Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: ‘Egregious misconduct’ by biotech collaborator; an IVF doctor with allegedly fake credentials; ChatGPT not the problem in publishing

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350. There are more than 43,000 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):

Exclusive: Author threatened to sue publisher over retraction, then sued to block release of emails

An education researcher who had four papers flagged for plagiarism and citation issues threatened to sue the publisher and editors who decided to retract one of the articles, Retraction Watch has learned.

We obtained the emails containing legal threats by Constance Iloh, formerly an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, through a public records request. Iloh, who was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” top figures in education in 2016 and briefly taught at Azusa Pacific University after leaving Irvine, sued to prevent the university from giving us the emails, but after a two-year legal battle, a state appeals court affirmed the records should be released. That battle is described in more detail in this post.

Following our reporting in August 2020 on the retraction of one of Iloh’s articles for plagiarism, the disappearance of another, and the correction of two more, we requested post-publication correspondence between UCI, Iloh, and the journals where the papers had appeared.

The emails UCI released to us in May of this year shed light on the processes three journals took after concerns were raised about Iloh’s work, and how she responded.

Our two-year fight for the release of public records

In September 2020, we requested records from the University of California, Irvine, regarding four papers by an assistant professor of education that had been retracted, corrected, or taken down.

The retraction and correction notices for the articles, written by Constance Iloh, mentioned plagiarism and misuse of references. After our initial reporting, we wanted to see if we could learn more about what happened.

It took approximately two and a half years for us to obtain the records, detailed in this post. The emails we obtained shed light on the processes three journals took after concerns were raised about Iloh’s work, and how she responded – including with legal threats.

Here, we tell the story of how we fought in court to get the records, represented by Kelly Aviles, who specializes in cases involving the California Public Records Act and has successfully sued on behalf of the Los Angeles Times.

Study of music by Mozart includes tunes “not necessarily music composed by Mozart”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy – famously writing music at an age when other children need lullabies to help them to fall asleep.

Despite how prolific he was, however, Mozart did not write an album called “Bedtime Mozart.” That has now created a headache for the authors of a study published in Pediatric Research in August that found the particular set of melodies helped soothe babies during a particular blood test.

Like many “Mozart Effect” studies before it, the new research prompted a press release referring to Mozart in its headline, and plenty of press coverage. But Hinnerk Feldwisch-Drentrup, a correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine, thought something was off-key:

How thousands of invisible citations sneak into papers and make for fake metrics

In 2022, Guillaume Cabanac noticed something unusual: a study had attracted more than 100 citations in a short span of less than two months of being published.

Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France, initially flagged the study on PubPeer after it was highlighted by the Problematic Paper Screener, which automatically identifies research papers with certain issues.

The screener flagged this particular paper — which has since been retracted — for containing so-called tortured phrases, strange twists on established terms that were probably introduced by translation software or humans looking to circumvent plagiarism checkers.

But Cabanac noticed something weird: The study had been cited 107 times according to the ‘Altmetrics donut,’ an indicator of an article’s potential impact, yet it had been downloaded just 62 times.

Weekend reads: The strain on publishing; Gino defends herself; the rise of fake peer review retractions

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

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):

Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting

Last week, an environmental journal published a paper on the use of renewable energy in cleaning up contaminated land. To read it, you would have to pay 40 euros. But you still wouldn’t know for sure who wrote it.

Ostensibly authored by researchers in China, “Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in soil remediation for a sustainable future” includes the extraneous phrase “Regenerate response” at the end of a methods section. For those unfamiliar, “Regenerate response” is a button in OpenAI’s ChatGPT that prompts the chatbot to rework an unsatisfactory answer.

“Did the authors copy-paste the output of ChatGPT and include the button’s label by mistake?” wondered Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse, in France, in a comment on PubPeer.

And, he added, “How come this meaningless wording survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”

Authors file complaint with publisher as journal retracts vaping paper

A paper that found smoking rates in the United States fell faster than expected as more people started using e-cigarettes has been retracted over the objections of its authors, who have filed a complaint with the journal’s publisher.

As we reported in July, BMC Public Health informed the authors of “Population-level counterfactual trend modelling to examine the relationship between smoking prevalence and e-cigarette use among US adults” that the editors had decided to retract the article after receiving a critical letter. We reported:

The letter did not request retraction of the paper, but argued that its analyses “were flawed and therefore potentially produced misleading findings that would benefit tobacco industry profits and interests.”

The authors of the retracted paper are 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.

After we published our story about the pending retraction, 23 researchers wrote a letter to the journal expressing concern about the decision. They wrote:

To guard against fraud, medical research should be a profession: A book excerpt

We are pleased to present an excerpt from Trust in Medical Research, a freely available new book by Warwick P. Anderson, emeritus professor of physiology and biomedical sciences at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

It has always been difficult for me to admit that we have a genuine and substantial problem of fraud and rubbish science in medical research. I suspect this is true for most scientists. We want to think of science as being free from half-truths and fake news. We hope that the high moral purpose of medical research will guard against wrongdoing, that it will weigh on our minds so heavily that we all take care to work and publish honestly and competently.

We know that scientists sometimes make unintentional mistakes due to ignorance, but we also know in our hearts that some people are so ambitious that they push the envelope, stretch the truth and take shortcuts. We know, too, that a few others go further and get carried away by the prospects of scientific and financial rewards and so cheat, commit fraud and lie in publications. This is what some humans do in all walks of life.

We know all this, but it is fair to say that we generally do not want to face up to it. Jennifer Byrne at the University of Sydney put it well when she wrote that we tend to overlook the research fraud issue “because the scientific community has been unwilling to have frank and open discussions about it”:

Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction

It’s Nobel Prize week, and the work behind mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has just earned the physiology or medicine prize. But this is Retraction Watch, so that’s not what this post is about.

A Nobel prize-winning researcher whose publications have come under scrutiny has retracted his 10th paper for issues with the data and images.

Gregg Semenza, a professor of genetic medicine and director of the vascular program at Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Cell Engineering in Baltimore, shared the 2019 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for “discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.”

The pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis had flagged possibly duplicated or manipulated images in Semenza’s publications on PubPeer before 2019, and other sleuths posted more beginning in October 2020.

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