Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Why science needs red teams; when clinical trial participants lie; kids cheating in science fairs?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A paper on vaccines in Nigeria retracted because its author list omitted key contributors
A French university rescinding a PhD for misconduct
Ten retractions for an itinerant legal scholar who faked his affiliation
Two more journals pushing back against Impact Factor suppression

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 25.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Fowl play? Poultry researcher has two more papers retracted for “grave mistakes”

The journal Poultry Science has retracted two papers for authorship issues.

The first author on both articles was Sajid Umar, of the Arid Agriculture University, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, who now has lost at least four papers for similar reasons.

One article, from 2016, was titled “Synergistic effects of thymoquinone and curcumin on immune response and anti-viral activity against avian influenza virus (H9N2) in turkeys.” According to the retraction notice:

Painfully awkward: Duplicate anesthesiology study retracted

A study that compared drugs used to reverse the effects of relaxants for surgery has been retracted because the majority of the results were already published.

The study, “Comparison of sugammadex and pyridostigmine bromide for reversal of rocuronium-induced neuromuscular blockade in short-term pediatric surgery,” appeared in the journal Medicine in February 2020.

The work found that the drug sugammadex worked faster than pyridostigmine in children undergoing surgery, and doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. But a study with the same authors and same name (barring a single uncapitalized letter) had already been published in the journal Anesthesia and Pain Medicine on July 31, 2019.

“Consistently unsurprised”: Nigerian vaccine study with no Nigerian authors retracted

Last month, PLOS ONE published a paper reporting on a trial to improve the uptake of the measles vaccine in Nigeria. The researchers were affiliated with IDinsight, a San Francisco-based “global advisory, data analytics, and research organization that helps development leaders maximize their social impact.”

San Francisco is about 7,800 miles from Lagos, and the list of authors — Sam Brownstone, Alison Connor and Daniel Stein, a former economist at the World Bank — seemed suspiciously devoid of Nigerian names.

That omission was even more strange given the title of the article: “Improving measles vaccine uptake rates in Nigeria: An RCT evaluating the impact of incentive sizes and reminder calls on vaccine uptake.” Almost immediately after publication, Ejemai Eboreime, a physician and public health worker, pointed out on Twitter the implausibility of the implied claim that no local scientists were involved in a randomized controlled trial covering nine clinics throughout the country — which he alleged also was a violation of local research ethics provisions.

A mystery: How did this team plagiarize an unpublished paper?

A study on a wireless communication algorithm was retracted for being an exact duplicate of a paper submitted to a separate journal last year — but the authors were different and it’s unclear how they got hold of it.

The retracted study, “Energy-aware resource management for uplink non-orthogonal multiple access: Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning” was published in the Elsevier journal Future Generation Computer Systems. Neither the author of the original work who we were able to reach, nor either journal involved, say they know how the unpublished manuscript got into another group’s hands.

Here’s the (complicated) timeline:

French university rescinds researcher’s PhD after misconduct finding

*Saccharomyces cerevisiae* cells in DIC microscopy via Wikimedia

A university in France has stripped a researcher of her doctoral degree after she was found to have committed misconduct in at least two studies of yeast.

As we reported in May, Marjorie Petitjean, who received her PhD from the National Institute of Applied Sciences at the University of Toulouse, was accused of having fabricated and manipulated data while in the lab of Jean-Luc Parrou — who described her output as “a complete work of fiction.”

Petitjean left Parrou’s lab for a post-doc in Scotland, where, he said, she continued her bad habits:

“I am the first one to regret not being more careful in the first place”: Paper on rat semen retracted

A journal has retracted a paper on the semen of diabetic rats after learning about problems with authorship, and possibly more.

Physiology International, which also is called Acta Physiologica Hungarica, published the article, “The effects of sericin in recovering spermatogenesis and sexual hormone levels in diabetic rats,” in 2019. The first author was Ali Olfati, of Tabriz University in Iran. The second author — on paper, at least — was Felipe Martínez-Pastor, of the University of León, in Spain.

Not so. Per the retraction notice (which now directs to a “page not found” error):

Itinerant legal scholar who claimed Tufts affiliation up to 10 retractions

A legal scholar who claims to have held professorships in Italy and the United States and to have written more than 600 papers has had 10 of those articles retracted, some for plagiarism and the most recent also because of a faked affiliation.

Dimitris Liakopoulos, according to his self-written ORCID profile, has

“Stunned, very confused”: Two more journals push back against Impact Factor suppression

At least two more journals are fighting decisions by Clarivate — the company behind the Impact Factor — to suppress them from the 2019 list of journals assigned a metric that many rightly or wrongly consider career-making.

In a letter to the editorial board of Body Image, an Elsevier journal that was one of 33 suppressed by Clarivate for excessive self-citation, editor in chief Tracy Tylka and nine journal colleagues write:

Better (publishing) background checks: A way toward greater integrity in science

Science represents perhaps the single greatest accomplishment of humankind. Of all human institutions, organisations and establishments, science has proven an effective tool for driving progress. It is inherently self-correcting, and tolerates — and even demands — skepticism, challenge and self-critique. Few human institutions can make a similar claim.

However, there is increasing recognition and concern that current research incentives are perverse, and promote behaviors that undermine the very foundations of science. Under the guise of altruism and independence, the self-serving, self-promoting nature of academic science today is typically neither declared nor acknowledged. The dispassionate, objective analysis and presentation of data is frequently lost, as results are seen as personal (“my data”) and subservient to a personal or political agenda. As a consequence, scientists are losing their authority to speak, genuine experts are often disparaged and ignored, and our society is diminished.

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