Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Hamsters, cats, dogs, and other fake authors; a fraudster regains her medical license; how to ruin journal titles

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Sending thoughts to our readers and wishing them the best in this uncertain time.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

the retraction of a French study on hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19
the retraction of a well-publicized study from a JAMA journal about physician burnout
a tenth retraction for an associate vice president of research
another whodunit

How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

What it takes to correct the record: Autopsy of a COVID-19 corrigendum

We’ve been keeping track of retracted coronavirus papers, but what about corrections? Here’s a guest post from Richard Jones of Cardiff University about a paper that earned widespread media coverage but turned out to be wrong.

According to our best knowledge, this is the first report on COVID-19 infection and death among medical personnel in a Forensic Medicine unit.

So ended a letter from Thailand to the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, accepted on 9^th April 2020 within 3 days of receipt, and published as an ubiquitous “Pre-Proof.”

The authors of that letter stated that there had been only two COVID-19 patients amongst medical personnel in Thailand at that time, one of whom was a “forensic medicine professional” working in Bangkok.

French hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study withdrawn

The authors of a preprint on use of hydroxychloroquine — the controversial drug heavily promoted by, and now apparently taken by, President Trump, at least for a few more days — along with azithromycin for COVID-19 have withdrawn the paper.

The preprint, “Hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin: a potential interest in reducing in-hospital morbidity due to COVID-19 pneumonia (HI-ZY-COVID)?” was posted to medRxiv on May 11 by authors at Hopital Raymond Poincare, and sometime yesterday replaced with this statement:

Former grad student faked cancer research data, says federal watchdog

A former graduate student at the University of Cincinnati falsified data in a published article, since retracted, and an unpublished manuscript, according to government investigators.

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said Logan Fulford doctored images while working at the university on experiments supported by two federally funded grants. Fulford, who is now a senior clinical research associate at IQVIA, a health care consulting company, entered into a voluntary settlement with the agency but neither denied nor admitted to the misconduct.

The published paper, titled “The transcription factor FOXF1 promotes prostate cancer by stimulating the mitogen-activated protein kinase ERK5,” appeared in Science Signaling in 2016. Fulford was first author on the article, which the journal retracted in 2018, after initially flagging it with an expression of concern.

JAMA journal retracts well-publicized paper linking doctor burnout to patient safety

A JAMA journal has retracted a 2018 paper linking physician burnout to poor patient care, after a misconduct inquiry found evidence of shoddy work but not data fabrication.

The article, “Association between physician burnout and patient safety, professionalism, and patient satisfaction: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” was published in JAMA Internal Medicine by a group based at the National Institute for Health Research Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, in England. The journal also published a commentary on the article and three letters to the editor, which have been flagged to indicate the new retraction.

The paper — which concluded that burned-out doctors might be jeopardizing the well-being of their patients — received a significant amount of coverage in the media, with stories trumpeting the take-home message that:

Associate VP for research at Georgia State is up to 10 retractions

The associate vice president for research at Georgia State University and founding director of the university’s Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine has had his tenth paper retracted.

Like the nine previous retractions for Ming-Hui Zou, the work underlying the newly retracted paper in PLOS ONE was performed while Zou was at Oklahoma State University.

The extensive retraction notice for “Activation of the AMP-Activated Protein Kinase (AMPK) by Nitrated Lipids in Endothelial Cells” refers to problems in six of the paper’s figures, including unexpected similarities and likely splicing. It concludes:

A ‘very cautious’ process: Journal retracts reviews by anesthesiologist found to have committed fraud a decade ago

A journal has retracted three review articles by Joachim Boldt, the German anesthetist who currently occupies the second spot on the Retraction Watch leaderboard with 103 retractions.

The reviews, which appeared in Intensive Care Medicine, cover articles by Boldt that were published both well before and the same year as his scandal broke in 2010.

One article, from 2000, was titled “Volume therapy in the intensive care patient – we are still confused, but.” According to the retraction notice:

Another whodunit: The author no one can find

Readers, meet Beatriz Ychussie. Or don’t meet Beatriz Ychussie.

Ychussie is a co-author of three recently retracted math papers. Or maybe not.

The three articles — in the Journal of Inequalities and Applications, Advances in Difference Equations, and Fixed Point Theory and Applications, all Springer Nature titles — had an overlapping set of problems, including plagiarism and faked peer review. But they all had one particular problem when it came to Ychussie:

Weekend reads: Revelations about a controversial COVID-19 study; weaponizing uncertainty; a ‘super-spotter’ of duplicated images

Sending thoughts to our readers and wishing them the best in this uncertain time.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The story of what it takes to correct a flawed paper about COVID-19.
Two retractions as a yeast researcher risks losing her PhD.
Another loss in court for a cancer researcher.
A report on a researcher who faked data in seven papers and two grant applications.

How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Materials science group loses four papers, has four more flagged

A Springer Nature journal has retracted four papers by a group of materials scientists in France, Spain and Tunisia, and slapped expressions of concern on four more.

All eight papers, from Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics, share three common authors: Abdelmajid Lassoued, Salah Ammar, and Abdellatif Gadri, of Université de Gabès in Tunisia. The retractions and expressions of concern all relate to duplicate publication of other work by papers that include various members of the team as authors.

A typical retraction notice, for “Synthesis and characterization of Ni-doped α-Fe2O3 nanoparticles through co-precipitation method with enhanced photocatalytic activities”:

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