Retraction Watch

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

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Do some IQ data need a ‘public health warning?’ A paper based on a controversial psychologist’s data is retracted
Controversial pyramid paper retracted when authors turn out to have radiocarbon-dated nearby dirt
Exclusive: PLOS ONE to correct 1,000 papers, add author proof step
Paper cited by article at center of lawsuit for criticizing Splenda earns an expression of concern

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400.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.

Exclusive: PLOS ONE to correct 1,000 papers, add author proof step

The megajournal PLOS ONE will be correcting about 1,000 papers over the next few months, Retraction Watch has learned, and will add an author proof step – a first for the journal.

The corrections are for “errors in author names, affiliations, titles and references; to make minor updates to the acknowledgements, funding statements, and data availability statements, among other minor issues,” PLOS ONE head of communications David Knutson told us. He continued:

This batch of corrections does not reflect a recent change in the journal’s quality control standards or processes. Rather, we are clearing a backlog that accumulated during a 2-year period when minor corrections were deprioritized and resources were diverted to other areas. PLOS ONE is in the process of implementing an author proof step so that in the future such errors can be identified and addressed prior to publication.

Controversial pyramid paper retracted when authors turn out to have radiocarbon-dated nearby dirt

A journal has retracted, over the objections of the authors, a controversial 2023 paper claiming a dig site in Indonesia is home to the largest pyramid built by humans.

The work was led by the Indonesian geologist-cum-archeologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, of the Research Center for Natural Disasters in Bandung.

Hilman has been working at the site in Java for many years in his quest to prove it contains the ruins of a massive pyramid built by an advanced culture between 9,000 and 27,000 years ago. Hilman has also tried to link the site to the lost city of Atlantis.

But the notion that Gunung Padang is the mother of all pyramids – and, according to Hilman, the world’s oldest building – has been dismissed by some as “pseudoarchaeology,”

Do some IQ data need a ‘public health warning?’ A paper based on a controversial psychologist’s data is retracted

A journal has retracted a controversial 2010 article on intelligence and infections that was based on data gathered decades ago by a now-deceased researcher who lost his emeritus status in 2018 after students said his work was racist and sexist.

The article, “Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability’, was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, by a group at the University of New Mexico. Their claim, according to the abstract:

The worldwide distribution of cognitive ability is determined in part by variation in the intensity of infectious diseases. From an energetics standpoint, a developing human will have difficulty building a brain and fighting off infectious diseases at the same time, as both are very metabolically costly tasks.

Overlaying average national IQ with parasitic stress, they found “robust worldwide” correlations in five of six regions of the globe:

Weekend reads: A paper written by ChatGPT goes viral; the Gino misconduct investigation report; superconductivity scandal

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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

Rejected paper pops up elsewhere after one journal suspected manipulation

In the autumn of 2022, a researcher in Turkey was reviewing a paper for a cardiology journal when an image of a Western blot caught her eye: A hardly visible pair of “unusual” lighter pixels seemed out of place. Magnification only bolstered her suspicion that something was off.

“This image made me think that the bands were cut one by one and pasted on a membrane background,” Şenay Akin, of Hacettepe University in Ankara, wrote in her comments to the editor of Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy, a Springer Nature journal. “If this is the case, it indicates a manipulation [of] the results of this study.”

The editor, Yochai Birnbaum of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, made a note to check the figure, adding below Akin’s comments in the editorial-management system: “I agree with the reviewer. It could be that the I/R band was manipulated.”

Up to one in seven submissions to hundreds of Wiley journals flagged by new paper mill tool

Wiley, whose Hindawi subsidiary has attracted thousands of paper mill papers that later needed to be retracted, has seen widespread paper mill activity among hundreds of its journals, it announced yesterday.

More than 270 of its titles rejected anywhere from 600 to 1,000 papers per month before peer review once they implemented a pilot of what the publisher calls its Papermill Detection service. That service flagged 10-13% of all of the 10,000 manuscripts submitted to those journals per month, Wiley told Retraction Watch.

Wiley said the service includes “six distinct tools,” including looking for similarities with known paper mill papers, searching for “tortured phrases” and other problematic passages, flagging “irregular publishing patterns by paper authors,” verifying researcher identity, detecting hallmarks of generative AI, and analyzing the relevance of a given manuscript to the journal.

Journal blacklists doctor in Pakistan ‘out of an abundance of caution’

Following an investigation into possible paper mill activities, the journal Cureus has barred a doctor in Pakistan from publishing more papers “out of an abundance of caution,” Retraction Watch has learned.

The journal investigated Satish Kumar, an internist at Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto Medical College in Karachi, after a tipster accused him of selling authorship of scientific papers to scientists who did not participate in the research.

The tipster, who wishes to remain anonymous to avoid backlash from the authors of these papers, sent Cureus WhatsApp messages from a group called “research Match Residency.” There, a user named ”SSS” sent paper titles and offered author slots on manuscripts. Many of the articles were slated for publication in Cureus.

Misspelled cell lines take on new lives — and why that’s bad for the scientific literature

Human cell lines represent key reagents for many research laboratories. Cell lines are often the first models that researchers choose for experiments such as gene manipulation and drug testing, as they are relatively accessible and inexpensive, particularly compared with mouse and other animal models.

However, cell lines also are prone to contamination by other faster growing cell lines. As a result, many human cell lines purported to represent particular tumor types have been found by genetic testing to be contaminated by other cancer cells. This potential for confusion poses a serious problem for researchers who want to study a particular cancer type but end up using cells from an unrelated disease.

Our team studies wrongly identified nucleotide sequence reagents in cancer research, such as PCR primers and gene knockdown reagents. Recently in the context of an undergraduate student project, we decided to also check the identities of cell lines in a small group of papers on the human gene miR-145, which codes for a microRNA. We found wrongly identified nucleotide sequences and cell lines in numerous articles about miR-145, but also what appeared to be five misspelled identifiers of contaminated cell lines.

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