Retraction Watch

Peer review bandits purloin again, this time in chemistry

A pair of researchers in India have lost a 2017 paper published by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry after an inquiry found that they’d stolen the guts of the work from an unpublished manuscript one of them had reviewed for another journal.

The article in question, “Tri-s-triazine (s-heptazine), a novel electron-deficient core for soft self-assembled supramolecular structures,” appeared in Chemical Communications was submitted on August 4, 2017 and published on September 25, 2017, and was written by Irla Kumar and Sandeep Kumar, of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore.

Sandeep Kumar, who is now retired, was a leading figure in the field of liquid crystals. The Royal Society of Chemistry feted him as one of the “most cited” researchers in Chemical Communications and another of its journals in 2006 and 2007. He also served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Liquid Crystals — a post that is particularly relevant in light of what follows.

According to the retraction notice:

Publisher slaps expressions of concern on 20 papers by nutrition supplement-selling doctor

More than two years after being made aware of undisclosed conflicts of interest by a Minnesota physician who ran afoul of the U.S. FDA for health claims about supplements sold by his company, a publisher has added expressions of concern on 20 of the doctor’s papers.

As we reported in August 2019, on Feb. 23, 2018, Stephen Barrett — a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatch — sent Dove Press a message about the 20 papers by Marty Hinz:

Authors to correct influential Imperial College COVID-19 report after learning it cited a withdrawn preprint

A March paper by researchers at Imperial College London that, in the words of the Washington Post, “helped upend U.S. and U.K. coronavirus strategies,” cited a preprint that had been withdrawn.

Retraction Watch became aware of the issue after being contacted by a PubPeer commenter who had noted the withdrawal earlier this month. Following questions from Retraction Watch this weekend, the authors said they plan to submit a correction.

In March, the New York Times wrote:

Weekend reads: The promise and peril of speedy coronavirus research; a JAMA retraction; Google Scholar indexes a lunch menu

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.

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The retraction of a paper claiming that aerosolized coronavirus spread much further than previously thought
Two Elsevier journals that haven’t retracted papers a year after a university asked them to
The retraction of a paper in Science on electromagnetics
A Springer Nature journal that took four years to retract a plagiarizing paper

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Too hot to handle: Authors retract Science paper on electromagnetics

Sometimes scientific findings can be too hot to handle. Literally.

A team of researchers in India and Japan who reported breakthrough results in two papers about electromagnetics, including an article in Science, are retracting the articles because the exciting data resulted from experimental error. To be precise: unbeknownst to them, inadvertent heating of their samples had contaminated their data.

The first author of both articles is Chanchal Sow, of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. The last author on both is Yoshiteru Maeno, a professor of physics at Kyoto University.

Here’s the notice:

Former UCSD prof who resigned amid investigation into China ties has paper flagged for using the wrong test

Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern about a 2020 paper on the genetics of colorectal cancer by a group in China whose results were pegged on a test that couldn’t have produced the findings.

The article, “Circulating tumor DNA methylation profiles enable early diagnosis, prognosis prediction, and screening for colorectal cancer,” appeared in January, with authors from both academia and an outfit called the Guangzhou Youze Biological Pharmaceutical Technology Company.

Study claiming broader spread of aerosolized coronavirus is retracted

A schematic based on the now-retracted findings, as published in newspapers

A study which found that aerosolized novel coronavirus could be spread nearly 15 feet — twice what health officials had believed — has been retracted, but the journal isn’t saying why.

Practical Preventive Medicine published the paper in early March. Titled “An epidemiological investigation of 2019 novel coronavirus diseases through aerosol－borne transmission by public transport,” the authors, from institutions in China, looked at the spread of the virus on a bus linked to one infected passenger.

According to the abstract:

A year after a university asked two Elsevier journals to retract papers, they haven’t

How long should a retraction take?

As Retraction Watch readers may recall, that’s a question we ask often. In 2018, for example, we wrote a post noting that nearly two years after the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had requested retractions, the journals had done nothing. Some of the papers have since been retracted.

We have occasion to ask the question again, about a different case at the University of Maryland.

‘Fiasco’ as publisher misses authors’ request to hold off publishing their paper on rubber gloves

The authors of a 2019 paper on rubber gloves have retracted their work after the journal to which they’d submitted their manuscript somehow missed their request to put a hold on the article.

The paper, “Are rubber gloves marketed as accelerator-free truly free of accelerators?,” was published in Dermatitis, a Lippincott Williams & Wilkins title. The authors, led by Makenzie Pillsbury, of the University of Minnesota, had looked for traces of potential allergens in gloves. According to the abstract of the article:

An author realized a paper had plagiarized his thesis. It took the journal four years to retract it.

After more than four years of doing, well, not much, evidently, Scientific Reports — a Springer Nature title — has retracted a paper which plagiarized from the bachelor’s thesis of a Hungarian mathematician.

The article, “Modified box dimension and average weighted receiving time on the weighted fractal networks,” was purportedly written by a group of researchers from China led by Meifeng Dai, of the Nonlinear Scientific Research Center at Jiangsu University.

Except it wasn’t. As the retraction notice states:

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