Retraction Watch

Third retraction imminent for Harvard-affiliated sports research group

Several sports physicians at Harvard have earned two retractions and await another after publishing work based on “unreliable” survey data that was misrepresented in the papers.

The articles, “Running-related injuries in middle school cross-country runners: Prevalence and characteristics of common injuries” and “Prevalence and factors associated with bone stress injury in middle school runners,” were published in the journal of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, PM&R, in 2021. The papers have been cited a total of 17 times since publication, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Identical retraction notices issued in November this year state the decision followed “a joint review by the authors’ institutions which identified the dataset of this article to be unreliable and not accurately represented in the paper.” The institutions did not find the authors to be responsible for the problematic data, but recommended the papers be retracted, according to the notices. Several of the authors are affiliated with Harvard Medical School, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Cyberstalking pits Harvard professor against PubPeer

A deluge of bizarre and malicious emails targeting a professor at Harvard Medical School has left him reeling, while raising questions about the smear campaign’s use of a popular online forum where scientists publicly critique research.

Joseph Loscalzo sent a letter to PubPeer, the online forum, in September describing an “aggressive cyberstalking and harassment campaign” that “has relentlessly targeted myself and my colleagues” for many months with “misleading and often inaccurate comments.” He called PubPeer “a vehicle” for the attacks, alleging anonymous comments raising concerns about at least 15 papers were posted “in bad faith” and then used to defame and badger him in emails to other researchers, journals, and universities.

Loscalzo, physician-in-chief emeritus and former chair of the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, asked PubPeer to remove the offending comments and impose a six-month moratorium on anonymous posts about his work. The letter was obtained by Retraction Watch.

Weekend reads: Hijacked journals polluting an index; special issues take a hit; a data breach at a megajournal

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 to over 375. There are more than 45,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Elsevier investigating articles linked to controversial French researcher

The publisher Elsevier is investigating an unspecified number of articles by authors affiliated with a French research institute for concerns about “the appropriate conduct of research involving human participants.”

According to a “Publisher’s Note” that appeared November 9 in Elsevier’s New Microbes and New Infections, “concerns have been raised about a number of articles” published in the journal by researchers affiliated with the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection (IHU-MI) in Marseille.

The journal and Elsevier’s “Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics Centre of Expertise” are investigating the allegations “by confidentially consulting with the authors and, where necessary, liaising with the institution where the studies took place,” the note said. It continued:

Author of ‘gibberish’ paper admits to extensive plagiarism

A paper that claimed to have developed a new method to predict acid drainage from mines was not so novel after all, according to one of its authors.

In a series of emails to Retraction Watch, Dulian Zeqiraj of the Polytechnic University of Tirana, Albania, admitted to lifting figures and tables from other articles and said he might also have left some “text as it is in original.”

His paper, “A Novel Stochastic Approach for Modeling Acid Mine Drainage in Three Dimensions,” was published November 17 in Process Safety and Environmental Protection, an Elsevier title.

That the article managed to clear peer review is astonishing, said Muhammad Muniruzzaman, a senior scientist at the Geological Survey of Finland in Espoo, who discovered last week that Zeqiraj’s team had plagiarized his work.

Professor in Jordan sues sleuth who exposed citation anomalies

A PhD student in Switzerland who blogged about a series of dubious conferences linked to potential citation fraud is being sued by one of the conference chairs, a professor of computer science, Retraction Watch has learned.

The professor, Shadi Aljawarneh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology, reaped a prodigious number of citations from the conference proceedings, often in highly questionable ways.

“Fraud can pay off,” Solal Pirelli, a doctoral student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, wrote on his blog in January. “Shadi Aljawarneh has 6082 citations and an h-index of 38 per Google Scholar, above many well-regarded researchers. This probably helped him sit on the editorial board of PeerJ Computer Science, alongside well-regarded researchers.”

Purdue agrees to pay feds back $737,000 for grant submissions with fake data

Purdue University has reached a settlement with the federal government to pay back grant money the institution received through applications submitted with falsified data, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Indiana.

The settlement resolves allegations under the False Claims Act related to the case of Alice C. Chang (who also uses the name Chun-Ju Chang), a former associate professor of basic medical sciences at Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine in West Lafayette, In. Inside Higher Ed reported first on the settlement.

Last December, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found Chang had faked data in two published papers and nearly 400 images across 16 grant applications. As we reported then:

A new way to support Retraction Watch this Giving Tuesday

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

Earlier this week, The Retraction Watch Database surpassed 45,000 retractions.

45,000.

That’s three times as many as you’ll find in other data sources. And in a recognition of the value of the Database, earlier this year Crossref acquired it – and made its contents freely available. The fact that the acquisition included five years of funding to cover the continued operation of the Database was critical to our sustainability. We were, in a word, overjoyed by the deal.

But the journalism side of Retraction Watch – the part that digs deep into stories about retraction and related issues, files public records requests, and occasionally faces legal threats – still needs regular sources of funding. At the moment, the salaries of our two reporter-editors – Ellie Kincaid and Fred Joelving – are funded by a combination of a generous two-year grant from the WoodNext Foundation, partnership with news outlets, and individual donations from readers like you.

In nonprofit parlance, we’ve diversified, but we always face the risk that one or more of those streams may dry up. We have a few ways you can help.

Weekend reads: ‘A scientific fraud epidemic’; censorship by retraction; buying and selling articles

It’s almost Giving Tuesday. 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 to over 375. There are more than 44,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains well over 200 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? Or The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Did a prof in India steal his student’s work – or is he being framed?

On Feb. 10, 2022, Avinash Kumar, a PhD student at one of India’s top technical schools, sent a trove of research data to his adviser. But when the same data appeared in a paper in a scientific journal earlier this year, Kumar’s name wasn’t on it.

“I have done the experimental and analysis part of this work,” Kumar, who has since graduated, wrote in an email to Retraction Watch. “I am in deep shock after seeing this article online.”

It seemed like a solid case of plagiarism.

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