“The most horrific time of my career.” What do you do when you realize years of your published work is built on an error?

Nicola Smith, credit Karl Welsch, Welsch Photography

In September 2019 Nicola Smith, a molecular pharmacologist in Australia, faced a brutal decision. She’d realized that she’d made a mistake — or rather, failed to catch a mistake in her group’s research before the crippling error was published — in two academic articles which were the culmination of years of work. And she could either tell the world, or pretend it never happened.

Her students had been having trouble reproducing lab data. Once she looked into it and she figured out why, she told them, “Guys, you’re not going to believe this.” A cloning error had ensured the experiments were doomed to fail from the start.

If she came clean, she knew that at least one of the articles would most likely be retracted and she’d have to live with a lasting mark on her and her team’s record. “What can I do to minimize the impact” on her two students? Smith thought at the time.

In particular, Tony Ngo,who was first author on both papers and had recently finished a PhD in her lab, was looking forward to a future in academia. Smith was terrified of tarnishing his prospects.

What was to stop her from just keeping quiet about it?

Continue reading “The most horrific time of my career.” What do you do when you realize years of your published work is built on an error?

Weekend reads: How COVID-19 has changed publications; peer review and women; is ‘manuscript recycling’ OK?

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:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 74.

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

Continue reading Weekend reads: How COVID-19 has changed publications; peer review and women; is ‘manuscript recycling’ OK?

Holy cow: “The article as written contains misleading information and omits important details.”

via Flickr

An agriculture journal has put the “retraction” brand on a 2020 study about calving cattle after the editors learned that the researchers had misrepresented aspects of their work. 

“Changes in rumen fermentation, bacterial community, and predicted functional pathway in Holstein cows with and without subacute ruminal acidosis during the periparturient period,” appeared in March in the Journal of Dairy Science. The senior author of the article was Shigeru Sato, of the Graduate School of Veterinary Sciences at Iwate University in Japan. 

According to the retraction notice (which is only mentioned at the very bottom of the original article’s page, as a “linked article”): 

Continue reading Holy cow: “The article as written contains misleading information and omits important details.”

Columbia grad student faked data in study of socioeconomics and life experiences, says retraction notice

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has retracted a 2018 paper because, according to a retraction notice, the first author changed data in a way that “resulted in incorrect and misleading results.”

The article, “Cardiovascular and self-regulatory consequences of SES-based social identity threat,” claims to show that socioeconomic status-based “social identity threat can go from ‘in the air’ to ‘under the skin’ to influence physiological and self-regulatory processes.” It has been cited twice in addition to the retraction notice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Here’s the retraction notice:

Continue reading Columbia grad student faked data in study of socioeconomics and life experiences, says retraction notice

“This retraction is one of the fastest I ever experienced after reporting a paper to a journal editor.”

Elisabeth Bik

A researcher who has had more than 40 papers questioned by scientific sleuths has lost a second to retraction.

On December 14, Elisabeth Bik reported problems in 39 papers coauthored by Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China, to the editors of the journals that had published the papers. PubPeer commenters found problems in several other papers, and Bik tallied the 45 articles in a December 18 post.

In May, Tang lost a paper from PLOS ONE that Bik had flagged for the journal all the way back in 2015 — a delay that is not unusual for the journal, but becoming less common.

But the response this time was swift, at least for one journal. DNA and Cell Biology, a Mary Ann Liebert title, retracted “microRNA-34a-Upregulated Retinoic Acid-Inducible Gene-I Promotes Apoptosis and Delays Cell Cycle Transition in Cervical Cancer Cells” this week. (The exact date of the retraction is unclear, as Bik notes below.)

Here’s the notice:

Continue reading “This retraction is one of the fastest I ever experienced after reporting a paper to a journal editor.”

JAMA journal retracts its first paper, on exercise and heart disease

The authors of a 2019 meta-analysis in a JAMA journal on exercise and heart disease have retracted the paper after discovering that a quarter of the studies they’d used in the analysis did not belong. 

The retraction is the first for the journal, which had published some 2,800 articles before having to pull one, Frederick P. Rivara, the editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. One in 2,800, we should note, is quite close to the 4 in 10,000 rate of retraction in the overall literature.

The study, from a group at the Universities of Manchester and Brighton, in the United Kingdom, was titled “Accelerometer- and pedometer-based physical activity interventions among adults with cardiometabolic conditions: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” and appeared in JAMA Network Open. 

The authors, led by Alexander Hodkinson, looked at 36 randomized clinical trials and found that: 

Continue reading JAMA journal retracts its first paper, on exercise and heart disease

PLOS ONE retracts paper purporting to be about lung ultrasound for COVID-19 but that had suspicious overlap with pre-pandemic article

PLOS ONE has retracted a paper on pneumonia in people with Covid-19 after the authors could not allay concerns about the integrity of their data. 

The article, “Lung ultrasound score in establishing the timing of intubation in COVID-19 interstitial pneumonia: A preliminary retrospective observational study,” appeared in September and was written by a group from Zhejiang University School of Medicine, in Hangzhou, China. 

About three months after publication, PLOS ONE issued an expression of concern about the article, citing suspicious overlap with a 2018 paper in a different journal. It concluded:

Continue reading PLOS ONE retracts paper purporting to be about lung ultrasound for COVID-19 but that had suspicious overlap with pre-pandemic article

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”:

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

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:

Continue reading Journal becomes “victim of an organized rogue editor network”

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:

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):

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