Retraction Watch

“Riddled with errors”: Study of cell phones and breast cancer retracted

A journal has retracted a study that said exposure to radiofrequency radiation increased the risk of breast cancer after an epidemiologist found that some of the papers it relied upon did not measure radiofrequency radiation at all, in a decision that the lead author has called “unfair.”

The study, titled “Exposure to radiofrequency radiation increases the risk of breast cancer: A systematic review and meta‑analysis,” was published in Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine on November 9th. The paper analyzed eight prior studies — four case‑control and four cohort studies — concluding “that radiofrequency radiation exposure significantly increased the risk of breast cancer, especially in women aged ≥50 years and in individuals who used electric appliances, such as mobile phones and computers.”

In early December, Frank de Vocht, an epidemiologist at the University of Bristol, decided to investigate the study. He explained in an email to Retraction Watch:

Weekend reads: The fake author with more than 200 papers; accusations of ‘heinous plagiarism’; PETA requests a retraction

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:

Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers
University clears scientist of logging industry’s misconduct allegations
Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off
After grad student suicide, misconduct findings, university suspends professor
“Falsifying elements” prompt retraction of three more papers by former “Peorian of the Year”
Bad blood at a lab leads to retraction after postdoc publishes study without supervisor’s permission

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 89.

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

Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers

The pantheon of husband-wife teams in science includes Marie and Pierre Curie, Gerty and Carl Cori, even Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the founders of BioNTech, which collaborated with Pfizer on a Covid-19 vaccine.

To that list we hesitatingly add Ahmed Elkhouly and his spouse.

Elkhouly, a medical resident at St. Francis Medical Center, in Trenton, N.J., has lost five papers from the journal Cureus over a rather curious (ahem) domestic arrangement. According to the journal, Elkhouly used his unnamed wife as a peer reviewer on the articles, whose topics ranged from a case study on appendicitis to the neurological manifestations of COVID-19 infection.

Here’s the retraction notice for the COVID paper — which, by the way, raises our tally of retracted papers on the pandemic to 89:

University clears scientist of logging industry’s misconduct allegations

The University of Tasmania has cleared one of its scientists of wrongdoing after she was accused by the Australian logging industry of publishing flawed research linking logging to increased forest flammability and of having a conflict of interest with an environmental group.

The university then implemented mandatory research integrity training for its school of geography, which Jennifer Sanger, the researcher who worked in that school, suggests is due to the university’s “very strong ties with the forestry industry.”

In May 2020, Sanger published a study titled, “Propensities of Old Growth, Mature and Regrowth Wet Eucalypt Forest, and Eucalyptus Nitens Plantation, to Burn during Wildfire and Suffer Fire-Induced Crown Death,” in the journal Fire. The study found that logged forests were generally more flammable than those left unlogged, a finding that has been upheld in recent research.

On August 13, Sanger requested that Fire pull the study, according to Alistair Smith, the journal’s editor-in-chief. Sanger asked for a retraction after a reader went through the study’s dataset and found issues with its analysis, she explained in an email:

Irony alert: stolen voices, relative rip-off

We’re always on the lookout for papers with that fillip of irony that lets us wonder if the Great Comedian in the Sky enjoys our little project. This week, we found two such articles.

One involves a 2008 paper in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research titled “Examining Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis as One of the Main Views on the Relationship Between Language and Thought.” The author was Iman Tohidian, an Irani scholar. Except, in fact, the author was not Iman Tohidian, who appears to have what we might consider a rather appropriative view of the relationship between language and thought.

According to the retraction notice:

After grad student suicide, misconduct findings, university suspends professor

Nearly two years after a doctoral student hanged himself in a building on the campus of the University of Florida, in Gainesville, his supervisor has been placed on paid leave, a move that follows a report released last month that found evidence of misconduct at three different computing conferences.

Huixiang Chen was found dead in June 2019, while working in the research group of Tao Li, a computing engineer. A few months before his suicide, Chen wrote a paper for a prestigious, annual conference in computing, the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, or ISCA, which is one of the three mentioned in the report.

Chen’s paper was accepted, but his death, before the conference began, sparked allegations that the peer-review process had been unfairly compromised and that Li had coerced his student to publish faulty results. The University of Florida launched an investigation into the circumstances of Chen’s death shortly after his suicide, but those findings have not been publicly released.

Li did not respond to requests for comment. The report on the conferences, released February 8 by a “joint investigative committee” from two organizations that sponsored the ISCA meeting, reached four main conclusions, starting with:

“Falsifying elements” prompt retraction of three more papers by former “Peorian of the Year”

Jasti Rao, a former star scientist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria whose career flamed out over concerns about misconduct, gambling and allegations that he had mistreated employees, is now up to 16 retractions.

The International Journal of Oncology, a Spandidos title, has retracted three of Rao’s papers dating back to 2011, citing the presence of “falsifying elements” in the images.

Here’s the notice for the 2011 paper “Oncogenic role of p53 is suppressed by si‑RNA bicistronic construct of uPA, uPAR and cathepsin‑B in meningiomas both in vitro and in vivo”:

Bad blood at a lab leads to retraction after postdoc publishes study without supervisor’s permission

A former postdoc at Stony Brook University who was moonlighting in a different lab has lost a study after a university investigation found issues with the work, including “overlap” with prior grants and an earlier study that her supervisor had published, as well as misreported data.

The supervisor — neuroscientist Joshua Plotkin, who was the complainant in the investigation — said that the study was published without his permission, according to an email seen by Retraction Watch. The former postdoc, Catarina Cunha, has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a “witch hunt,” claiming that the university ignored her exculpatory evidence and that the paper’s findings are valid and original.

Weekend reads: A JAMA editor resigns; why correcting the record takes so long; focus on predatory journals

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal flags a dozen papers as likely paper mill products a year after sleuths identified them
Authors retract Nature Majorana paper, apologize for “insufficient scientific rigour”
Elsevier journals ask Retraction Watch to review COVID-19 papers
Drug researchers retract two papers, one because “human stem cells were actually mouse stem cells”
Supplement-selling doctor who ran afoul of FDA and state medical board up to 20 retractions

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 87.

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

Supplement-selling doctor who ran afoul of FDA and state medical board up to 20 retractions

Dove Press, which late last year retracted more than a dozen articles by a U.S. physician who appears to have used the articles and other publications as marketing material for dietary supplements he sold, has pulled six more of his papers.

The new retractions make 20 removals by Dove — a unit of Taylor & Francis — for Marty Hinz.

As we have reported, Hinz has a long history of running afoul of regulatory bodies, from the FDA to the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice, which in March 2020 reprimanded and fined him more than $7,000 following allegations including that he claimed on his website to have “reinvented the medical science foundation of Parkinson’s disease” and to “treat and do things for our Parkinson’s disease patients that most doctors of the world believe are impossible.”

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