Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: More allegations about Stanford president; a plagiarizing rabbi; costly spreadsheet mistakes

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted over a year after Retraction Watch report
Five years on, convicted transplant surgeon earns expressions of concern from Lancet
Harvard surgeon has five papers pulled following internal investigation
Exclusive: Prof stole former student’s identity to edit two journal special issues

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are more than 38,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. 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: Prof stole former student’s identity to edit two journal special issues

A university investigation in Hong Kong found that a professor used the email account of a former student to conduct all the correspondence needed to edit special issues of two journals, Retraction Watch has learned.

The two special issues, which were published last year, are full of articles with the hallmarks of paper mills, said Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford psychologist and scientific sleuth who flagged the matter to the institution involved in the case.

Last November, Bishop emailed the president of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) with the information that Kaifa Zhao, a PhD student at the university, was listed as the lead editor for two special issues of the Journal of Environmental and Public Health and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, both journals published by Hindawi. The nearly 300 articles in the special issues were “mostly meaningless gobbledegook” that suggested they came from a paper mill, she wrote.

The episode is the latest of many problems involving questionable peer review of special issues – and subsequent retractions – we’ve covered.

Harvard surgeon has five papers pulled following internal investigation

Citing an investigation by Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, two journals last week retracted five articles by Edward Whang, an associate professor of surgery at the school.

The journals, Oncogene and Surgery, both refer to problems with images of Western blots that could not be resolved because “no underlying research data” were available, according to the investigation.

Questions have loomed over Whang’s research for a decade, and more than 20 of his studies have been flagged on PubPeer for possible image problems. As one commenter wrote in 2014 about one of the now-retracted papers, “It is perhaps fortunate that figure assembly and liver surgery require such unrelated skill sets.”

It is not clear how many of Whang’s papers were affected by the investigation. We reached out to Harvard Medical School for more details, but it declined to share information about the investigation.

Five years on, convicted transplant surgeon earns expressions of concern from Lancet

In 2018, when The Lancet pulled two studies by once-celebrated transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini after he was found guilty of misconduct, we suggested in a post that the journal’s chapter of the long-running Macchiarini saga was finally over.

We were wrong.

Last week, the journal issued expressions of concern about a pair of papers by the Italian doctor, who is currently on probation after a court in Sweden convicted him of causing bodily harm to a patient.

Paper with authorship posted for sale retracted over a year after Retraction Watch report

A list of authorships available at Teziran.org

More than a year after we reported on two websites advertising authorships of scientific papers for sale, one of the posted articles has been retracted, while publishers say they are still investigating others.

The retracted article, “Dynamic simulation of moderately thick annular system coupled with shape memory alloy and multi-phase nanocomposite face sheets,” appeared in the journal Engineering with Computers, a Springer Nature title, in January 2021. The article has been cited 28 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Although the retraction notice doesn’t say as much, the journal’s publisher told us that it removed the article in part due its having been advertised for sale.

After our September 2021 article on the websites selling authorships, the anonymous whistleblower “Artemisia Stricta” identified several papers from a cached version of one of the websites, Teziran.org, and notified the editors and publishers of the journals about the finding.

Weekend reads: Elsevier journal under fire; a researcher’s PhD is revoked; peer review vs. ‘attention-economy hellscapes’

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 290. There are more than 38,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. 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):

US federal research watchdog gets new permanent director

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity, the agency that oversees research misconduct investigations for work funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has a new permanent director after a year and a half without one.

Sheila Garrity, currently associate vice president for research integrity and research integrity officer at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., will start as ORI’s next permanent director the week of March 26, according to an internal memo from Rachel Levine, the Biden Administration’s Assistant Secretary for Health.

Garrity previously was director of the division of research integrity at Johns Hopkins University, where she worked for more than 20 years. She also was a founding member and the first president of the Association for Research Integrity Officers (ARIO).

Levine’s memo described Garrity as “a leader in the fields of research integrity and the responsible conduct of research education,” and asked staff to “join me in welcoming Sheila to the OASH family and in thanking Wanda Jones for the incredible job she has done in running ORI while we conducted our candidate search.”

‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention.

A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the treatment’s efficacy in people with moderate to severe depression. That meant the drug worked better than electric shock therapy, an option when antidepressants fail. It was a breakthrough.

“I thought, you know, wow, this is something that I’m comfortable prescribing that could make a huge difference for my patients,” said Ross, who at the time was doing his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

But when he looked up the study, he discovered several oddities. For instance, the number of patients who experienced an adverse event differed by exactly one for 17 out of 18 single events like fatigue or bloating. That seemed unlikely to have occurred by chance. And all of the scores of statistical tests the authors had done turned out just the way they would have wanted, a dream that rarely comes true in biomedical sciences.

The Whack-a-Mole problem: Hijacked journal still being indexed in Scopus even after discovery

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.

Hijacked journal: Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies

What happened: The journal became a perfect target for hijackers when it expanded its title from “Linguistica Antverpiensia” and changed its web domain.

Fraudulent publishers hijacked the journal in 2021, re-registering the old, expired domain under the original, shorter name Linguistica Antverpiensia.

How fishy email addresses tipped off a sleuth to a paper mill

Anna Abalkina noticed something odd about a psychology paper on the “modern problems of youth extremism”: The corresponding author was affiliated with a university in Russia, but his email address had a domain name from India.

The unusual domain name was part of a pattern Abalkina, of the Freie Universität Berlin, noticed in hundreds of papers that seemed to have been produced by paper mills.

Six of those papers, including the one on youth extremism, had been published in the Journal of Community Psychology, a Wiley title. Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, conducted a detailed review of the six articles, along with the published referee reports and editorial correspondence on Publons, to see if anything else about them was amiss.

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