Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: UK shadow chancellor accused of plagiarism; eLife editor fired; Elsevier editor resigns because publisher ignored likely paper mill activity

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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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to well over 350.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):

Lancet retracts two more papers by convicted surgeon Paolo Macchiarini

The Lancet today retracted two papers by former Karolinska Institutet surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, whose professional and personal escapades have made headlines for more than a decade and who has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for causing bodily harm to his patients.

The move comes a month after Sweden’s National Board for Assessment of Misconduct (NPOF in Swedish) said it had found Macchiarini guilty of misconduct involving the two articles, eight months after the journal issued expressions of concern for the two papers, and five years after Macchiarini had already been found to have committed misconduct in related work.

As we reported in February:

History repeats itself: Diabetes researcher gets four expressions of concern in journal he once sued

A diabetes researcher who lost a defamation suit against a journal that marked four of his papers with expressions of concern now has four more papers flagged – by the same journal.

Diabetes, a journal of the American Diabetes Association (ADA), placed expressions of concern on four papers led or co-authored by Mario Saad, of the University of Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil on October 23.

Saad sued the ADA in 2015 after Diabetes marked four other papers with similar notices. A judge dismissed the suit, and the journal later retracted the papers (for which we recognized them with a DiRT — Doing the Right Thing — award). Saad is now up to 19 retractions, by our count.

Publisher looking into COVID vaccine paper with ‘serious flaws’

A controversial paper on the safety and immunogenicity of an Iran-made COVID-19 vaccine is being investigated by the U.S.-based publisher Wiley, Retraction Watch has learned.

Iran reportedly has already administered 3 million doses of the vaccine, dubbed Noora, which the country licensed for emergency use last year.

The paper describes the vaccine’s first test in humans, marking the only time results from the clinical development of the homegrown shot have been reported in international journals.

“Safety and immunogenicity of a recombinant receptor-binding domain-based protein subunit vaccine (Noora vaccine™) against COVID-19 in adults: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, Phase 1 trial” was published in 2022 in the Journal of Medical Virology, an achievement highlighted in Iranian news media. One report said the study showed a dose of 80 micrograms of the vaccine was “safe” and provided “adequate immunity in adults.”

Cancer researcher with nine retractions says he’ll take publisher to court

A cancer researcher who lost nine papers in one day as a publisher purged articles offered in “authorship-for-sale” schemes told Retraction Watch he and his co-authors “will soon defend ourselves legally.”

Last month, the publisher Frontiers announced it had retracted 38 papers after its research integrity team found links to the practice of buying and selling authorship positions. Brokers list advertisements for authorships of scientific papers on dedicated websites as well as social media.

Nine of the 38 articles Frontiers retracted listed Mostafa Jarahian, formerly of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, as a co-author.

When we initially reported on the large batch of retractions, one of Jarahian’s co-authors shared an article from Frontiers indicating the publisher had decided to retract the paper after “concerns were brought to our attention from the German Cancer Research Center regarding the authorship of the article.”

PLOS and scientist appear close to settling lawsuit over expression of concern

The publisher PLOS appears close to an agreement with a scientist who sued to stop the addition of an expression of concern to one of her articles, according to a recent filing in the case.

Soudamani Singh, an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Marshall University’s Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W. Va., filed suit against PLOS in April, as we previously reported.

According to Singh’s complaint, the publisher planned to place an expression of concern on one of her papers after she and her co-authors had requested a correction.

Singh’s suit sought a temporary restraining order and permanent injunction preventing PLOS from publishing the expression of concern, as well as damages and legal fees.

Weekend reads: A Nobelist earns an expression of concern; India’s fake universities; shaking things up in psychology

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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):

Professor who blamed plagiarism on ghostwriter to earn first retraction

A professor in France who plagiarized extensively in a review article and then blamed the offense on an undisclosed medical writer will lose the publication, Retraction Watch has learned.

“We have decided to retract this paper,” Yi-Xiang Wang, editor-in-chief of Quantitative Imaging in Medicine and Surgery, told us by email.

The move comes one day after a Retraction Watch exclusive describing how the professor, Romaric Loffroy of CHU Dijon Bourgogne, claimed he had not written the offending paper despite being listed as its first and corresponding author. Instead, Loffroy put the blame on an alleged medical writer.

The retraction will be Loffroy’s first. He did not immediately respond to our request for comments.

Alcohol researcher faked data in animal studies, US watchdog says

A neuroscientist who studies alcohol and stress faked data in two published studies and two grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to a U.S. government watchdog.

Lara S. Hwa, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, since January 2021, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data, methods, results, and conclusions in animal models of alcohol use disorders,” the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) concluded in its findings.

ORI found Hwa, who has not immediately responded to our request for comment, “falsified and/or fabricated experimental timelines, group conditions, sex of animal subjects, mouse strains, and behavioral response data” in the grant applications and papers. The articles were published when she was a postdoc at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.

Article defending private-equity involvement in autism services retracted

An article that proposed potential benefits of private equity firms investing in autism service providers has been removed from the journal in which it was published.

The article, “Private equity investment: Friend or foe to applied behavior analysis?” was originally published in the International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education as part of a January 2023 special issue devoted to applied behavior analysis (ABA) for autism.

ABA is the most widely used therapy for autism, and companies that provide it have faced a flood of interest from private equity firms in the past decade.

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