Retraction Watch

Cureus reviewing paper alleged to plagiarize Lancet article

A 2022 paper in Cureus on causes of cancer around the world is under investigation by the journal following inquiries by Retraction Watch prompted by a reader’s email.

The paper, “Causes of Cancer in the World: Comparative Risk Assessment of Nine Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors,” shares a title and figures with a 2005 paper in The Lancet. It also “follows the Lancet one on a sentence-by-sentence level while using tortured phrases,” an anonymous tipster told us.

As we’ve noted elsewhere in a report on the team that developed the phrase, “Tortured phrases are what happens to words that get translated from English into a foreign language, then back to English — perhaps by a computer trying to generate a scholarly publication for a group of unscrupulous authors.”

Embattled researcher Didier Raoult earns more than 100 expressions of concern and another retraction

An Elsevier journal has issued just over 100 expressions of concern for papers published by a group of researchers led by the French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who also notched a new retraction – his tenth – in a separate publication.

As we and others have reported, Raoult’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic drew intense scrutiny from data sleuths, most notably Elisabeth Bik – whose critiques, which extended beyond his COVID studies, were met with vicious online trolling and a legal complaint filed by Raoult himself.

The allegations prompted an ethics investigation by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products into Raoult’s research during his tenure at the IHU Méditerranée Infection, in Marseille, which he led between 2011 and his retirement as director in 2022. That inquiry found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”

The 101 expressions of concern come for papers Raoult and his colleagues published in New Microbes and New Infections. Here’s an example of one of the EoC’s, for “Genome sequence and description of Anaerosalibacter massiliensis sp. nov.,” which Raoult’s group published in March 2016:

High-profile ob-gyn accused of duplicating data threatens to sue critic

Sometime last summer, Ben Mol, an obstetrician-gynecology researcher in Australia, and his colleagues were adapting a European guideline on unexplained infertility when they came across a 2006 paper from Maria Luisa Casini, a pharmacologist in Rome, that gave them pause because of results that were not statistically significant.

When they looked further, they ended in a rabbit hole. Casini’s previous work revealed identical patient data across papers published two years apart, despite purporting to come from different groups of patients. The similarities were striking: In the 2006 paper, the women’s mean height was 165.5 centimeters; in the study published two years earlier that reported having more than triple the number of participants, the women had the exact same mean height, with the same standard deviation.

The guideline update would eventually lead to half of the included trials being flagged for integrity issues, and as a result, left out of the Australian version of the guideline. From that one paper by Casini that had initially raised doubts, the team was able to unearth a trail of suspicious data connected to several ob-gyns in Italy. An Italian medical society and one of the implicated authors have threatened to sue over the allegations, claiming the complaints were made to interfere with a high-profile society election, but the papers are now part of a wider Elsevier investigation.

Paper claiming vaping tops nicotine gum for smoking cessation retracted from JAMA journal

A JAMA journal has retracted a paper on vaping it published two months ago after the researchers alerted the editors to “significant coding errors” and other problems with the work.

The article, “Efficacy of Electronic Cigarettes vs Varenicline and Nicotine Chewing Gum as an Aid to Stop Smoking: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” was written by a group from China led by Zhao Liu, of the Department of Tobacco Control and Prevention of Respiratory Disease at China-Japan Friendship Hospital, in Beijing.

According to the researchers, the study found use of vapes was no worse than a prescription medication, and better than nicotine gum, at helping people quit smoking.

The paper received a significant amount of attention in the medical and lay press and on social media (full disclosure: Medscape, where Adam works, covered it).

Here’s the March 29 retraction notice for the paper, which originally appeared online in JAMA Internal Medicine January 29:

Exclusive: ‘Bust Size and Hitchhiking’ author to earn four more expressions of concern

The journal Social Influence will be issuing expressions of concern for four papers by Nicolas Guéguen, a marketing researcher whose work has long been dogged by allegations, Retraction Watch has learned.

Guéguen has to date has lost at least three papers to retraction, and has received many more expressions of concern, for his questionable studies. However, his institution, the Université de Bretagne-Sud, cleared him of wrongdoing in 2019.

Guéguen made a name for himself for his quirky studies – often about human sexuality – like one purporting to find women with bigger breasts were more likely to be successful hitchhikers; and one which claimed to find men with guitar cases are more attractive to women. (The first of those articles has an expression of concern; the second was retracted in 2020.)

Chief researcher at national Japanese institute has paper retracted for faking data

An official journal of the Japanese government has retracted a 2021 paper over concerns about misconduct in the work, which was performed in a national research center.

Here’s the retraction notice for the paper, titled “Development and Evaluation of Fluorescence Immunochomatography for Rapid and Sensitive Detection of Thermophilic Campylobacter”:

Food Safety decided to retract this article in which the primary author misconducted as reported from the primary author’s affiliation.

Far more details are available in materials published last December by Japan’s National Institute of Health Sciences, where the first author of the article, Hiroshi Asakura, is chief researcher. According to a press release dated Dec. 26, 2023:

Weekend reads: Clinical trial fraud leads to prison; journal editors resigning en masse; who should police scientific fraud?

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Following mass resignation, obstetrics journals place editor’s notes on studies

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 48,000 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 new list of 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):

Following mass resignation, obstetrics journals place editor’s notes on studies

Two BMC journals – part of the Springer Nature stable – have flagged studies a month after 10 editors at one of the journals resigned to protest the publications’ failure to respond quickly to allegations of data fabrication.

As we reported earlier this month, obstetrician-gynecologist and sleuth Ben Mol sent allegations about papers published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth and BMC Women’s Health on Jan. 29, 2024. When BMC had not responded to Mol by February 28, 10 editors quit.

Mohamed Abdelmonem Kamel of Fayoum University in Egypt, the corresponding author of both articles, did not initially respond to a request for comment from Retraction Watch. However, he left a comment defending the work on our post and said his team could not share the data behind one of the papers “before publishing it first as a paper to prevent stealing the data in another paper by different authors.” The study said that the data “are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.”

Weekend reads: More retractions at Columbia; ‘an epidemic of scientific fraud’; when articles cite retracted papers

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 47,000 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 new list of 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):

Paper cited by article at center of lawsuit for criticizing Splenda earns an expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2008 paper suggesting artificial sweetener Splenda could disrupt the gut microbiome and cause other havoc with the gastrointestinal system – and which is cited by a paper at the center of a lawsuit against one of its authors by the maker of the sugar substitute.

The article, “Splenda Alters Gut Microflora and Increases Intestinal P-Glycoprotein and Cytochrome P-450 in Male Rats,” appeared in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, a Taylor & Francis title. The journal has a Part B, too, which also is part of this story.

The paper, which has been cited more than 200 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, caught the attention of Elisabeth Bik, who last year commented on the article on PubPeer, noting potential problems with four of the figures, including Western blots and missing error bars.

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