Retraction Watch

The rector who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis

Lots of good stories are hiding behind retraction notices, and with the flood of retractions — 2,200 just in 2020 — we can’t always keep up. Here’s a story about one 2020 retraction that turns out to involve a rector in Poland who resigned after plagiarizing a student’s PhD thesis.

In 2014, Błażej Kochański defended his PhD thesis at Gdańsk University of Technology, where he is now an assistant professor. To pass the exam, two external reviewers — one of whom was Jerzy Gwizdała, an economist at the University of Gdańsk — evaluated his work.

The following year, Gwizdała published a study titled, “Wpływ systemowego ryzyka płynności na stabilność gospodarki polskiej,” or “The Impact of Systemic Liquidity Risk on Stability of the Polish Economy,” in Problemy Zarządzania (Management Issues). Entire sections of that paper, according to a note Kochański sent us through our database Google form, were “copy-and-paste” plagiarized from his PhD thesis.

Gwizdała also translated sections of Kochański’s PhD thesis to English in 2018, sent it to the University of Gdańsk Publishing House, and had it published as a book chapter.

Weekend reads: Faked data in psychology; publishing in predatory journals = misconduct?; how scientists take criticism

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:

Seven barred from research after plagiarism, duplications in eleven papers
An author asked for multiple corrections to a paper. PLOS ONE decided to retract it.
Researcher charged with abusing his wife has third paper retracted
Apparent HeLa cell line mixup earns a paper an expression of concern
Anesthesiologist loses 50 more papers in 12 months

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 117.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

Anesthesiologist loses 50 more papers in 12 months

A decade has passed since the breaking of the scandal involving Joachim Boldt, a world-renowned critical care specialist who has held steady as the number two author on the Retraction Watch leaderboard. But the case continues to produce developments that have dramatically increased Boldt’s retraction tally.

Journals have retracted at least 53 papers by Boldt since May 2020, bringing his total number to 153, by our count. That includes 24 articles removed so far in 2021. In September 2020, the British Journal of Anaesthesia announced that it was retracting all but one of the more than two dozen Boldt papers that it had published — leaving the last one standing because it didn’t have solid evidence that it contained fabricated data.

The impetus for the purge was a 2018 report from Justus Liebig University (JLU) Medical School, where Boldt worked between 1982 and 1996. The university concluded that, among other things, Boldt appears to have fabricated data from several theses of students he helped supervise, publishing the doctored results without their knowledge.

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’

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.

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