Retraction Watch

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

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A look at why an infamous paper on autism and vaccines continues to be cited;
A journal that decided to play it safe instead of retracting a paper;
The lifting of sanctions on Duke University following concerns about how they handled cases of misconduct.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

NIH to lift Duke sanctions stemming from misconduct

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:

‘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.

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an expression of concern for a paper on glaucoma that, given the litany of problems with the data, could well have been retracted.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:

Food poisoning researcher up to four spoiled papers

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:

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:

Criminologist to have four papers retracted following months of scrutiny

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:

Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper on vaccines and autism has been cited more than a thousand times. These researchers tried to figure out why.

Elizabeth Suelzer

Retraction Watch readers are no doubt familiar with one of the most consequential retractions of this century, namely that of the 1998 paper in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and others claiming a link between vaccines and autism. What they may also know is that the paper remains one of the most highly cited retracted articles of all time, as demonstrated by our leaderboard of such papers.

With that in mind, six librarians from institutions in Wisconsin had a question: ” What are the characteristics of citations of the retracted 1998 article by Wakefield et al that purported to show an association between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism?” A paper describing their findings was published on Friday in JAMA Network Open.

We asked corresponding author Elizabeth Suelzer, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, to answer several questions about the paper.

Retraction Watch (RW): Why did you decide to focus on the Wakefield paper, and what were your findings?

Weekend reads: Falsified authorship; allegations about more than 200 papers; honoring an exploitative scientist

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The retraction of a 30-year-old paper cited by creationists;
A chemistry paper retracted after ten years of being in limbo;
An accounting paper corrected for methodology that “does not generate the results;”
The story of what happened when reviewers asked authors to change their study design.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Reviewers asked authors to change their study design. It apparently didn’t go well.

In what the editor of a psychiatry journal says in an unusual case, the authors of a paper on treatments for depression have retracted it after being alerted to “inconsistencies” stemming from a change to their study design that the peer reviewers had requested.

Here’s the retraction notice, in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease:

Two spectrometry papers retracted, one for “intolerable” mistakes. The authors don’t agree.

Saudi researchers have lost a pair of papers in a spectrometry journal for errors the editors found fatal but the authors apparently dismiss as trivial.

The articles appeared in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The principal author on both papers is Mohammad Gondal, of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dharhan. According to his website, Gondal is a highly decorated physicist, with

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