Retraction Watch

Pitt researchers sue journal for defamation following retraction

A pair of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are suing the Journal of Biological Chemistry for defamation after the publication retracted one of their papers for problematic images.

Raju Reddy and Aravind Reddy Tarugu, who are not related, claim the JBC and its publisher, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, defamed them by retracting their 2014 paper on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Reddy is a visiting associate professor of medicine at Pitt and chief of pulmonology at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Aravind Targugu, also identified as Aravind T. Reddy, is employed by Pitt.

According to the suit, filed in August and first reported by the The Pennsylvania Record, the researchers say the retraction “severely” harmed their reputations and caused:

Weekend reads: Disgraced surgeon earns prison sentence; politicians and plagiarism; parents who help their kids cheat

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:

A political science professor who is now up to eight retractions for plagiarism
A researcher who found the retraction of his paper “Kafkian“
A look at how slow journals can be to correct the record — and why that matters.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

‘We badly need to change processes’: How ‘slow, opaque and inconsistent’ journals’ responses to misconduct can be

Two researchers from Japan — Jun Iwamoto and the late Yoshihiro Sato — have slowly crept up our leaderboard of retractions to positions 3 and 4. They have that dubious distinction because a group of researchers from the University of Auckland the University of Aberdeen, who have spent years analyzing the work. As their efforts continue, those researchers have been analyzing how journals respond to allegations, and what effect Sato and Iwamoto’s misconduct has had on the clinical literature. We asked three of the common authors of two recently published papers to answer some questions.

Retraction Watch (RW): Tell us a bit about the case you analyzed in these two papers, and what you found.

Authors “in shock” when image reuse doesn’t fly with publishers of paper on emu oil and stem cells

A team of researchers in Iran has lost a 2018 paper on using emu oil to prepare stem cells because they tried to recycle previously published images.

The journal told us that a whistleblower had raised concerns about the article, prompting an involved back-and-forth with the authors and even efforts at accommodation before the eventual decision to pull the paper.

The article, “A biomimetic emu oil-blended electrospun nanofibrous mat for maintaining stemness of adipose tissue-derived stem cells,” appeared in Biopreservation and Biobanking. According to the abstract:

“I cannot agree to this unfounded, unscientific, and rather Kafkian retraction.”

Mladen Pavicic, of the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and the Ruder Boskovic Institute in Zagreb, Croatia has had a paper retracted from Nanoscale Research Letters.

He’s not happy about it.

In a preprint posted to arXiv, “Response to “Retraction Note: Can Two-Way Direct Communication Protocols Be Considered Secure,” Pavicic writes:

Political science prof up to five retractions after she “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources”

A professor of political science at the University of Porto in Portugal has had at least five papers retracted for plagiarism.

Or, as one journal put it, Teresa Cierco “carelessly uses parts of diverse sources.”

Cierco’s areas of research include Kosovo, Macedonia, and Timor-Leste. The retractions, for papers published in 2013 and 2014, began in 2013, with three happening this year.

Cierco told Retraction Watch that she now realizes that she “did things wrong and tried to correct them.”

Weekend reads: Double-dipping with industry funding; a bully is rehired; organized crime scholar charged with money laundering

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A look at why an infamous paper on autism and vaccines continues to be cited;
A journal that decided to play it safe instead of retracting a paper;
The lifting of sanctions on Duke University following concerns about how they handled cases of misconduct.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

NIH to lift Duke sanctions stemming from misconduct

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to lift sanctions it placed on Duke University more than 1.5 years ago following concerns about how the school responded to recent cases of misconduct.

In a memo today to faculty and staff obtained by Retraction Watch, Lawrence Carin, Duke vice president for research wrote:

‘We decided to play it safe.’ Journal doesn’t retract paper even though the authors neglected to mention that they didn’t do the experiments themselves.

An eye journal has issued an expression of concern for a paper on glaucoma that, given the litany of problems with the data, could well have been retracted. Not least of the issues: The authors admitted to using an outside firm to conduct experiments they’d tried to pass off as having done themselves.

The article, “Fisetin rescues retinal functions by suppressing inflammatory response in a DBA/2J mouse model of glaucoma,” came from a group at People’s Hospital of Rizhao. It appeared online last February in Documenta Ophthalmologica, the journal of the International Society for Clinical Electrophysiology and Vision.

According to the researchers:

Food poisoning researcher up to four spoiled papers

The Journal of Food Safety has retracted two papers by a group from Iran over concerns that the work was tainted by problems with peer review and bad data.

The articles, both of which appeared in 2018, came from the lab of Ebrahim Rahimi, of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Tehran. Rahimi, by our count, has now lost four papers for questionable peer review and findings.

For Rahimi’s article, “Antibiotic resistance properties and genotypic characterization of enterotoxins in the Staphylococcus aureus strains isolated from traditional sweets,” the retraction notice reads:

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