Retraction Watch

Don’t tread on me: Snake paper retracted for ‘soft-stepping’ technique

*Bothrops jararaca* is a pit viper species prevalent in southeastern Brazil.
*Credit: Butantan Institute*

Agitating snakes isn’t something most of us would do on purpose, but for a group of researchers, it was central to their research. The authors of a May 2024 paper in Scientific Reports achieved that by “softly” stepping on the head, tail and mid-body of newborn, juvenile and adult pit vipers to see how often they would bite.

But the technique wasn’t quite what the authors’ ethics committee had in mind when approving the study. The journal retracted the paper last month, noting the ethics approval the authors received “did not include newborn snakes or the use of the ‘soft stepping’ method.”

Lead author João Miguel Alves-Nunes blamed the retraction on a “communication error” by the ethics committee. The researchers believed they had approval both to step on snakes and to include newborn snakes, Alves-Nunes, a former researcher at the Butantan Institute in São Paulo, Brazil, said in an email to Retraction Watch.

His manuscript was rejected. Then he saw it published by other authors

A chemist at a university in Pakistan found a surprise when he opened an alert from ResearchGate on a newly published paper on a topic related to his own work.

When Muhammad Kashif, a chemist at Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, looked at the paper, he noticed “substantial overlap” with an unpublished review article he had submitted to other journals. On closer inspection, he found it was indeed his paper — published by other authors.

“I was shocked and deeply concerned,” Kashif told Retraction Watch. “My unpublished work was replicated without attribution, undermining months of effort.”

Seven years after ‘noncompliance’ finding, whistleblowers push for retractions

Seven years after investigations uncovered “serious noncompliance” in the collection of biological samples at a California VA hospital, the original whistleblowers say several papers related to the work use these problematic samples and should be retracted. But the principal investigator of the work says there’s no reason to question the findings.

The VA San Diego Health Care System was one of 12 institutions involved in the InTeam Consortium, a research initiative between 2013 and 2019 focused on alcohol-related liver inflammation. In 2016, two whistleblowers — Mario Chojkier and Martina Buck — alleged staff at the VA hadn’t obtained proper consent to perform biopsies on critically ill patients and use the samples for research related to the project.

Subsequent investigations — including one by VA San Diego’s institutional review board — have confirmed violations of policies, primarily related to a lack of informed consent. Ramon Bataller, the principal investigator of the InTeam Consortium, told local media outlet inewsource in 2019 the samples collected at the VA would be “banished” from any academic papers.

Was nonsense ‘vegetative electron microscopy’ phrase a Farsi typo?

~~Vegetative~~ Scanning electron microscope
*Wikimedia Commons*

A gibberish phrase that caught the attention of science sleuths after it slipped into several journals might trace its origin to a typo in Farsi rather than questionable use of AI, as we reported earlier this month.

Nearly two dozen scientific papers, including some in journals from major publishers, mysteriously refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope.” As we wrote in our previous story, sleuth Alexander Magazinov speculated on PubPeer “the phrase could have originated through faulty digital processing of a two-column article from 1959 in which the word ‘vegetative’ appeared in the left column directly opposite ‘electron microscopy’ in the right.”

Most of the articles containing the strange wording included authors from Iran. Magazinov told us perhaps an AI model had picked up the phrase from the 1959 article and spit it back into machine-generated text that was later plagiarized in other papers by the same Iranian network of fraudsters.

ICYMI: Dean under investigation for plagiarism following Retraction Watch story: report

A university dean is being investigated for plagiarism following our coverage of accusations against him, a Bulgarian newspaper reported last month.

The Academic Ethics Commission in Bulgaria has launched an investigation into Milen Zamfirov, dean of the faculty of educational sciences at Sofia University, Dnevnik reported February 25.

The accusations concern a 2021 paper he wrote with his colleague Margarita Bakracheva, “In Search of Integrativity of Sciences: the Principle of Supplementarity in the Story of Pauli and Jung.” As we reported in December 2024, the paper “seems to have significant overlap” with other sources.

Five studies from “Bust Size and Hitchhiking” author retracted

A journal has retracted five papers about the appearance, sexual behavior and attractiveness of women.

Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of marketing at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, was an author on each of the papers, published in the Sage journal Perceptual and Motor Skills (PMS) at least 15 years ago. All of the articles garnered expressions of concern in 2023, but Guéguen’s history of misconduct long precedes the PMS papers.

Sleuths have been flagging Guéguen’s work for years for seemingly impossible results. In 2019, he was cleared of wrongdoing by his university, but since then has racked up at least four retractions, according to the Retraction Watch database.

Weekend reads: Same data, opposite conclusions; ‘Death by ax’; ‘plastics in your brain’

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

IQ paper gets expression of concern as misconduct fallout continues
Exclusive: Extensive correction to Genentech PNAS article will get an update after RW inquiry
A critique of our cofounders’ recent piece in The Atlantic
Author forges document to claim USDA affiliation
Exclusive: U.S. federal research integrity teams take hits with departures

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 57,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 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):

Exclusive: U.S. federal research integrity teams take hits with departures

Amid efforts by the Trump administration to “put an end to fraudulent and wasteful spending” and “enhance” accountability, two key offices charged with investigating fraud and holding scientists and institutions accountable for federal spending have seen top leadership depart.

At the National Science Foundation’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), the changes start at the top: Inspector General Allison Lerner is departing, and Megan Wallace, currently assistant inspector general for investigations at NSF, will become the acting inspector general, effective March 1.

Deputy Inspector General Ken Chason is also departing. The acting deputy will be Catherine DelPrete, who is NSF’s general counsel to NSF’s inspector general, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The changes were confirmed by Nadine Lymn, communications director of the National Science Board, which appoints and supervises NSF’s inspector general.

Meanwhile, Retraction Watch has learned that most — if not all — research investigators at the National Science Foundation’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) will also be leaving their jobs.

Author forges document to claim USDA affiliation

A journal has retracted three papers after an investigation revealed one of the authors falsely claimed he was affiliated with the United States Department of Agriculture.

All three retraction notices, issued February 13 by the Journal of Environmental Management, state study coauthor Tariq Shah claimed affiliation with the USDA Plant Science Research Unit. “When asked about these issues during an editorial investigation, Shah’s responses caused the editor to further lose confidence in the validity/integrity of the article,” the notices say.

A spokesperson for Elsevier, which publishes the journal, told us in an email “Shah provided a document claiming to show his official affiliation with USDA that we later learned through our investigation was forged.” Neither Shah nor Elsevier clarified what the document was.

Exclusive: Extensive correction to Genentech PNAS article will get an update after RW inquiry

An article by Genentech scientists received an extensive correction in January for multiple instances of image duplications after comments on PubPeer spurred the authors to review the work.

But the correction “inadvertently omitted” an additional duplication, and will be updated after Retraction Watch brought the matter to the journal’s attention, a representative for the publication said. The sleuth who identified the additional duplication said the original article should have been retracted instead of corrected.

The article, “Death-receptor activation halts clathrin-dependent endocytosis,” appeared in July 2006 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with a correction issued that September. It has been cited 99 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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