Retraction Watch

‘A disturbing experience’: Postdoc fights to have work that plagiarized her thesis retracted

In December, Solange Saxby, a postdoctoral research fellow at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was notified by her friend of a paper published in the MDPI journal Nutrients that sounded similar to her dissertation. Saxby pulled up her 2020 dissertation, “The Potential of Taro (Colocasia esculenta) as a Dietary Prebiotic Source for the Prevention of Colorectal Cancer,” and compared it to the 2023 Nutrients article.

To her dismay, the paper “Taro Roots: An Underexploited Root Crop,” co-authored by researchers at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, North Carolina, overlaps significantly with Saxby’s work, including some passages of word-for-word copying with no citation.

While the corresponding author of the paper has called the omission of any citation to Saxby’s work “unfortunate” and said that she is working with Nutrients’ publisher – MDPI – to add one, the publisher said the behavior did not amount to plagiarism because the prior work was a thesis.

Weekend reads: Another vaccine-autism retraction; ‘Why We Commit Academic Fraud’; on a psilocybin-depression correction

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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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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 nearly 49,000 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):

Neuroscience journal retracts eight articles for image distortion

Elsevier’s Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy has retracted eight articles for image manipulation and overlap, with more on the way, according to the sleuth who notified the publication of the issues.

Each retraction notice credits an “anonymous reader” with having raised concerns about manipulated or duplicated images, with the journal’s editor in chief determining a retraction was warranted.

That anonymous reader was Mu Yang, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Columbia University, in New York City, who started emailing the journal about problematic papers in January 2023.

On May 16th, the journal notified Yang of the following retractions:

Indonesian university dean dismissed, barred from teaching, asked to apologize

Kumba Digdowiseiso has been dismissed from his position as dean of the economics and business faculty at the Universitas Nasional (UNAS) in Jakarta, Indonesia, following an investigation into claims he used the names of other academics without consent on papers with which they were not involved.

Digdowiseiso had already announced his resignation from the university on April 19, a week after Retraction Watch reported several researchers from the Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) were accusing Digdowiseiso of using their names on papers without permission.

At the time, the university’s official account on X had reposted Digdowiseiso’s response to our report in a now-deleted tweet from April 11. In the tweet, Digdowiseiso wrote that after an internal meeting with UMT, the institution decided the authorship allegations were “a personal issue” and therefore didn’t need “further intervention/action from both universities or even faculties.” Another UNAS tweet from April 14 that is still online does not include this paragraph.

Pharmaceutical researcher faked data in two papers, says federal watchdog

A former professor and vice provost for research at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York, falsified data in two published papers, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Shaker Mousa, who was also chairman and executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute at Albany, already has at least 10 retractions and two corrections, by our count.

The falsified data appeared in “Tetraiodothyroacetic acid-conjugated PLGA nanoparticles: a nanomedicine approach to treat drug-resistant breast cancer,” which appeared in Nanomedicine in 2013, and “The proangiogenic action of thyroid hormone analogue GC-1 is initiated at an integrin,” which appeared in the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology in 2005 and was retracted last September. ORI called for Mousa to request a correction or retraction of the Nanomedicine paper as well.

Caught by a reviewer: A plagiarizing deep learning paper lingers

Last May, Devrim Çavuşoğlu, an engineer at Turkish software company OBSS, was looking at feedback from a conference reviewer of a paper he and his colleagues had submitted. One comment stood out to him: The reviewer had noticed a resemblance between Çavuşoğlu’s work and another paper accepted to a different conference on computational linguistics.

When Çavuşoğlu first skimmed through the other paper, he came across some sections containing an uncanny resemblance to his own ideas. “I thought, it’s like I wrote that,” he recalled. “How could it be so similar, did we think about the same thing?”

He checked the accompanying source code and found the authors of the other paper seemed to have directly copied and built upon his own publicly released code without any attribution – a violation of the license connected to the work. “I was shocked, to be honest,” Çavuşoğlu told Retraction Watch.

University vice president for research contests retraction for image issues

A university vice president has received his first retraction – and disagrees with it, according to the journal.

The retraction for Jaydutt Vadgama, the Vice President for Research and Health Affairs at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, comes after a commenter on PubPeer noted similarities between data in two papers from the same group. Similar comments have led to corrections to two other papers by Vadgama, who is also professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles.

The retracted article, “A83-01 inhibits TGF-β-induced upregulation of Wnt3 and epithelial to mesenchymal transition in HER2-overexpressing breast cancer cells,” appeared in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment in 2017. It has been cited 38 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, published this month, states:

University of Sydney dean working to amend review papers that cited papermill articles

The dean of science at the University of Sydney is reassessing a series of review papers after commenters on PubPeer pointed out each cited several retracted articles, Retraction Watch has learned.

Marcel Dinger and his coauthors will submit addendums to the journals noting the retracted references, he told Retraction Watch, and work with editors to determine whether the reviews should be retracted.

Dinger, who also is a professor of genome biology, is a middle author of four review articles and last author on one more that sleuths using the Problematic Paper Screener flagged as referencing retracted articles. The articles have been cited nearly 100 times altogether, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Guillaume Cabanac, who developed the screener, commented on one of the papers in August 2022:

Weekend reads: ‘Why Scientific Fraud is Suddenly Everywhere’; ‘misconduct, intimidation, alcohol abuse and theft’; ‘grimpact’

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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):

‘Lab shenanigans’: TikTok influencer faked data, feds say

A well-known content creator and former lab technician at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas admitted taking “several shortcuts” in work that has been found to contain falsified data funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to a U.S. government watchdog.

Darrion Nguyen, who has more than a half-million followers on his TikTok account “lab_shenanigans,” engaged in research misconduct while working at Baylor by “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating experimental data and results” of several research records, two manuscript figures, a research progress report, a poster, and a presentation, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said.

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