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

Alison Avenell

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.

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

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

Image by Terri Sharp from Pixabay

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: 

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

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

Franz Kafka

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:

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

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

Teresa Cierco

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.”

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

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

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:

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

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

NIH to lift Duke sanctions stemming from misconduct

Duke University

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:

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‘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.

via James Heilman/Wikipedia

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: 

Continue reading ‘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.

Food poisoning researcher up to four spoiled papers

via Wikimedia

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: 

Continue reading Food poisoning researcher up to four spoiled papers

Death, retirement, and inability to contact authors leads to retraction of paper first flagged five years ago

More than five years after comments appeared on PubPeer about a 2012 paper in PLoS ONE with a raft of problematic images — and a deceased member of the group whom the corresponding author suggests might have been able to support the validity of the data — the journal has retracted the article.

The article, “Placental expression of CD100, CD72 and CD45 is dysregulated in human miscarriage,” was written by a team of researchers at the Università Politecnica delle Marche, in Ancona, Italy. The first, and corresponding, author of the paper was Teresa Lorenzi, of the school’s Division of Neuroscience and Cell Biology.

The paper has 19 citations, including two in 2019, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The lengthy notice begins with a rundown of 14 questions about three of the paper’s figures. We’ll spare you the entire catalog of ships, but here are a few examples: 

Continue reading Death, retirement, and inability to contact authors leads to retraction of paper first flagged five years ago

Criminologist to have four papers retracted following months of scrutiny

via Tony Webster/Flickr

A criminology professor at Florida State University whose work has been under the microscope for six months will have four papers retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

We first reported on the case of Eric Stewart, the FSU professor, in July, after Justin Pickett, one of the co-authors on one of the papers, posted a 27-page explanation of why he thought the article should be retracted. That followed a May 5 letter from a “John Smith” outlining problems with five papers by Stewart. Four of those papers are being retracted.

The paper Pickett co-authored, which was first published in 2011, is now being retracted by Criminology. The notice will read:

Continue reading Criminologist to have four papers retracted following months of scrutiny