Retraction Watch

Exclusive: How a dean went about correcting the scientific record even when at least one journal said he didn’t need to

Less than a year after he became dean of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Dentistry, an uncomfortable email landed in Russell Taichman’s inbox.

Overlapping and duplicated panels in one of Taichman’s 2005 papers were among a list of complaints relayed by the publisher of Cellular Signalling in the April 2020 correspondence – complaints which were publicly posted on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik.

“The substance of the complaint is image manipulation, which if true, would violate our publishing policies,” the email stated. “Please note that if we do not have an adequate and timely response, we may be forced to conclude that the allegations are truthful.”

The paper, “Diverse signaling pathways through the SDF-1/CXCR4 chemokine axis in prostate cancer cell lines leads to altered patterns of cytokine secretion and angiogenesis”, eventually became the first of five of Taichman’s papers to be retracted. We first reported on the retractions last September. Since then, following a public records request, we’ve obtained 20 pages of redacted emails that reveal the story behind the retractions.

Weekend reads: The black market for papers; the secret life of retractions; a ‘troublesome pattern’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to nearly 350. There are now 41,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in Edifix, EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 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?

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

Science rescinds expression of concern issued last month

Science has rescinded an expression of concern it issued one month ago after the authors provided data that “addressed concerns about the integrity of the paper.”

The journal had published the expression of concern for the 2021 article “Light-induced mobile factors from shoots regulate rhizobium-triggered soybean root nodulation” after two separate readers contacted the editorial team about an issue in the paper, as we reported at the time. The expression of concern noted that “that data presented in Fig. 5 assessed GmNSP1 expression rather than GmNIN expression.”

The article has been cited 43 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal is publishing the newly submitted data as a correction, as well as an editor’s note explaining the removal of the expression of concern. The new notice states:

Exclusive: Public health journal says it will retract vaping paper for questions authors say were addressed in peer review

The journal BMC Public Health plans to retract an article that found smoking rates fell faster than expected in the US as use of e-cigarettes increased, Retraction Watch has learned.

The authors contend that they addressed the issues cited in the retraction notice during the peer review process and say they addressed them even more extensively when the journal said they intended to retract.

The paper, “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults,” was published last October. The authors are all employees of Pinney Associates, a consulting firm that they disclosed “provide[s] consulting services on tobacco harm reduction on an exclusive basis to Juul Labs Inc.” The article also disclosed that Juul Labs funded the research and reviewed and provided comments on a draft manuscript.

Some journals, including several in the BMJ family and the American Journal of Public Health, will not publish research funded by the tobacco industry, which has led to at least one retraction. But the planned BMC Public Health retraction notice does not refer to that conflict of interest.

Exclusive: City of Hope cancer researcher goes to court to fight misconduct finding

An alumna of the lab of Carlo Croce, a high-profile cancer researcher at The Ohio State University with 14 retractions, has sued the institution over the results of its investigation that found she committed research misconduct.

Flavia Pichiorri is now a principal investigator with her own lab researching potential therapies for multiple myeloma at City of Hope – a cancer center that also owns Cancer Treatment Centers of America – in Duarte, Calif.

She worked at Ohio State from 2004-16, first as a postdoctoral researcher in Croce’s lab, then as a research scientist, and finally as an assistant professor of hematology. She has been a PI on grants that garnered millions of dollars in funding from the National Institutes of Health since switching jobs.

Meet the author who has published more than 500 letters to the editor in a year

Hyperprolific authors have been drawing attention for some time. In 2018, for example, a Nature article reported that “thousands of scientists have published a paper every five days.” And earlier this year El Pais noted that a now-suspended scientist was publishing a paper every 37 hours.

What about an author who publishes more than once a day, on average?

Viroj Wiwanitkit has published 543 items indexed in PubMed in the last 12 months, the vast majority of them letters to the editor. Most of Wiwanitkit’s letters with colleagues appear to be only a single paragraph. Many concern COVID-19 and vaccinations, but the catalog includes letters about monkeypox, knee replacement surgery, bipolar disorder, even ChatGPT.

Weekend reads: Stanford president to resign; untrustworthy clinical trials; ‘cruel and fake’ animal experiments

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 more than 300. There are now 41,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in Edifix, EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains 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?

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

Sage retracting three dozen articles for ‘compromised’ peer review

Sage Publishing is retracting 37 articles from an engineering journal after finding “indicators of third party involvement” in the peer review process.

The publisher’s investigation continues, and more papers may be retracted, a spokesperson for the company told Retraction Watch.

A single retraction notice lists the links of the 37 papers to be retracted from Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part E: Journal of Process Mechanical Engineering. The notice states:

Florida university fires criminology professor blemished by retractions

Florida State University last week terminated a criminology professor accused of research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned, capping a years-long, highly publicized saga the school says has caused almost “catastrophic” damage to its standing.

In a termination letter obtained by Retraction Watch, the university accused the former professor, Eric A. Stewart, of “extreme negligence and incompetence.” It also asserted that, due to Stewart’s actions, “decades of research” once believed “to be at the forefront of” criminology has “been shown to contain numerous erroneous and false narratives.”

“The details of problematic data management, false results, and the numerous publication retractions have negatively affected the discipline on a national level,” FSU Provost James J. Clark wrote in the letter, dated July 13.

Clark added that the debacle had also affected recruitment of faculty and students and caused the university’s researchers to worry about their chances of getting papers into top journals.

Journal editors resign, strike in dispute with Wiley over ‘business model that maximises profit’

The editor in chief of a Wiley journal has resigned, saying the publisher recently has “seemed to emphasize cost-cutting and margins over good editorial practice.”

Most of the journal’s associate editors are in the midst of a work stoppage protesting the same issues. After Wiley responded to the associate editors in a way they found “troubling,” the editors replied with a list of 12 demands, and a deputy editor in chief tendered her resignation.

Editorial boards of at least three other journals have recently resigned en masse, or threatened to resign, amid similar disputes.

Michael Dawson, editor in chief of the Journal of Biogeography, published a blog post announcing his resignation on June 21. In it, he wrote:

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