Retraction Watch

Journal retracts two papers linking exposure to violence to aggressive behavior

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

A journal on adolescent issues has retracted a pair of papers linking exposure to violent media to aggressive behavior in youth after critics questioned the validity of the data.

The studies, which appeared in Youth & Society, were led by Qian Zhang, of Southwest University in Chongqing, China and were published in 2018.

According to the retraction notice, which covers both “Short-term exposure to movie violence and implicit aggression during adolescence,” and “The priming effect of violent game play on aggression among adolescents”:

Psychology researcher committed misconduct, says university

A Dutch university has found a former psychology researcher at the institution guilty of misconduct for several offenses, including lack of ethics approval for some of her studies and fabricating results in grant applications.

In a Nov. 11, 2019, report, officials at the University of Leiden stated that the researcher, whom it does not identify, violated academic integrity in the following ways:

Publisher retracts nearly 50 papers at once

A year after retracting 29 papers in one fell swoop, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a scientific society which is also one of the world’s largest scientific publishers, is retracting 49 articles from a journal and a conference because of problems in the way they were peer reviewed.

In a statement, IEEE said:

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Pitt researchers sue journal for defamation following retraction

A pair of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are suing the Journal of Biological Chemistry for defamation after the publication retracted one of their papers for problematic images.

Raju Reddy and Aravind Reddy Tarugu, who are not related, claim the JBC and its publisher, the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, defamed them by retracting their 2014 paper on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Reddy is a visiting associate professor of medicine at Pitt and chief of pulmonology at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Aravind Targugu, also identified as Aravind T. Reddy, is employed by Pitt.

According to the suit, filed in August and first reported by the The Pennsylvania Record, the researchers say the retraction “severely” harmed their reputations and caused:

Weekend reads: Disgraced surgeon earns prison sentence; politicians and plagiarism; parents who help their kids cheat

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:

A political science professor who is now up to eight retractions for plagiarism
A researcher who found the retraction of his paper “Kafkian“
A look at how slow journals can be to correct the record — and why that matters.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

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

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.

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

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:

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

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:

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

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.”

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