Retraction Watch

How a now-retracted study got published in the first place, leading to a $3.8 million NIH grant

The scientific paper inspired international headlines with its bold claim that the combination of brain scans and machine learning algorithms could identify people at risk for suicide with 91% accuracy.

The promise of the work garnered lead author Marcel Adam Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and co-author David Brent of the University of Pittsburgh a five-year, $3.8 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a larger follow-up study.

But the 2017 paper attracted immediate and sustained scrutiny from other experts, one of whom attempted to replicate it and found a key problem. Nothing happened until this April, when the authors admitted the work was flawed and retracted their article. By then, it had been cited 134 times in the scientific literature, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science — a large amount for a young paper — and received so much attention online that the article ranks in the top 5% of all the research tracked by Altmetric, a data company focused on scientific publishing.

All this could have been avoided if the journal had followed the advice of its own reviewers, according to records of the peer-review process obtained by Retraction Watch. The experts who scrutinized the submitted manuscript for the journal before it was published identified many issues in the initial draft and a revised resubmission. One asked for the authors to replicate the work in a new group of study participants, and overall, they recommended rejecting the manuscript.

Did a ‘nasty’ publishing scheme help an Indian dental school win high rankings?

Each year, the 500 undergraduates at Saveetha Dental College in Chennai, India, participate in 4-hour exams that require them to write a 1500-word manuscript on research they have conducted. After faculty and students review and revise the papers, they use an online tool to add references to previously published work. Many of the papers are then submitted to and published by journals; the process contributed to the more than 1400 scholarly works the dental school published last year.

Saveetha, which calls itself a “pioneer in undergraduate publications,” says the exercise is designed to help every student gain practical research experience—as well as at least 10 publications listed in Scopus, the vast literature database maintained by the publisher Elsevier. The college’s website boasts that one Saveetha student published 24 papers.

But the torrent of undergraduate manuscripts—on topics including fruit intake by students and awareness of mental health among teenagers—also appears to serve a less savory purpose, an investigation by Retraction Watch has found. By systematically citing other papers published by Saveetha faculty—including papers on completely unrelated topics—the undergraduate publications have helped dramatically inflate the number of citations, a key measure of academic merit, linked to Saveetha.

Read the rest of this Science-Retraction Watch story here.

Journal pulls paper from Ethiopia for unlicensed use of questionnaire

A public-health journal has retracted a study from Ethiopia that made unlicensed use of a questionnaire developed by a U.S. researcher known to aggressively protect his intellectual property.

This time, he didn’t have to: The journal’s publisher flagged the copyright infringement itself, Renee Hoch, managing editor at PLOS Publication Ethics, told Retraction Watch:

“Flagrant and frankly, inexcusable” data duplication leads to retraction

Bardia Askari, who flagged the duplication

A biochemistry study has been retracted nearly a year after a whistleblower found significant overlap between the article and one published in a different journal by the same research group.

The study, “Berberine ameliorates renal injury in diabetic C57BL/6 mice: Involvement of suppression of SphK–S1P signaling pathway,” appeared in the journal Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics in July 2010. It has been cited 76 times.

The study examines how berberine, a compound found in plants such as tree turmeric, might improve kidney injury in diabetic mice. People sometimes take berberine supplements to help treat diabetes, but the evidence for its effectiveness is mixed. The authors of the paper are researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

The study was retracted on May 23 at the request of the journal’s editor-in-chief, according to the retraction notice. It states, in part:

Weekend reads: How university rankings lead to bad science; how to report research misconduct; the impact of Retraction Watch reporting

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are now 40,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in 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):

Exclusive: Alleged research misconduct cost Turkish surgeons tenure

Two orthopedic surgeons in Turkey will not attain tenured professorships following alleged research misconduct that, so far, has also cost them a pair of publications, Retraction Watch has learned.

Mehmet Faruk Çatma and Serhan Ünlü are among the authors of a paper about hip-replacement surgery that was published in 2016 in International Orthopedics and retracted earlier this year.

The February 16 retraction notice reads:

Scientist with six retractions wins challenge of firing, funding ban

Ten years after a neuroscientist was fired from his job at a Veterans Administration Medical Center, he has won a challenge of the decision.

Wayne State University, where the researcher, Christian Kreipke, was studying traumatic brain injury, fired him in February 2012 following a research misconduct investigation that found he had faked data. At the time Kreipke had a dual appointment at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit.

Kreipke maintains that Wayne State investigated him in retaliation for asking questions about how the university administered grant funding. He filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired alleging that the university had committed grant fraud against the federal government, to the tune of $169 million. In 2014, a judge dismissed the case.

In the Death of an Iranian Scientist, Hints of Unchecked Strife

The news of Zahra Jalilian’s death seemed to change as quickly as it spread.

On Dec. 4, 2022, the University of Tehran announced that the nanotechnology graduate student had died following “a tragic self-harm incident.” Political opposition groups quickly countered that darker forces were likely at work, attributing the 31-year-old Ph.D. student’s death to Islamic mercenaries, government functionaries, and other plots. Jalilian’s family, meanwhile, has accused her adviser of getting rid of his student in order to take credit for her work — charges that he steadfastly denies.

What is clear amid the varying and sometimes overheated accounts is that Jalilian was struggling under the pressures of her research. Interviews with her former colleagues, alongside voice memos that appeared on a university messaging platform shortly after her death, provide a rare glimpse into the culture of a scientific lab in a country that is often opaque to the outside world — and where mental illness is often ignored, denied, and deeply freighted with stigma.

Weekend reads: A Nobel winner’s seventh retraction; Stanford’s president fights back; what should go into a retraction notice

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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):

Three journals’ web domains expired. Then major indexes pointed to hijacked versions

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

When web domains of legitimate journals expire, fraudulent publishers have an opening to hijack them by registering the expired domains and creating clone websites that mimic the genuine journal.

In 2015, John Bohannon found fraudulent publishers had hijacked the websites of several legitimate journals indexed in Web of Science. The expired domains of GMP Review and Ludus Vitalis, which Web of Science listed as their official homepages, were registered by the fraudulent publishers, who created clone journals offering to publish papers for a fee.

Taking over expired domains remains a successful strategy for fraudulent publishers, because potential authors may use the websites listed in scientometric databases to verify the authenticity of a journal. Recently, three examples have come to light of journals with domains that expired and were hijacked by fake journals.

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