In one of those cases, that of Ohio State University professor Carlo Croce, Sanders ended up being sued — before an article in which he was quoted even came out. He eventually prevailed, but the episode left a mark, as readers will learn in this Q&A. (It has left a mark on Croce, too, in the form of 10 retractions and two suits brought by teams of lawyers for unpaid bills.)

Retraction Watch (RW): Carlo Croce sued you in 2017. Why?

Ten journals denied 2020 Impact Factors because of excessive self-citation or “citation stacking”

Clarivate, the company behind the Impact Factor, a closely watched — and controversial — metric, is calling out more than 20 journals for unusual citation patterns.

The 21 journals — 10 of which were suppressed, meaning they will not receive an Impact Factor in 2020, and 11 of which received an expression of concern — are fewer than half of the nearly 50 that the company suppressed or subjected to an expression of concern last year from its Journal Citation Report (JCR). The suppressions, the company notes, represent .05% of the journals listed — a total that increased dramatically this year from about 12,000 to about 20,000.

Clarivate suppressed 10 journals for excessive self-citation which inflates the Impact Factor, or for “citation-stacking,” sometimes referred to as taking part in “citation cartels” or “citation rings:”

Paper claiming two deaths from COVID-19 vaccination for every three prevented cases earns expression of concern

A study published last week that quickly became another flashpoint for those arguing that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe has earned an expression of concern.

[Please see an update on this post; the paper has been retracted.]

The original paper, published in the MDPI title Vaccines, claimed that:

The number of cases experiencing adverse reactions has been reported to be 700 per 100,000 vaccinations. Currently, we see 16 serious side effects per 100,000 vaccinations, and the number of fatal side effects is at 4.11/100,000 vaccinations. For three deaths prevented by vaccination we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.

However, the study’s methods quickly drew scrutiny, and at least two members of Vaccines’ editorial board, Mount Sinai virologist Florian Krammer and Oxford immunologist Katie Ewer, said they have stepped down to protest the publication of the paper.

Britney Spears story prompts apology from Nature and author

Britney Spears has, as Retraction Watch readers no doubt know, been in the news a great deal lately, as the battle over her father’s “broad control over her life and finances” plays out in court. But a science fiction story about Spears that published in Nature in 2008 — the year Spears’ father was appointed her conservator — has prompted apologies from its author and the journal.

The story, which appeared in a section of the journal called Nature Futures, is titled “When Britney Spears comes to my lab.” It begins:

When Britney Spears comes to [Louisiana State University] LSU she’ll be wearing a silver strapless stretch top that doesn’t show too much of her belly (unless she actually moves her arms), and black Capri pants with a little dip in the waistband.

That and other passages in the piece — in which Spears goes on to earn a PhD from Harvard and discover a treatment for diabetes — caught the attention of more than 1,000 Twitter users since Friday. Many questioned why Nature would publish it. An example:

‘A fig leaf that doesn’t quite cover up’: Commission says philosopher engaged in ‘unacknowledged borrowings’ but not plagiarism

A philosopher with a double-digit retraction count did not commit plagiarism, according to a report released this weekend by France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), where the researcher is employed.

Magali Roques has had 11 papers retracted from seven different journals, most of which referred to plagiarism in their notices. But as Daily Nous, which was first to report on the CNRS findings and which has been writing about the case for some months, notes, the commission says Roques’ “writings contain ‘neither academic fraud nor plagiarism properly so called.’” The report differentiates “plagiarism properly so called” from “unacknowledged borrowings,” evidence of which the commission found.

According to the report commissioned by CNRS:

Weekend reads: ‘The obesity wars and the education of a researcher’; zombie research; hijacked journals

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:

Pulp fiction: Japanese university revokes two dentistry PhDs in case involving two dozen retractions
Most of problematic articles flagged in Japanese university’s investigation remain uncorrected or unretracted nearly a year later
An exercise in frustration: A researcher is impersonated
‘We apologize again for the inadvertent mistakes during the assembly of data due to our carelessness’
Meta: An expression of concern quotes Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 131.

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

Meta: An expression of concern quotes Retraction Watch

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST)

Sometimes, we become part of the story: A play in several acts.

On Jan. 27, 2021, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) issued a report about the work of Ye Zhang, a materials scientist on the faculty. The Institute, as we reported February 2, found that Zhang had committed plagiarism and had fabricated data in a May 2019 paper in Chemical Communications, and suspended her for six months.

Zhang told us on February 3 that she “dispute[d] the conclusion of the investigation on scientific grounds that refute it entirely.” In a comment the next day, a Retraction Watch commenter asked to see the spectra Zhang and colleagues referred to in the paper. Zhang sent those shortly thereafter, and we posted them to the site.

And now, some four and a half months later, comes an expression of concern, signed by the journal’s executive editor, Richard Kelly. The EOC includes Zhang’s full-throated defense, and a link to that PDF:

‘We apologize again for the inadvertent mistakes during the assembly of data due to our carelessness’

Baodi Clinical College of Tianjin Medical University

Last December, Elisabeth Bik notified journals about 45 articles by a researcher in China which struck her as suspicious. Within weeks, one of those journals — DNA and Cell Biology — had retracted the paper she’d flagged.

That reassuringly brisk response appears to have been an anomaly in the case of Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China. Only two other retractions have followed, by our count (Tang had a retraction in 2020, bringing his total so far to four). However, FEBS Letters, which published three articles by Tang that Bik had identified as problematic, has now issued expressions of concern for the papers.

The notices for the articles, which appeared between 2011 and 2014, raise questions about the “data integrity” in the work. Here’s the one for “Downregulation of PPP2R5E expression by miR-23a suppresses apoptosis to facilitate the growth of gastric cancer cells,” from 2014:

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