Retraction Watch

Authors of a case report on COVID-19 in a prisoner say they ‘are unsatisfied with the quality of [their] work’

The authors of a 2020 case study of COVID-19 have retracted the work because they were “unsatisfied with the quality” of the work. Nor, judging from the retraction notice, should they — or the journal that published the report — be.

The article was titled “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection Mimicking as Pulmonary Tuberculosis in an Inmate” and was written by a group led by Hina Akbar, of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, in Memphis. According to the abstract:

Here, we describe a case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a low prevalence area which was initially diagnosed and managed as pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in a high-risk inmate population. These ambiguous presentations can lead to mismanagement of such patients resulting in potentially fatal outcomes and public health crises in confined facilities. This also highlights the significance of a high index of clinical suspicion for SARS-CoV-2 especially in high risk and vulnerable populations.

That might be true, but evidently the article did a poor job of making the argument. The nostra culpa retraction notice states:

Weekend reads: The ‘plagiarism hunter’; targeting academics over grant fraud; data manipulation at the World Bank

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:

Publisher investigating all of an author’s papers following reporting by Retraction Watch
Highly criticized paper on dishonesty retracted
Authors who don’t disclose conflicts of interest? “[W]e cannot force them to do so,” says editor
Former Emory division director committed misconduct, says federal watchdog
Highly cited paper marks 14th retraction for Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 155. And there are now 30,000 retractions in our database.

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

Highly cited paper marks 14th retraction for Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher

A chemistry journal has retracted a 2014 paper by a group from China after the first author on the article copped to having Photoshopped a figure — marking the second retraction for members of the group in less than a week and the 14th for one of the authors.

The paper, “Polymer nanodots of graphitic carbon nitride as effective fluorescent probes for the detection of Fe3+ and Cu2+ ions,” appeared in Nanoscale and was written by a group with ties to Soochow University, Hefei University of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, and Yale University. The first author was Shouwei Zhang, whose name appears on at least seven papers flagged on PubPeer for problematic images.

The senior author was Xiangke Wang, whose tally of PubPeer entries is now at 76 and who now has 14 retractions. One of those, the 2013 article “Superior adsorption capacity of hierarchical iron oxide@magnesium silicate magnetic nanorods for fast removal of organic pollutants from aqueous solution,” was retracted from the Journal of Materials Chemistry A on September 13, with the following notice:

Former Emory division director committed misconduct, says federal watchdog

A cancer researcher who was a former division director at Emory University in Atlanta “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsifying data” in a federal grant application and six published papers, according to new findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Ya Wang, who retired from Emory a year ago, “falsified protein immunoblot data by reusing and relabeling the same images to represent different experimental conditions in mammalian tissue culture models of DNA damage and repair in eighteen (18) figure panels in eleven (11) figures in one (1) grant application and six (6) published papers,” the ORI said.

Wang “neither admits nor denies” ORI’s findings of misconduct, according to the agency’s report on the case. She agreed to a four-year ban on any federal funding, and to correct or retract four papers:

Authors who don’t disclose conflicts of interest? “[W]e cannot force them to do so,” says editor

Nanshan Zhong, by 东方(美國之音記者) via Wikimedia

Do journal editors have the responsibility to ensure authors are disclosing relevant conflicts of interest?

According to the editor of one Elsevier journal, the answer is “no.”

The case marks the second time this year that the editor of an Elsevier journal has been less than dogged about enforcing the company’s clearly stated policies about undisclosed conflicts.

Highly criticized paper on dishonesty retracted

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has retracted a highly influential 2012 paper by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University whose work has been called into question over concerns about the data in some of his publications.

The retraction wasn’t unexpected. Ariely and his colleagues said last month that they would be pulling the article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end,” in the wake of revelations that some of the data in the study appear to have been fabricated.

As Stephanie Lee of BuzzFeed reported in August:

Publisher investigating all of an author’s papers following reporting by Retraction Watch

Less than two weeks after Retraction Watch reported that an abstract from 2019 included what appeared to be text from plagiarism detection software, the publisher has subjected the paper to an expression of concern and is investigating all of the lead author’s papers.

The paper,”Identification of Selective Forwarding Attacks in Remote locator Network utilizing Adaptive Trust Framework,” appeared as part of an IOP Conference Series. Nick Wise, an engineering graduate student at Cambridge, flagged the incident on Twitter, which IOP Publishing told us they had not yet heard about.

Today, IOP Publishing spokesperson Rachael Harper told Retraction Watch:

Weekend reads: A ‘hoax paper’ author resigns; Uyghur DNA papers retracted; a year without p values

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Introducing two sites that claim to sell authorships on scientific papers
Authors object after Springer Nature journal cedes to publisher Frontiers’ demand for retraction
University orders PhD supervisor to retract paper that plagiarized his student
Obama intelligence official shortchanged grad student in 2015 book
‘Misleading and inaccurate information’: Rocky tenure for high mountain paper as complaints prompt retraction

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 154. And there are now 30,000 retractions in our database.

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

‘Misleading and inaccurate information’: Rocky tenure for high mountain paper as complaints prompt retraction

A journal has retracted a study that sought to dispel fears about the risks — real and inflated — associated with travel to high altitudes after receiving complaints from a group of experts who found fault with the paper.

That’s the official version. The backstory is somewhat more complex.

“Acute Mountain Sickness, High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, and High Altitude Cerebral Edema: A view from the High Andes” was published online in February 2021 in Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology, an Elsevier title. The authors were Gustavo Zubieta-Calleja and his daughter, Natalia Zubieta-DeUrioste, of the High Altitude Pulmonary and Pathology Institute in La Paz, Bolivia — which, at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level, is no stranger to hypoxia.

According to the abstract:

Obama intelligence official shortchanged grad student in 2015 book

A top intelligence official in the Obama administration failed to adequately credit a research assistant for a 2015 book but eventually relented after the grad student refused to back down about the slight, Retraction Watch has learned.

Gregory Treverton, who served as chairman of President Obama’s National Intelligence Council, wrote “National Intelligence and Science: Beyond the Great Divide in Analysis and Policy” with Wilhelm Agrell, a Swedish political scientist. At the time, Treverton was at the RAND Corporation, and he enlisted the help of Tyler Lippert, then a student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and a RAND analyst.

According to Lippert, Treverton used extensive passages of text that Lippert provided to him with no acknowledgment that Lippert had done the work. Emails between Lippert and Treverton obtained by Retraction Watch show an increasingly acrimonious exchange between the two scholars.

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