Retraction Watch

Leading evidence-based group blames pandemic for 9-month delay pulling flawed cancer review

Last February, Richard Pollock was reading a review in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews — a prominent resource for evidence-based medicine — when he spotted an error.

In the first figure, which compared the effectiveness of two different treatments for the most common form of liver cancer, a label was switched. The error made it seem like the “worse” treatment was better than the more effective option.

Pollock, a health economist, was concerned enough to send an email to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the corresponding author, on February 20th. Abdel-Rahman, an oncologist at the University of Alberta, wrote back the next day, saying he would review the comments with experts at Cochrane, “and if there is any typos in the publication, it will be corrected immediately.” Emails seen by Retraction Watch show that, when replying to this email, Abdel-Rahman copied one of Cochrane’s editors, Dimitrinka Nikolova.

Months passed. Pollock sent another email to Abdel-Rahman and two Cochrane editors — Nikolova and Christian Gluud — on June 15th. Then, on November 16th, the journal pulled the review with a brief notice:

Editors decide not to retract microplastics article but “they feel that it is barely justified”

Chemosphere has issued an expression of concern for a 2019 paper on microplastics in the ocean with an uncomfortable degree of similarity to a previously published article in another journal.

However, the editors decided that they could find enough daylight between the two papers that leaving their version unretracted was “barely justified” — a less-than-hearty endorsement of the article and one that’s likely to leave readers with more questions than answers about the integrity of the work.

The article, titled ‘‘Prevalence of microplastic pollution in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean,” came from a group led by Zhong Pan, of the Laboratory of Marine Chemistry and Environmental Monitoring Technology, part of the State Oceanic Administration in Xiamen, China.

According to the notice:

20 ways to spot the work of paper mills

Last year, Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology found itself on the receiving end of what its editor Roland Seifert called a “massive attack of fraudulent papers” that were the product of paper mills.

In response Seifert — who says the journal ultimately will have retracted 10 of those articles and stopped another 30 from being published — has produced a 20-point list of red flags that indicate the possibility of a paper mill in action, and features of these papers in general.

We won’t reproduce the list in its entirety, but here are a few highlights, in no particular order.

Why “good PhD students are worth gold!” A grad student finds an error

Researchers in the Netherlands have retracted and replaced a 2015 paper on attention after discovering a coding error that reversed their finding.

Initially titled “Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation over Left Dorsolateral pFC on the Attentional Blink Depend on Individual Baseline Performance,” the paper appeared in the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience and was written by Heleen A. Slagter, an associate professor of psychology at VU University in Amsterdam, and Raquel E. London, who is currently a post-doc at Ghent University. It has been cited 19 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But while trying to replicate the findings, Slagter and a then-PhD student of hers, Leon Reteig, found a critical mistake in a statistical method first proposed in a 1986 paper. Slagter told us:

Weekend reads: A Holocaust studies misconduct finding; Nature investigating majorana paper; nepotistic 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:

On COVID-19 PCR testing paper, “the criteria for a retraction of the article have not been fulfilled”
Engineering professor up to nine retractions for image problems
Litigious OSU professor loses appeal in federal defamation case
Okinawa researcher suspended for faking data denies committing misconduct
Mathematician ranked as Clarivate “highly cited researcher” has third paper retracted
Okinawa university suspends researcher for six months following findings of plagiarism and faked data
Researcher to overtake Diederik Stapel on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, with 61
Journal pulls two studies that listed an author without his permission
Springer Nature to retract chapter on sign language critics call “unbelievably insulting”

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 83.

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

On COVID-19 PCR testing paper, “the criteria for a retraction of the article have not been fulfilled”

Two months after announcing it would review an early 2020 paper on a way to detect the virus that causes COVID-19, a journal says that “the criteria for a retraction of the article have not been fulfilled.”

The review of the paper, “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR, by the journal, Eurosurveillance, was prompted by critiques including a petition by some 20 people around the world for what they called “scientific and methodological blemishes.” The senior author of the Eurosurveillance paper, Christian Drosten, of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, has been a leader in the fight against the pandemic, but has also predictably drawn criticism from those who oppose lockdowns.

On December 3, the journal issued a statement saying they were reviewing the allegations, which, as editors note in their statement dated yesterday:

Engineering professor up to nine retractions for image problems

An engineering researcher is up to nine retractions for image issues, having lost eight papers in the last month.

Yashvir Singh, of India’s Graphic Era University — ironically enough, given the reasons for the retractions — is the first author on seven of the papers, and second author on the eighth, which appeared between 2016 and 2019. All eight articles were published in journals owned by Taylor & Francis, and have been cited more than 80 times in total, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Issues with the 2017 paper “Effect of load on friction and wear characteristics of Jatropha oil bio-lubricants,” in Biofuels were flagged in a post on PubPeer last July.

Biofuels issued this notice on January 18:

Litigious OSU professor loses appeal in federal defamation case

Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University who has had 10 papers retracted and at least as many subject to corrections or expressions of concern, has lost another court appeal.

Croce brought the case against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017 for statements that Sanders had made in stories in The New York Times and Lafayette Journal Courier. Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, ruled against Croce in the case last year. Croce filed an appeal, and yesterday three judges in the Sixth Circuit of Appeals upheld the earlier ruling.

The judges note:

Okinawa researcher suspended for faking data denies committing misconduct

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST)

Ye Zhang, who as we reported yesterday is serving a six-month suspension from her post at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), in Japan, says she did not commit misconduct, as the school contends.

In response to a query from Retraction Watch, Zhang, a materials scientist, said she did not agree with the findings of an OIST investigation that found she fabricated data and plagiarized in a May 2019 paper in Chemical Communications. (A spokesman for the publisher told us that the journal only recently learned about the OIST report and is looking into the matter.)

In a lengthy email protesting her innocence, Zhang told us:

Mathematician ranked as Clarivate “highly cited researcher” has third paper retracted

A math professor named as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate Analytics has had his third paper retracted after issues with it were flagged last year.

The mathematician, Abdon Atangana, is a professor at The University of the Free State, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and China Medical University, Taiwan.

Atangana’s article, “Derivative with two fractional orders: A new avenue of investigation toward revolution in fractional calculus,” was published in The European Physical Journal Plus — where Atangana is an editor — on Oct. 24, 2016, and has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

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