Last May, Devrim Çavuşoğlu, an engineer at Turkish software company OBSS, was looking at feedback from a conference reviewer of a paper he and his colleagues had submitted. One comment stood out to him: The reviewer had noticed a resemblance between Çavuşoğlu’s work and another paper accepted to a different conference on computational linguistics.
When Çavuşoğlu first skimmed through the other paper, he came across some sections containing an uncanny resemblance to his own ideas. “I thought, it’s like I wrote that,” he recalled. “How could it be so similar, did we think about the same thing?”
He checked the accompanying source code and found the authors of the other paper seemed to have directly copied and built upon his own publicly released code without any attribution – a violation of the license connected to the work. “I was shocked, to be honest,” Çavuşoğlu told Retraction Watch.
A university vice president has received his first retraction – and disagrees with it, according to the journal.
The retraction for Jaydutt Vadgama, the Vice President for Research and Health Affairs at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, comes after a commenter on PubPeer noted similarities between data in two papers from the same group. Similar comments have led to corrections to two other papers by Vadgama, who is also professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles.
The dean of science at the University of Sydney is reassessing a series of review papers after commenters on PubPeer pointed out each cited several retracted articles, Retraction Watch has learned.
Marcel Dinger and his coauthors will submit addendums to the journals noting the retracted references, he told Retraction Watch, and work with editors to determine whether the reviews should be retracted.
Dinger, who also is a professor of genome biology, is a middle author of four review articles and last author on one more that sleuths using the Problematic Paper Screener flagged as referencing retracted articles. The articles have been cited nearly 100 times altogether, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Guillaume Cabanac, who developed the screener, commented on one of the papers in August 2022:
A well-known content creator and former lab technician at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas admitted taking “several shortcuts” in work that has been found to contain falsified data funded by the National Institutes of Health, according to a U.S. government watchdog.
Darrion Nguyen, who has more than a half-million followers on his TikTok account “lab_shenanigans,” engaged in research misconduct while working at Baylor by “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating experimental data and results” of several research records, two manuscript figures, a research progress report, a poster, and a presentation, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said.
Readers who have checked the Retraction Watch leaderboard lately may have picked up on something notable: One researcher, Joachim Boldt, has now been credited with 210 retractions – making him the first author (to our knowledge) with more than 200 retractions to his name.
Boldt’s new tally – representing about half of his roughly 400 publications – admittedly is an accounting change rather than new problems being identified. Some journals have only now come around to acting on the corrupt articles. In that sense, it reflects both progress and a frustrating lack of concern-slash-urgency on the part of the journals that have taken more than a decade to resolve the case.
An interdisciplinary journal says it will take “corrective actions” on a paper following a thorough investigation on a paper for which one author used ChatGPT to update the references.
Krithika Srinivasan, an editor of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space and a geographer at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, confirmed to Retraction Watch her journal is finalizing what actions need to be taken. After the probe concluded, Srinivasan says she submitted her recommendations to Sage, the journal’s publisher, who will take actions in line with their policy.
What’s clear from the probe, she says, is that “none of the incorrect references in this paper were ‘fabricated’ in the sense of being made up or false.” She notes that the original manuscript was submitted to the journal with the correct references but “the errors were generated when one of the other authors (without the knowledge of the submitting author) used chatGPT (instead of regular referencing software) to insert the citations and reference list.”
One incident illustrates just how determined the leaders of the Karolinska Institute were to protect Paolo Macchiarini. In November of 2014, a leaked copy of the whistleblowers’ report came into the hands of the New York Times, which published an article titled “Leading Surgeon Is Accused of Misconduct in Experimental Transplant Operations.” The article detailed several of the most serious allegations against Macchiarini: that he had never obtained ethical permission to conduct his experiments, that his 2011 study in The Lancet had misrepresented the outcome of Beyene’s implant, and that of the three patients at the Karolinska Institute that Macchiarini had given synthetic implants, only Beyene had signed a consent form— and the form was dated two weeks after his surgery. The publicity generated by the article all but forced the Karolinska Institute to act. Anders Hamsten, the vice-chancellor, said he would ask for an external inquiry.
Retaliation against the whistleblowers came quickly. According to Simonson, the whistleblowers were told that they had violated patient privacy and would be fired immediately. That didn’t happen, but in December the Karolinska Institute informed the whistleblowers that the head of the cardiothoracic clinic would deliver a formal warning, the last step before an employee is terminated.
The Karolinska Institute also reported the whistleblowers to the police. “I was called down to the police and put in a room with no windows, with a tape recorder and a lawyer and a policeman in front of me, and interrogated. That was pretty scary,” Matthias Corbascio, a cardiothoracic surgeons says. “It was exactly what it’s like on television. And you know, it’s hard to be a tough guy in that room.”
In the late afternoon at a conference in Cartagena last year, a team of Swedish researchers presented their work on a technique that uses machine learning to translate the body’s own electric signals used to move a limb. They had tested it on a minor recovering from a stroke.
Documents from an internal investigation shared by Chalmers University have now revealed, however, that this case study was part of a series of regulatory lapses and suspicious research practices at the Centre for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR) where the clinical research was conducted. The researchers seem to have conducted the study before Max Ortiz-Catalán, the center’s founder and former manager, had secured regulatory approval from the relevant Swedish agency.
Chalmers, the Centre’s home, has now suspended it after also suspecting that its data and research participants seemed “systematically selected” so that treatments appeared effective, and excluded data when treatments caused health problems. The investigation also uncovered the center had no person responsible for compliance, which is a requirement under Swedish law, and that personal data had been handled poorly.
