Retraction Watch

Researcher linked to author with 52 retractions loses a paper for duplication

An engineering researcher alleged to be part of a four-group ring of authors who have “repetitively published their own work in ways that call into serious question” the validity of hundreds of papers has had a paper retracted.

As we reported in August, Mostafa Jalal, a postdoc at Texas A&M, is alleged to have “engaged in some manner of collaboration or communication” with three other researchers, including Ali Nazari, who has now had 52 papers retracted. Those retractions came after the whistleblower, the pseudonymous Artemisia Stricta, called attention to problems in Nazari’s work.

The newly retracted paper, originally published in 2013 in Science and Engineering of Composite Materials, is one of five publications in which Artemisia Stricta said Jalal’s group had misrepresented electron microscopy images.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Assessment of nano-TiO2 and class F fly ash effects on flexural fracture and microstructure of binary blended concrete”:

Journal becomes “victim of an organized rogue editor network”

We’re not accustomed to seeing journal article titles that end in exclamation points. But that’s what a title did earlier this month: “The Journal of Nanoparticle Research victim of an organized rogue editor network!”

The journal, a Springer Nature title, wrote the editors, “has been attacked in a new way by a sophisticated and organized network.” (It turns out not to be entirely new, but more on that in a moment.) As the editors explain:

Weekend reads: The backstory of a Nature retraction; an author salutes her favorite review of 2020; vaping-COVID-19 link questioned

Welcome to the first Weekend Reads of 2021. 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:

Medical writer loses COVID-19-cancer paper for plagiarism
Psychology paper retracted after creators of tool allege “serious breach of copyright”
Psychology journal retracts two articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”
List of retracted COVID-19 papers grows past 70
A look back at retraction news in 2020 — and ahead to 2021

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 72.

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

A look back at retraction news in 2020 — and ahead to 2021

Like everyone else, it seems, we here at Retraction Watch are more than ready to put 2020 to bed. It was a bittersweet year to celebrate our tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’ve learned. But the work never stops, so as we’ve done every year since 2010, we’ll take a look at the most notable retractions of the last 12 months, and review some important milestones and events.

Given that journals retracted more than 1,800 papers in 2020, we had plenty of stories from which to choose. However, leading the list would have to be the papers about the pandemic that were pulled for flaws ranging from problematic data to shaky science to absolute wackiness. Indeed, if Covid were an author, it would be fifth on our leaderboard, with 72 so far. We’re certain that’s not the high-water mark for Covid retractions given the haste with which scientists have churned out papers about the disease and the virus behind it.

The intersection of politics and science drew particular attention, such as this paper about race and police killings whose authors triggered an outcry from the right after they called for their work to be retracted. Some journals engaged in an exercise of cupboard cleaning, retracting papers offensive to minorities, women and other groups. As we argued in Wired, critics of this “purging” tended to miss the larger point: the papers deserved to be retracted not just because of their repellent content but because they were scientifically unsound. And best practices for retraction recommend that they not disappear down a “memory hole,” but that they remain online, but marked “RETRACTED.”

List of retracted COVID-19 papers grows past 70

As Retraction Watch readers may know, as part of keeping our database of retractions up to date, we’ve been publishing a running list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted. That list has been steadily growing since the end of April, but yesterday the number jumped from 45 to 72, so we thought we’d walk through where the additional retractions came from.

Ten of the new retractions are from one publisher — Elsevier — and for one reason: Elsevier screwed up. How? Well, they published these ten papers twice. The error has nothing at all to do with the authors or the quality of the work, according to the notices. We’ve commented on this phenomenon before.

Psychology journal retracts two articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

A psychology journal has retracted a pair of decades-old articles by a now-deceased psychologist with noxious views about race and intelligence after the editors concluded that his work was “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda.”

The author, J. Philippe Rushton, was affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, where he was notorious for publishing highly questionable studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that

Psychology paper retracted after creators of tool allege “serious breach of copyright”

A researcher in Ecuador has lost a 2019 paper on the application of a widely-used psychological research instrument after the owner of the tool flexed their copyright muscle.

The episode — like another one, recently — echoes the case of Donald Morisky, a UCLA researcher who developed an instrument for assessing medication adherence — and then began charging other scientists small fortunes (and, in some cases, large ones) for use of the tool, or forcing retractions when they failed to comply. (For more on the Morisky case, see our 2017 piece in Science and this recent warning by journal editors.)

Written by Paúl Arias-Medina, of the University of Cuenca, the article, “Psychometric properties of the self-report version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire in the Ecuadorian context: an evaluation of four models,” appeared in BMC Psychology.

Per the paper’s abstract:

Medical writer loses COVID-19-cancer paper for plagiarism

An oncology journal has retracted a review article on the hypothetical link between Covid-19 and cancer after determining that the medical writer who authored the work hadn’t done all the writing herself.

The paper, “Clinical sequelae of the novel coronavirus: does COVID-19 infection predispose patients to cancer?” appeared in Future Oncology in May and was written by Priya Hays, who at the time was a technical writer with Talis Biomedical Corp., in Menlo Park, Calif. Hays is currently with Abbott, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also has a company called Hays Documentation Specialists, which offers a variety of manuscript services, including academic writing and something called “unstructured authoring assistance.”

As the retraction notice indicates, Hays appears to have had some authoring assistance of her own:

Weekend reads: $1.5 million payout after failure to disclose conflicts; systematic review retractions; entire class penalized for cheating

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 year-ed tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Publisher retracts 14 papers by doctor who ran afoul of U.S. FDA for marketing supplements
Nature Communications retracts much-criticized paper on mentorship
Texas bone researcher faked data in Nature paper, says federal watchdog, as university rescinds professorships
After legal threats from Herbalife, Elsevier journal retracts — and then removes — a paper
‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers
‘Misconduct on a grand and terrible scale’: Dental scientist up to 26 retractions

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 40.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

‘Misconduct on a grand and terrible scale’: Dental scientist up to 26 retractions

A dentistry researcher in Spain with a history of reusing and manipulating images has notched two more retractions, giving him 26.

The new retractions move Jose´ Luis Calvo-Guirado, of Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, into a tie for 24th place on the Retraction Watch leaderboard.

Calvo-Guirado has in the past disputed the retractions of his research. And at least one of his co-authors, Georgios Romanos, of the State University of New York Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine, speculated that Calvo-Guirado was reusing images to limit the number of lab animals that would need to be sacrificed in his studies.

The latest retractions involve two papers in Annals of Anatomy, an Elsevier publication, including the 2018 article “A new procedure for processing extracted teeth for immediate grafting in post-extraction sockets. An experimental study in American Fox Hound dogs.” According to the notice, the paper contained manipulated images that were reused in subsequently retracted articles:

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