Retraction Watch

‘I’m starting the year off with something I didn’t expect to ever do: I’m retracting a paper.’

In journalism, we often joke that three cases of a phenomenon is a trend. If that’s the case, the trend of late 2019 and early 2020 would appear to be authors announcing retractions on Twitter.

In December, Joscha Legewie took to social media to say he had been made aware of an error that had caused him to retract a just-published paper on police shootings and the health of black infants. Nobel Prize winner Frances Arnold did something similar just a few weeks ago.

And now, the authors of a 2016 study on the social networks of spiders have retracted the paper after finding irreconcilable problems with their data — and the first author tweeted about it.

In doing so, she was following in the foosteps of the editor in chief of the journal that published the paper, who had himself retracted a paper several years ago. Read on for more.

Weekend reads: An ugly fight in nutrition research; embezzling scientists; eyebrow-raising papers in China

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A new member of the 100-retraction club;
A reviewer caught stealing from an unpublished manuscript;
A publisher who decided to retract two papers after waiting more than a year for a university’s investigation to be completed.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Tired of waiting for a university, a publisher commissions its own investigation — and retracts two papers

The journal Diabetes has retracted two 2006 papers by a group of researchers in Germany whose work has long been the subject of concerns about image duplication and manipulation.

The first author of the articles is Kathrin Maedler, a prominent diabetes specialist at the University of Bremen, where she’d been a named professor but lost the title over the affair. Maedler’s group now has four retractions resulting from problematic figures.

The University of Bremen in 2016 found insufficient evidence that Maedler committed research misconduct, but concluded that she was negligent. Maedler at the time told us:

Author ‘still shocked by the blatancy of the plagiarism and by the stupidity’ after a reviewer steals his work

A group of researchers in France has lost a 2019 paper in Cell Calcium because one of the authors took, um, a bit too much inspiration for the work from a manuscript he’d reviewed for another publication.

The article, “TRPV6 calcium channel regulation, downstream pathways, and therapeutic targeting in cancer,” was written by a team from the Laboratory of Excellence Ion Channel Science and Therapeutics at the University of Lille. The senior author of the paper was V’yacheslav Lehen’kyi.

Or, maybe it was John Stewart, of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.

As the retraction notice states:

Former UMass post-doc faked data, says federal watchdog

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has found a former post-doc at the University of Massachusetts Medical School guilty of misconduct stemming from falsification of data.

The finding comes more than two years after a retraction referred to an investigation at U Mass. The ORI said Ozgur Tataroglu, who worked as a neurobiologist at the institution, doctored data in a published paper and two federal grant proposals. The 2015 paper, which appeared in Cell, was retracted in 2017. Tataroglu refused to sign the notice, which stated:

Anesthesiologist joins the 100-retraction club

Until this year, only one researcher — Yoshitaka Fujii — had eclipsed the century mark for retractions. But Fujii can no longer claim dibs on being the only scientist to lose three digits worth of papers.

Joachim Boldt, a fellow anesthesiologist fraudster, recently notched three more retractions, bringing his tally, by our count, to an even 100.

Boldt was one of Europe’s leading anesthesiologists for decades. A critical care specialist, he was internationally known for his work on the use of substances called volume expanders that are used during surgery to preserve blood pressure. That fame was replaced in the early part of the last decade by questions about his work, and findings of misconduct.

Georgia State researcher up to nine retractions disagrees with the journal

A prominent researcher at Georgia State University who had two papers retracted and eight subjected to expressions of concern for problematic images last year is now up to nine retractions.

Ming-Hui Zou is the common author on all nine retracted papers, which were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry from 2003 and 2010. Of the eight papers originally subjected to expressions of concern, seven have been retracted, and one has been updated to a correction.

Here is a typical retraction notice, for “Nicotine-induced activation of AMP-activated protein kinase inhibits fatty acid synthase in 3T3L1 adipocytes: A role for oxidant stress,” referring to image duplication, and an offer by the authors to “publish an amended figure or to repeat the experiments,” which the journal declined:

Weekend reads: 800 retractions from Russia; paying to publish in Vietnam; a retraction involving Facebook, political misinformation, and Teen Vogue

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Crossfit being awarded $4 million in sanctions in a case stemming from a now-retracted paper;
the WHO formally retracting opioid guidelines tainted by conflict of interest;
the retraction of 17 papers by one journal for citation manipulation.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

There are retractors in plastic surgery — and not just of the instrument kind

A plastic surgeon in Turkey has notched his fifth retraction for plagiarism and other issues.

That makes him a retractor — even if most plastic surgeons would have something else in mind if they used that term.

Ilteris Murat Emsen, then of the Department of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery at the Numune State Hospital in Erzurum, has lost five papers dating back to 2006. Four were pulled in 2009. The most recent retraction appeared last month in the European Journal of Plastic Surgery, for a 2007 article titled “Management of the large septal perforations with the support of porous high-density polyethylene (MEDPOR).”

According to the notice:

Two retractions prove fresh is best

To the list of best practices in experimental research, here’s another item to add: Always use fresh cheesecloth when separating biomasses.

We’ll explain.

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