Retraction Watch

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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 83.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

Okinawa university suspends researcher for six months following findings of plagiarism and faked data

A materials scientist in Japan was found guilty of plagiarism and fabrication of data in a May 2019 paper, resulting in a six-month suspension, according to her institution.

Ye Zhang, of the Bioinspired Soft Matter Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), was the senior author of “Enzyme-mediated dual-targeted-assembly realizes a synergistic anticancer effect,” which appeared in Chemical Communications on May 9, 2019. The paper has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to OIST’s report on the case, five days after publication of the paper, a post-doc at the university filed a complaint with the school’s hotline, alleging that the article contained fabrication and plagiarism.

A month later, Zhang submitted a revised version of the paper to the journal, which issued the following correction:

Researcher to overtake Diederik Stapel on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard, with 61

Ali Nazari and Swinburne University vice-chancellor Linda Kristjanson, presenting him with a commendation in 2017

A construction researcher is watching his publishing edifice crumble, as more upcoming retractions of his papers will bring his total to 61.

Ali Nazari is believed to be a member of a ring of authors whom a whistleblower has claimed are churning out unreliable research — hundreds of papers, according to the sleuth, who goes by the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta. Nazari lost his job at Swinburne University, in Australia, following a misconduct investigation in 2019.

According to the whistleblower (who laid out the case in a recent email to a journal editor):

Journal pulls two studies that listed an author without his permission

David Cox

Springer Nature has removed two studies that were published in its journal Cluster Computing and included a co-author who didn’t know that the papers existed until December 2020, years after they were published.

The move follows reporting by Retraction Watch last week about the papers, which listed David Cox, the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, as a co-author.

The studies–“A FCM cluster: cloud networking model for intelligent transportation in the city of Macau,” and “Mobile network intrusion detection for IoT system based on transfer learning algorithm,” disappeared from the publisher’s website on January 29th, without any retraction notices.

A spokesperson for Springer Nature told Retraction Watch:

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