Retraction Watch

What happened when a group of sleuths flagged more than 30 papers with errors?

Jennifer Byrne

Retraction Watch readers may recall the name Jennifer Byrne, whose work as a scientific sleuth we first wrote about four years ago, and have followed ever since. In a new paper in Scientometrics, Byrne, of New South Wales Health Pathology and the University of Sydney, working along with researchers including Cyril Labbé, known for his work detecting computer-generated papers, and Amanda Capes-Davis, who works on cell line identification, describe what happened when they approached publishers about errors in 31 papers. We asked Byrne several questions about the work.

Retraction Watch (RW): You focused on 31 papers with a “specific reagent error.” Can you explain what the errors were?

“I absolutely stand by the validity of the science” says author of energy field paper now flagged by journal

An integrative health journal has issued an expression of concern for an article it published two years ago last month about the “human biofield” and related topics after receiving complaints that the piece lacked scientific “validity.”

The article, “Energy Medicine: Current Status and Future Perspectives,” appeared in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, a SAGE title. The author was Christina Ross, of the Wake Forest Center for Integrative Medicine, in Winston-Salem, N.C. Which happens to be where the two top editors of the journal are based.

Ross also is the author of Etiology: How to Detect Disease in Your Energy Field Before It Manifests in Your Body, which is available on Amazon and elsewhere.

According to the abstract of the article:

Weekend reads: Prof plagiarized student, says investigation; universities mishandle allegations; what we should learn from ‘bad science’

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:

Meet the postdoc who says he’s been trying to retract his own paper since 2016
Nanotech group that retracted Nature study pulls two more papers
JAMA journal retracts, replaces paper linking nonionizing radiation to ADHD
Former Cleveland Clinic researcher’s papers “more likely than not” included falsified images, says investigation
“Serious non-compliance” prompts retraction of book on social justice in Hawai’i

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 85.

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

Meet the postdoc who says he’s been trying to retract his own paper since 2016

In August 2015, bioengineers gathered in Milan, Italy, for the 37th annual conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. About 2,000 papers were accepted and published online for the conference. But an author of one of those articles says he’s been trying to retract it since 2016.

As a PhD student at the Université de Lorraine, in France, Khuram Faraz worked with professors Christian Daul and Walter Blondel on the processing of biomedical images, mainly for dermatology. Faraz is listed as a co-author on a paper titled “Optical flow with structure information for epithelial image mosaicing,” which was published at the 2015 conference. The paper has been cited twice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

A few months after the conference, in January 2016, Faraz emailed Daul and Blondel about his concerns with the study, according to emails that Faraz shared on PubPeer last June. Faraz allegedly told Daul and Blondel that, for a specific method used in the paper, called RFLOW:

Nanotech group that retracted Nature study pulls two more papers

Nanotechnology researchers in Japan, who in November retracted a paper in Nature for lack of reproducibility, have retracted two more articles after what they said was a failure to replicate their findings.

As we reported previously, the authors, led by Kenichiro Itami of Nagoya University, called for an investigation into the problems with their work, the conclusions of which have yet to be made public.

The new retractions involve articles published in ACS Applied Nano Materials.

Here’s the notice for “Graphene Nanoribbon Dielectric Passivation Layers for Graphene Electronics,” a paper which appeared in July 2019 and has been cited 11 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:

JAMA journal retracts, replaces paper linking nonionizing radiation to ADHD

A JAMA journal is retracting and replacing a 2020 paper which linked exposure to nonionizing radiation — think cellphones, Bluetooth devices and microwave ovens — during pregnancy to the risk for attention deficit disorder later in childhood after a reader pointed out a critical error in the study.

The paper, “Association Between Maternal Exposure to Magnetic Field Nonionizing Radiation During Pregnancy and Risk of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Offspring in a Longitudinal Birth Cohort,” appeared in JAMA Network Open and prompted a significant amount of media coverage, as well as activity on social media.

According to the authors:

Former Cleveland Clinic researcher’s papers “more likely than not” included falsified images, says investigation

A former researcher at the Cleveland Clinic who studied cardiac genetics has lost three papers for what an institutional investigation concluded was “more likely than not” a case image falsification.

As we reported last year, the work of Subha Sen, once a highly funded scientist at Cleveland Clinic but who left the institution in 2011, has come under scrutiny on PubPeer (note: a researcher with the same name, but at a different institution, also appears in these search results). With the latest papers, Sen now has ~~nine~~ seven retractions for issues including questions about the integrity of the data and the validity of the images.

The three newest removals involve studies published in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulatory Physiology between 2004 and 2009. The notices are very similar while referring to different images.

Here’s the statement for the 2005 article, “Inhibition of NF-κB induces regression of cardiac hypertrophy, independent of blood pressure control, in spontaneously hypertensive rats”:

“Serious non-compliance” prompts retraction of book on social justice in Hawai’i

A publisher retracted a book last year after the home institution of one of the editors, the University of Hawai’i, “identified research protocol violations by two of the editors, which constitute Serious Non-Compliance.”

The 2019 book, Voices of Social Justice and Diversity in a Hawai‘i Context, was edited by Amarjit Singh and Mike Devine, of Memorial University in Newfoundland, and M. Luafata Simanu-Klutz of the University of Hawai’i.

According to the book’s description, it:

Weekend reads: An editorial board resigns over interference; what a manuscript rejection means; the scientific 1%

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Exclusive: Ohio State researcher kept six-figure job for more than a year after a misconduct finding
Widely shared vitamin D-COVID-19 preprint removed from Lancet server
‘No malicious intent’: Authors retract week-old Science Advances paper based on embargoed data
Publisher retracting five papers because of “clear evidence” that they were “computer generated”
Third journal scammed by rogue editors
‘Conference organizers have ignored this:’ How common is plagiarism and duplication in abstracts?

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 85.

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

Widely shared vitamin D-COVID-19 preprint removed from Lancet server

A preprint promoted by a member of the UK Parliament for claiming to show that vitamin D led to an “80% reduction in need for ICU and a 60% reduction in deaths” has been removed from a server used by The Lancet family of journals.

The preprint, “Calcifediol Treatment and COVID-19-Related Outcomes,” was posted to Preprints with The Lancet on January 22. On February 13, David Davis, a Conservative member of UK’s Parliament, tweeted:

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