Weekend reads: A call for 400 retractions of papers on organ donors; “citation mania;” AAAS reassessing award for work on herbicide

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 the tale of the reviewer who told authors to cite him if they wanted their paper accepted; a case of a paper stolen during peer review; and questions about whether retraction notices should credit readers by name. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: A call for 400 retractions of papers on organ donors; “citation mania;” AAAS reassessing award for work on herbicide

Chem journal yanks paper because authors had stolen it as peer reviewers

The UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry has retracted a 2017 paper in one of its journals after learning that the authors stole the article from other researchers during peer review.

The offending article, “Typical and interstratified arrangements in Zn/Al layered double hydroxides: an experimental and theoretical approach,” appeared in CrystalEngComm, and was written by Priyadarshi Roy Chowdhury and Krishna G. Bhattacharyya, of Gauhati University in Jalukbari.

Well, that’s not really true, is it? The retraction notice lays out the transgression in detail: Continue reading Chem journal yanks paper because authors had stolen it as peer reviewers

The case of the reviewer who said cite me or I won’t recommend acceptance of your work

Some peer reviews evidently are tempted to ask authors to cite their work, perhaps as a way to boost their own influence. But a recent episode at the journal Bioinformatics suggests, the risk can outweigh the reward.

We’ll let the editors — Jonathan Wren, Alfonso Valencia and Janet Kelso — tell the tale, which they did in “Reviewer-coerced citation: Case report, update on journal policy, and suggestions for future prevention:” Continue reading The case of the reviewer who said cite me or I won’t recommend acceptance of your work

Should journals credit eagle-eyed readers by name in retraction notices?

Logo of the European Society of Cardiology, EHJ’s publisher

One of the most highly-cited journals in cardiology has retracted a paper less than a month after publishing it in response to criticism first posted on Twitter.

The article, “Short-term and long-term effects of a loading dose of atorvastatin before percutaneous coronary intervention on major adverse cardiovascular events in patients with acute coronary syndrome: a meta-analysis of 13 randomized controlled trials,” was published online January 3 in the European Heart Journal (EHJ). Its authors purported to analyze clinical trials of patients who were given a loading dose of atorvastatin, a cholesterol medication, before undergoing cardiac catheterization.

How closely the study authors adhered to their own methods came under question on January 8, when Ricky Turgeon, a cardiology pharmacist, posted a series of tweets in which he claimed some of the studies included in the analysis either did not test the drug in patients undergoing the procedure — referred to as PCI — or patients had not all been diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome, commonly known as a heart attack. With many of the trials included in the analysis not abiding by the predefined inclusion criteria, the study’s conclusions are unreliable, argued Turgeon. Continue reading Should journals credit eagle-eyed readers by name in retraction notices?

Deputy director of U.S. gov’t watchdog leaves to run another gov’t office

The second-in-command at the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which oversees investigations into scientific misconduct, will be leaving the agency.

Scott Moore has been at ORI since 2016. He had previously been at the National Science Foundation’s Office of Inspector General, where he was an investigative scientist for 13 years. He was appointed by former director Kathy Partin, who after a tumultuous two years left the ORI in November 2017, and is now the intramural research integrity officer at NIH.

Moore was named acting deputy director of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health’s (OASH) Office of Grants Management in July, serving in both that role and as ORI deputy director since then. According to a memo from Assistant Secretary for Health Brett P. Giroir that was circulated at that time: Continue reading Deputy director of U.S. gov’t watchdog leaves to run another gov’t office

Carlo Croce loses a round in legal bid to be reinstated as dep’t chair

Carlo Croce

Carlo Croce, a professor at The Ohio State University in Columbus who has faced multiple investigations into misconduct allegations, has been denied a temporary restraining order that he sought in order to be reinstated as chair of his department.

Croce was forced to step down from the post last year. Magistrate Jennifer D. Hunt, of the Franklin County civil court, wrote in a January 23 decision that

third parties and the public interest will be harmed if a temporary restraining order is granted and Dr. Croce is reinstated as Chair.

Croce, OSU said Continue reading Carlo Croce loses a round in legal bid to be reinstated as dep’t chair

Weekend reads: New revelations about CRISPR’d babies experiment; Impact Factor developer warns against using single metrics; is peer review just a game?

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 eight retractions at once for a biochemist in Spain; a researcher who lost her medical license for her misconduct; and news of an upcoming retraction in a food journal. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: New revelations about CRISPR’d babies experiment; Impact Factor developer warns against using single metrics; is peer review just a game?

Food packaging journal to retract paper by researchers in Thailand

A food packaging journal plans to retract a 2018 article by Thai researchers who tried to repackage (ahem) a virtually identical article of theirs, Retraction Watch has learned.

That’s not particularly unusual; duplication, sometimes inaccurately called “self-plagiarism,” happens, as they say. What makes the case more interesting is the back-and-forth between the journal and the authors.   

Early last December, the editor of the Food Packaging & Shelf Life, Ali Abas Wani, sent a letter to Chiravoot Pechyen, of Thammasat University, the senior author on a paper FPSL had recently published online (but not yet in print): Continue reading Food packaging journal to retract paper by researchers in Thailand

Total recall: Brazilian journal issues “total retraction” of plagiarized paper

We’ve seen partial retractions, and retract-and-replacements, but here’s a first (cue timpanis): The Total Retraction.

A Brazilian journal has pulled a 2018 paper on food security for plagiarism — at least, that’s what really happened; the stated reasons are a bit sauced up.

According to the notice: Continue reading Total recall: Brazilian journal issues “total retraction” of plagiarized paper

Can a “nudge” stop researchers from using the wrong cell lines?

Anita Bandrowski, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, works on tools to improve the transparency and reproducibility of scientific methods. (Her work on Research Resource Identifiers, or RRIDs, has been previously featured on Retraction Watch.) This week, Bandrowski and colleagues  — including Amanda Capes-Davis, who chairs the International Cell Line Authentication Committee — published a paper in eLife that seeks to determine whether these tools are actually influencing the behavior of scientists, in this case by reducing the number of potentially erroneous cell lines used in published studies.

Such issues may affect thousands of papers. Among more than 300,000 cell line names in more than 150,000 articles, Bandrowski and her colleagues “estimate that 8.6% of these cell lines were on the list of problematic cell lines, whereas only 3.3% of the cell lines in the 634 papers that included RRIDs were on the problematic list,” suggesting “that the use of RRIDs is associated with a lower reported use of problematic cell lines.” 

Retraction Watch spoke with Bandrowski about the role of these tools in the larger movement to improve transparency and reproducibility in science, and whether meta-scientific text-mining approaches will gain traction in the research community.

Retraction Watch (RW): Your study presents RRID as a behavioral “nudge,” beyond its primary goal of standardizing method reporting. What other nudges can you envision to prevent misuse of cell lines in scientific research? Continue reading Can a “nudge” stop researchers from using the wrong cell lines?