Retraction Watch

Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation

A physiology journal has retracted two papers after an institutional investigation found a heart researcher falsified data and figures in the articles.

A committee at the Ohio State University found Govindasamy Ilangovan, an associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the school, falsified figures and reused data, according to the retraction notices published in Heart and Circulatory Physiology, a journal of the American Physiological Society.

The two papers, “Heat shock protects cardiac cells from doxorubicin-induced toxicity by activating p38 MAPK and phosphorylation of small heat shock protein 27,” and “HSP27 regulates p53 transcriptional activity in doxorubicin-treated fibroblasts and cardiac H9c2 cells: p21 upregulation and G2/M phase cell cycle arrest,” first appeared nearly 20 years ago. They have received 132 citations in total, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notices detail how Ilangovan repurposed and relabelled Western blots from both published and unpublished works. One of the figures also was “inaccurate” due to “addition of false bands” in a Western blot, but the notice did not explicitly attribute the problems with the figure to Ilangovan.

Weekend reads: MDMA papers retracted; COVID-19 vaccine paper retracted for the second time; who gets cited more?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

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

A scientist peer-reviewed an article that plagiarized his work. Then he saw it published elsewhere.

When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work.

“It’s so blatant,” Payne, an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, posted on X.

Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere.

“I had imagined they would just keep submitting it to new journals until it got accepted, because it was so brazenly plagiarized that they clearly didn’t care,” Payne told Retraction Watch.

Months later, Payne’s worry was justified. The paper, by researchers at First Moscow State Medical University, in Russia, appeared in Wiley’s Proteomics in May.

Authors retract quantum physics paper from Science after finding mistakes

A team of physicists has retracted a paper from Science after they discovered mistakes in their data and statistical analysis when following up on their work.

The paper “A room-temperature single-photon source based on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms” published in 2018, garnered 117 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Of these, 97 citations came after the authors corrected the paper in 2020 to adjust for updated calibrations, which they said did not affect the conclusions of the article.

This correction was unrelated to the reasons for retraction, said corresponding author Tilman Pfau, a professor of physics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

Exclusive: Publisher to retract article for excessively citing one researcher after Retraction Watch inquiry

A paper that cited a single researcher’s work in 53 of 64 references will be retracted following our inquiries, the publisher of the journal has told Retraction Watch.

The article, ‘Culturally-informed for designing motorcycle fire rescue: Empirical study in developing country’, published in June in AIP Advances, overwhelmingly cites the work of Muhammed Imam Ammarullah, a lecturer at Universitas Pasundan in West Java, Indonesia, sometimes without obvious relevance to the text.

An anonymous tipster came across the soon-to-be retracted paper on Google Scholar, then alerted the editors at AIP Advances in June to the strange citation pattern. The journal investigated, but didn’t acknowledge a problem with the excessive citations to Ammarullah’s work in their initial response to the complaint. Instead, they identified issues with six other, unrelated citations, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

Former Maryland dept. chair with $19 million in grants faked data in 13 papers, feds say

A former department chair engaged in research misconduct in work funded by 19 grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Richard Eckert, formerly the chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and deputy director of the university’s Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, faked data in 13 published papers and two grant applications, ORI found.

The ORI finding stated Eckert “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by” every NIH grant on which he served as principal investigator, totaling more than $19 million. The finding also lists multiple “Center Core Grants” worth hundreds of millions for shared resources and facilities at research centers.

What’s in a picture? Two decades of image manipulation awareness and action

This year marks the 20thanniversary of the publication of “What’s in a picture? The temptation of image manipulation,” in which I described the problem of image manipulation in biomedical research.

Two decades later, much has changed. I am reassured by the heightened awareness of this issue and the numerous efforts to address it by various stakeholders in the publication process, but I am disappointed that image manipulation remains such an extensive problem in the biomedical literature. (Note: I use the term “image manipulation” throughout this piece as a generic term to refer to both image manipulation (e.g., copy/paste, erasure, splicing, etc.) and image duplication.)

In 2002, I was the managing editor of The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), and STM journals were transitioning away from paper submissions. We had just implemented online manuscript submission, and authors often sent figure files in the wrong file format. One day, I assisted an author by reformatting some figure files. In one of the Western blot image panels, I noticed sharp lines around some of the bands, indicating they had either been copied and pasted into the image or the intensity of those bands had been selectively altered.

I vividly recall my reaction, which was, “Oh shit, this is going to be a problem. We’re going to have to do something about this.” With the blessing of then editor-in-chief, Ira Mellman, I immediately instituted a policy for the journal to examine all figure files of all accepted manuscripts for evidence of manipulation before they could be published. We began using simple techniques, which I developed along with three of my colleagues at the time, Rob O’Donnell, Erinn Grady, and Laura Smith. The approach involved visual inspection of each image panel using adjustments of brightness and contrast in Photoshop, to enhance visualization of background elements.

Weekend reads: Publish or perish, the card game; revisiting fraud in anesthesiology; the Hindawi mass retraction timeline

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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

‘Violated’: Engineering professor found her name on four papers she didn’t write

On a Friday in July, Laura Schaefer Googled herself to find her ORCID researcher ID for a paper submission.

To her surprise, a paper popped up with her name in a journal she’d never published in. Her surprise quickly turned to concern – had someone copied one of her articles?

As she searched the site where the work appeared, she found more articles with her name, covering subjects she had never written about and with co-authors she didn’t know.

“[I] became angrier the more I found, and also started feeling really violated that someone had used my name and title to put forward something that wasn’t scientifically rigorous,” Schaefer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, said.

‘No animosity between us’: Lungless frog finding retracted after 16 years

The Bornean flat-headed frog, via *Current Biology*

In 2008, a group of researchers published a paper in Current Biology reporting on what they said was a lungless water-loving frog in Borneo.

According to David Bickford, then of the National University of Singapore, and his colleagues, the Bornean flat-headed frog “breathed” the way most salamanders do: by absorbing oxygen through their skin or, during earlier phases of life for some species, through gills. (We’re not salamander experts, so if this characterization is a bit crude, don’t come for us.) Because the frog lived in fast-moving streams, the researchers reasoned, it could obtain adequate oxygen to meet its needs.

For the last 15-odd years, that understanding held. But in May, another team of herpetologists, using more sophisticated tools, said they’ve found evidence of lungs – tiny but functional – in the creatures. As the New Scientist magazine reported earlier this year:

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