Retraction Watch

Who are you, Dragan Rodriguez? Fifteen studies have the same fake author, sleuth finds

Talk about artificial intelligence. Fifteen studies published in various journals name a mysterious computer scientist as an author.

The problem? He doesn’t seem to exist.

Dragan Rodriguez is listed as being affiliated with Case Western Reserve University, but an official at the Cleveland institution told a sleuth no one of that name has been associated with the university.

The studies on which Rodriguez’s name appears range in topic from cancer detection to “renewable energy systems optimization.” The papers were published since 2018 in 10 journals from four major scientific publishers since 2018, including the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and the Journal of Building Engineering, which have both historically had impact factors above 7, and Applied Energy, whose impact factor has been above 11. They have been cited a total of 232 times.

Lawyers can foreclose on cancer researcher’s house for unpaid defamation suit bills, says judge

A law firm that holds a mortgage on the house of Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, may foreclose on the property, a judge has ruled.

Croce hired James E. Arnold and Associates to represent him in a libel case against the New York Times and a defamation case against David Sanders, a professor of biological sciences at Purdue University who became something of a public nemesis for the Ohio scientist after pointing out problems in Croce’s published work. Croce also needed representation for Ohio State’s research misconduct investigation, and a suit attempting to stop the university from removing him as chair of the department of cancer biology and genetics.

Croce lost each case. Ohio State’s investigation found problems with how he managed his lab that did not amount to research misconduct.

Weekend reads: How common is scientific fraud?; the quest to get a paper retracted; ‘so, is this fraud or what?’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 350. There are now 42,000 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):

Author of paper on COVID-19 and jade amulets sues employer for ‘mental anguish,’ discrimination

A professor at the University of Pittsburgh is suing the institution and two administrators, alleging they discriminated against him because he is Black.

The researcher, Moses Bility, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and microbiology in the university’s School of Public Health, alleges the school’s response to a 2020 paper he published and later withdrew that proposed jade amulets may prevent COVID-19 was discriminatory.

He also claims the school discriminated against him by blocking him from transferring his lab to the Pitt-affiliated Hillman Cancer Center, and that one of the named administrators plagiarized his COVID-19 paper, among other allegedly discriminatory acts. Bility says the school denied his application for tenure in June as retaliation for his complaints of discrimination.

Bility is seeking lost wages, compensatory and punitive damages, and attorney’s fees. His complaint states:

Colombia drug regulator halts clinical research at US-funded facility

Following an inspection earlier this month, Colombia’s FDA has suspended all human research at a facility that until this summer had been receiving U.S. funding to develop a malaria vaccine.

The Malaria Vaccine and Development Center, in the city of Cali in western Colombia, is part of the Caucaseco Scientific Research Consortium, which is run by husband-and-wife team Myriam Arévalo-Herrera and Sócrates Herrera. The couple has secured more than $17 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2003.

As we reported in April, an investigation by the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) exposed a host of serious problems at the facilities, including widespread animal abuse and falsified research approvals. The NIH defunded the facilities in June, as first reported by STAT.

According to a statement released on August 5 (in Spanish), the Colombian National Institute of Drug and Food Surveillance (Invima) made the following findings during its inspection of the Malaria Vaccine and Development Center:

Wiley journal editors resign en masse, fired chief editor speaks

Two-thirds of the associate editors of the Journal of Biogeography, a Wiley title, have resigned in a dispute with the publisher, and more resignations are likely, according to those involved.

Most of the resignations, reported first by Times Higher Education, were effective immediately, but a portion of the associate editors set August 28 as their effective date in hopes Wiley may negotiate with them about their concerns.

Most of the associate editors stopped processing new manuscripts at the end of June, as we reported last month, due to the dispute.

In interviews with Retraction Watch, two associate editors who had put in their resignations described concerns with the journal’s high article processing charges (APCs) fueling Wiley’s profitability, as well as the “breakdown in negotiations” between the publisher and the journal’s lead editorial team.

Outcry over ‘terminal anorexia’ response letter prompts retraction

The authors of a response to an article critiquing the use of the term “terminal anorexia” retracted their letter last month after receiving major backlash from researchers, healthcare providers, and people with eating disorders.

“Regardless of inequities in care, terminal anorexia nervosa exists: a response to Sharpe et. al,” which defended the use of the term, was published May 20 in the Journal of Eating Disorders.

The letter was a response to “Inaccessibility of care and inequitable conceptions of suffering: a collective response to the construction of “terminal” anorexia nervosa,” an article published earlier in the month in the same journal by researchers with lived experiences of eating disorders. The article outlined methodological problems with the criteria for diagnosis of a “terminal eating disorder” put forward in “Terminal anorexia nervosa: three cases and proposed clinical characteristics,” a previous paper by two of the authors of the response letter.

The response was retracted on July 17. Its retraction note reads:

Weekend reads: Death penalty for prof who killed whistleblower; psychiatry dept. shakeup after suicide in clinical trial; how scientific communication became highly profitable

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

Retraction Watch turned 13 on Thursday. The week also featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to nearly 350. There are now 42,000 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):

Former postdoc who admitted to faking data pleads guilty to attempted forgery

A cancer researcher who admitted to faking data has pleaded guilty to attempted forgery in a case involving letters of recommendation he passed off as coming from his former supervisor.

Last year, Georgios Laliotis, a former postdoc at The Ohio State University, was charged with forgery for allegedly creating a fake email address with the name of his PI, Philip Tsichlis, and using it to send two letters of recommendation to prospective employers.

Laliotis was later indicted for identity fraud, forgery, and telecommunications fraud, and pleaded not guilty to each count.

Happy 13th birthday, Retraction Watch: Another eventful year

In our old diner haunt, more than a decade ago

If Retraction Watch were the child of Jewish parents – which happens to be the case – it would be celebrating its bar mitzvah this year. Yes, that’s right, mazel tovs are in order: Retraction Watch turns 13 today.

And as the blog becomes some version of an adult, we have plenty to celebrate. This week, we published an op-ed in Scientific American. And here are highlights of the past 12 months:

A new $250,000 grant from the WoodNext Foundation that allowed us to hire another editor, Fred Joelving, who is already breaking stories right and left.
The additional bandwidth got us back to partnering with other outlets. Since January, we’ve published investigations and other stories with Undark, Science, STAT, and the Flatwater Free Press (with pickup by Nebraska Public Media).
A study published in Research Policy “found that reporting retractions on RW significantly reduced post-retraction citations of non-swiftly retracted articles in biomedical sciences.” In other words, when Retraction Watch covers a retraction, the retracted paper is less likely to be cited.
The Retraction Watch Database surpassed 40,000 retractions, which is three times as many as PubMed and multiples of other sources, and powers scholarship as well as retraction alerts in Edifix, EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. Clarivate has begun using it to vet its Highly Cited Researchers list. The Economist used data from the Retraction Watch Database to illustrate the amount of fraud in the biomedical literature.
We published an invited editorial in Anesthesiology, “How to Stop the Unknowing Citation of Retracted Papers.”

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