Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Image duplication software debuts; papers that plagiarize Wikipedia; ‘Time to Get Serious About Research Fraud’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A review of a French hydroxychloroquine study that found it was “fully irresponsible“
An expression of concern for a paper that claimed the Koran had predicted the Higgs Boson
An infectious disease researcher that a U.S. federal watchdog said had “recklessly” faked data in grants worth millions
The retraction of a big Nature study on a tiny “dinosaur”
An author retracting a Nature commentary because of concerns about the section’s sponsorship

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 25.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Journal to retract paper that spawned #medbikini

From the *Journal of Vascular Surgery* paper

The Journal of Vascular Surgery says it will retract a paper about surgeons’ social media posts that said health care professionals who posted pictures of themselves in bikinis were engaging in “potentially unprofessional” behavior — and led to a firestorm on Twitter yesterday.

As Medscape reported yesterday before the retraction:

Medical professionals are tweeting pictures of themselves in swimsuits with the hashtag #MedBikini, accompanied by sharp rebukes of a study that labeled such images on social media as “potentially unprofessional.”

Author retracts Nature commentary over concerns about section’s sponsorship

Nature has retracted a recent commentary after the author complained that he had been misled by the relationship of the publication to a financial sponsor and told to avoid critiquing work from the institution. The journal says it is revisiting its “editorial guidelines and processes” in the wake of the case.

Kenneth Witwer, an RNA expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said he had been approached by Nature earlier this year to contribute a piece to one of the journal’s “Outlook” sections.

Outlook sections are sponsored, and in this case, the supporter was Nanjing University in China. One of the institution’s deans and star researchers, Chen-Yu Zhang, had arranged the section and written an article for it as well — a piece Witwer described as essentially an advertorial for Zhang’s questionable research. [Springer Nature, in comments to Retraction Watch, said that “The Zhang piece is advertorial, is clearly labelled as such and uses a different typeface from editorial content to promote transparency.”]

According to Nature policy:

Co-author of controversial hydroxychloroquine study has 2018 paper corrected for “unintentional mistake”

Didier Raoult, whose claims that hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 have been widely disputed, has had a 2018 paper corrected for what his team says was unintentional duplication of a figure.

Here’s the correction for “Identification of rickettsial immunoreactive proteins using a proximity ligation assay Western blotting and the traditional immunoproteomic approach,” which came four months after scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik pointed out potential issues in Figure 2 on PubPeer:

Why did a journal suddenly retract a 45-year-old paper over lack of informed consent?

A journal has retracted a 45-year-old case study over concerns that the authors had failed to obtain proper informed consent from the family they’d described.

The article, “Stickler syndrome report of a second Australian family,” appeared in Pediatric Radiology, a Springer Nature title, in 1975. The first author was Kazimierz Kozlowski, a prominent radiologist who was born in Poland and worked in the United States and Australia, where he studied skeletal diseases in children.

A big Nature study on a tiny dinosaur is being retracted

A paper on a pocket-sized winged “dinosaur” is being retracted after new unpublished findings cast doubt on the authors’ characterizations of their discovery.

The study, “Hummingbird-sized dinosaur from the Cretaceous period of Myanmar,” was published in Nature on March 11, 2020. Many news outlets, including the New York Times, Newsweek and National Geographic, picked up on the findings.

Then on March 18, Zhiheng Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with co-authors, posted a comment on bioRxiv about the study, casting doubt on whether the amber-encased specimen was in fact a dinosaur or avian species.

Nature updated the study with an expression of concern on May 29, which said:

Retraction of paper on romantic crushes marks second for psychology researcher

A psychology researcher who left her tenure track position at Northwestern University in 2018 amid concerns about the integrity of her data has lost a second paper.

Here’s the abstract of the 2018 paper, titled “Romantic crushes increase consumers’ preferences for strong sensory stimuli:”

Infectious disease researcher “recklessly” faked data in grants worth millions, says federal watchdog

A pediatric infectious disease specialist in California “recklessly” fabricated his data in a 2009 published study and four grant submissions, worth millions of dollars, to the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

The federal watchdog said in a settlement agreement published today that Prasadarao Nemani, of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly including falsified and/or fabricated data” in a 2009 paper — retracted in 2018 — and four NIH grant applications.

Specifically, Nemani (who has published under the name Nemani V Prasadarao):

Calling exercise data “atypical, improbable, and to put it bluntly, pretty weird,” sleuths call for seven retractions

A group of data sleuths is calling for the retraction of seven articles by an exercise physiologist in Brazil whose data they believe to be “highly unlikely” to have occurred experimentally.

In a preprint posted to the server SportRxiv, the group — led by Andrew Vigotsky, a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University — details their concerns about the work of Matheus Barbalho, a PhD student at the Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, part of the Universidade da Amazônia, in Belém. Barbalho’s mentor is Paulo Gentil.

In addition to the preprint, titled “Improbable data patterns in the work of Barbalho et al,” Greg Nuckols, one of the coauthors, has posted a lengthy “explainer” about the analysis.

The Brazilian group already has one retraction, for a study in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance titled “Evidence of a ceiling effect for training volume in muscle hypertrophy and strength in trained men—less is more?” According to the notice:

“[H]ow gullible reviewers and editors…can be”: An excerpt from Science Fictions

We’re pleased to present an excerpt from Stuart Ritchie’s new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth.

One of the best-known, and most absurd, scientific fraud cases of the twentieth century also concerned transplants – in this case, skin grafts. While working at the prestigious Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York City in 1974, the dermatologist William Summerlin presaged Paolo Macchiarini—an Italian surgeon who in 2008 published a (fraudulent) blockbuster paper in the top medical journal the Lancet on his successful transplant of a trachea—by claiming to have solved the transplant-rejection problem that Macchiarini encountered. Using a disarmingly straightforward new technique in which the donor skin was incubated and marinated in special nutrients prior to the operation, Summerlin had apparently
grafted a section of the skin of a black mouse onto a white one, with no immune rejection. Except he hadn’t. On the way to show the head of his lab his exciting new findings, he’d coloured in a patch of the white mouse’s fur with a black felt-tip pen, a deception later revealed by a lab technician who, smelling a rat (or perhaps, in this case, a mouse), proceeded to use alcohol to rub off the ink. There never were any successful grafts on the mice, and Summerlin was quickly fired.

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