Retraction Watch

Apparent HeLa cell line mixup earns a paper an expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2011 paper after recognizing that the researchers may have been using contaminated cell lines.

The article, “Downregulation of NIN/RPN12 binding protein inhibit [sic] the growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma cells,” appeared in Molecular Biology Reports, a Springer Nature title. In it, the authors, from China Medical University Shengjing Hospital, sought to find:

whether the suppression of Nob1 by short hairpin RNA (shRNA) inhibits the growth of human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells. Recombinant lentiviral shRNA expression vector carrying Nob1 was constructed and then infected into human HCC cell line SMMC-7721

Perhaps they did, and the paper has been cited 21 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. However, experimental lines of SMMC-7721 cells are among the many cell lines known to have been contaminated by HeLa cells, named for Henrietta Lacks — highly proliferative cervical cancer cells that have overrun labs worldwide. So perhaps they didn’t.

As the EoC states:

Researcher charged with abusing his wife has third paper retracted

A researcher in Canada whose once-brilliant career in kinesiology went from plaudits from his peers to criminal charges of horrific abuse of his wife has notched his third retraction.

As we reported in 2018, Abdeel Safdar, formerly of McMaster University and Harvard, where he was a postdoc, was the subject of an institutional investigation over concerns about the integrity of the data in a pair of his published studies. At the time, journals had flagged only two of his articles, both written with a frequent co-author, Mark Tarnopolsky, of McMaster. Tarnopolsky is considered a leading figure in kinesiology, and together he and Safdar had written some 30 papers.

The newest retraction involves a 2016 article in Skeletal Muscle titled “Exercise-induced mitochondrial p53 repairs mtDNA mutations in mutator mice.” Safdar was first author and Tarnopolsky the senior and corresponding author.

According to the retraction notice:

An author asked for multiple corrections to a paper. PLOS ONE decided to retract it.

After an author requested a slew of changes to a published paper, journal editors reviewed the study and spotted “additional concerns” that led to its retraction.

The study, titled “Pressure regulated basis for gene transcription by delta-cell micro-compliance modeled in silico: Biphenyl, bisphenol and small molecule ligand models of cell contraction-expansion,” was published in PLOS ONE on Oct. 6th, 2020. Its sole author was Hemant Sarin, a “freelance investigator in translational science and medicine” from Charleston, W.Va.

The study was pulled on March 25th with the following notice:

Seven barred from research after plagiarism, duplications in eleven papers

A retired Nepali professor and six others have been barred from research after plagiarism and duplicated images were found in 11 of their papers.

Parashuram Mishra, a retired crystallographer at Tribhuvan University, in Nepal, is the lead author on all the studies. Most of the papers contain image duplications; the same figures were reused across multiple studies. But two figures that Mishra published, according to the university’s findings, were plagiarized from a 2010 study by a British team, and a 2020 study by researchers at the University of Monastir, in Tunisia.

Last December, Armel Le Bail, crystallographer at the Université du Maine in Les Mans, France, began flagging Mishra’s studies on PubPeer and his personal website. He reported his findings to the vice-chancellor of Tribhuvan University, Dharma Kant Baskota, on January 4th.

Weekend reads: Peer review ‘brutality’; COVID-19 vaccine trial scandal; homeopathy researcher admits ‘unethical behavior’

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:

25,000: That’s how many retractions are now in the Retraction Watch Database
A longtime whistleblower explains why he’s spent more than a decade trying to get a paper retracted
Beam us up! Elsevier pulls 26 Covid-19 papers by researcher with a penchant for Star Trek
Author, Author! Or perhaps we should say Fake Author, Fake Author!
Paper about calculating ocean currents runs aground
Paper claiming Muslim patients are “particularly sensitive” retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 117.

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

25,000: That’s how many retractions are now in the Retraction Watch Database

We reached two milestones this week at Retraction Watch.

Our database — the most comprehensive source for retractions by a wide margin — surpassed 25,000 retractions. And our list of retracted COVID-19 papers, which we’ve maintained for a year, grew past 100 for the first time.

When we launched Retraction Watch in 2010, we, along with many others, thought retractions happened only dozens of times per year. We were wrong, and soon learned that figures had doubled in the first decade of this century, and that no one was keeping close track. The idea for the database was born several years later.

Readers may recall that when we launched the database in October 2018, it contained 18,500 retractions. That means we’ve found, checked, categorized, and entered some 6,500 retractions in two and a half years. New last year: The ability to include retractions in any language.

A longtime whistleblower explains why he’s spent more than a decade trying to get a paper retracted

Since the report of the MIST Trial was published in Circulation in 2008, I have repeatedly written to the journal to express concern about the paper.

Most recently, on February 22, I wrote to the editor-in-chief of Circulation, which is owned by the American Heart Association (AHA), requesting that they retract the 2008 MIST Trial paper, the revised version of the paper, the correction and the data supplement. The response two days later was from the senior attorney of the AHA: “AHA respectfully declines any further involvement. We consider this matter closed and we will not pursue additional comment or review.”

Let me explain how I got involved, and why I have persisted. I was the principal cardiologist in the MIST Trial sponsored by NMT Medical. Another member of the steering committee (Simon Nightingale) and I refused to be authors of the paper because NMT had refused to allow any investigator to see all the data but even without access to the data it was clear that the paper made false claims. In November 2007, a few days after we refused to be authors, NMT started legal proceedings for libel and slander against me. They also instructed their lawyers to sue Nightingale, but did not start the legal proceedings against him.

Beam us up! Elsevier pulls 26 Covid-19 papers by researcher with a penchant for Star Trek

An Elsevier journal has retracted more than two dozen Covid-19 papers by a researcher in Malta with a fondness for Star Trek after determining that the articles did not meet its standards for publication.

The move comes several months after we reported that Hampton Gaddy, a student at the University of Oxford, had raised questions about more than 100 articles written by a pediatric cardiologist named Victor Grech. The papers appeared in Early Human Development (EHD), which Grech managed to turn into something of a vanity press — including for papers about how the lessons of Star Trek shed light on everything from the evolving role of nurses to the horrors of Nazi doctors.

As Gaddy pointed out to Elsevier last December, Grech has written at least 113 papers in EHD, 57 as sole author:

Author, Author! Or perhaps we should say Fake Author, Fake Author!

The wrong David Ross (and his wife Sara)

Researchers in Iran have lost their 2019 paper on nanofluids after the journal learned that their list of authors included an engineer at the University of Texas who had nothing to do with the work.

The article, “Numerical study on free convection in a U-shaped CuO/water nanofluid-filled cavity with different aspect ratios using double-MRT lattice Boltzmann,” was published in Thermal Science and Engineering Progress, an Elsevier journal. The first author was Ahmad Fard, of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at K.N. Toosi University of Technology, in Tehran.

Batting cleanup was David Ross, whose affiliation is given as the University of Texas at Austin. A David Ross — no, not the Cubs manager and former Major League Baseball catcher — was on the faculty of UT from 1966 until his retirement in 2003.

Paper about calculating ocean currents runs aground

A paper arguing that conventional methods of calculating ocean currents are flawed has been retracted because its own calculations ran aground.

The article, “A Complete Formula of Ocean Surface Absolute Geostrophic Current,” was written by Peter Chu, of the Naval Ocean Analysis and Prediction Laboratory, part of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Chu is a distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Oceanography at the NPS, whose mission is to:

Provide defense-focused graduate education, including classified studies and interdisciplinary research, to advance the operational effectiveness, technological leadership and warfighting advantage of the Naval service.

Chu’s paper, which appeared in Scientific Reports in January 2020, argued that:

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