Retraction Watch

Exclusive: Cancer researchers in Iran under investigation as questions swirl around dozens of studies

Year after year, a husband-and-wife team at a university in Iran has been publishing studies involving research on cell lines ostensibly purchased from the Pasteur Institute of Iran, in Tehran.

But the couple may never have been in possession of the cells. In correspondence obtained by Retraction Watch, the Pasteur Institute told their employer, Jahrom University of Medical Sciences, only three of the many cell lines described in their publications had been available at the national cell bank over the past decade.

A university official confirmed the two researchers – Fraidoon Kavoosi, an associate professor in the department of anatomical science, and his wife Masumeh Sanaei, an assistant professor in the same department – were under investigation.

Former Columbia University psychiatrist committed research misconduct, says federal watchdog

A psychiatry researcher who received a warning letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this year committed research misconduct, another federal watchdog found.

Bret Rutherford, formerly a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University, “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly falsely reporting that all human research subjects met the inclusion/exclusion criteria for late-life depression studies,” according to a case summary from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) published today.

As The Transmitter previously reported, a suicide that occurred during one of Rutherford’s trials in 2021 was followed by a suspension of his research a few months later. The U.S. Office of Human Research Protections subsequently halted all federally funded research involving human participants at the institute in June 2023 and launched a review of its research practices.

After saying it would retract an article, Cureus changed its mind

Karen Rech, a hematopathologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., was reading a case report about a rare disease when she recognized the patient.

Although the authors of the paper were affiliated with the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Fargo, the patient in the report had gone to Mayo for care, and Rech had made the pathology diagnosis. But the article, “A Diagnostic Dilemma and Classification Conundrum: Atypical Histiocytic Neoplasm Presenting as a Calvarial Mass,” published in Cureus in February, didn’t mention or credit Rech or her colleagues.

“The ability to make such a unique diagnosis is a direct result of my translational research in histiocytic neoplasms,” Rech wrote in an email to the journal in April. After she made the pathology diagnosis, a hematologist colleague saw the patient, and a group of specialists discussed the case and came to a consensus diagnosis.

Weekend reads: Retractions by Nobel Prize winners; privatizing peer review; fake mouse brains

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 past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 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? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Authors sue Sage over “discriminatory” retractions of papers cited in abortion pill case

The authors of three papers about abortion Sage retracted earlier this year have sued the publisher, alleging the company pulled the articles “for pretextual and discriminatory reasons.”

In February, Sage retracted three articles from Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology “because of undeclared conflicts of interest and after expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors’ conclusions,” according to the publisher’s statement at the time. Sage also removed the paper’s lead author from the editorial board of the journal.

A federal judge cited two of the articles last year in his decision to suspend approval of mifepristone, a drug used in medical abortions.

Pain researcher in Italy up to seven retractions

A physiatrist in Italy has lost four publications this year after two groups of researchers raised concerns about his research.

The physician, Marco Monticone, a professor at the University of Cagliari, had three papers pulled in 2022, as we reported at the time. Those retractions followed a critique by Cochrane researchers who analyzed data in 10 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) headed by Monticone.

Neil O’Connell, of Brunel University of London, lead author of the critique, told us:

New engineering dean has two retractions for authorship manipulation

A newly appointed dean at the University of Guelph in Canada has had two papers retracted for “evidence of authorship manipulation.”

Another article by the researcher, Moncef Nehdi, formerly of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, seems to match a paper that had its authorship advertised for sale, according to a post on PubPeer.

Nehdi told Retraction Watch he stands by his group’s work in the two retracted papers, but agreed with the retractions because he thought the investigations “raised some valid concerns.”

Nehdi began a five-year term as dean of the University of Guelph’s College of Engineering and Physical Sciences on September 1, according to an announcement this spring. The announcement stated:

Hidden hydras: uncovering the massive footprint of one paper mill’s operations

At the heart of any paper mill’s operations sits an unavoidable contradiction. On the one hand, paper mills must keep their operations clandestine lest they be discovered and have their clients’ articles retracted en masse. On the other, paper mills must make themselves visible to some degree to attract new customers. For instance, advertisements for paper mills abound on services like WhatsApp and Telegram. This contradiction makes it difficult for researchers like us who study systematic fraud to get a full sense of the scope of any paper mill’s operations. By charting the web presence of one shady business, we sought to do just that.

About a year ago, we began probing search engines with queries a scientist desperate for publications might make: “authorship for sale,” “call for co-authors,” “scopus-indexed publications,” “guaranteed journal acceptance,” etc. We figured paper mills would litter their pages with these phrases in a bid to be easily found by customers. Sure enough, one of our first searches directed us to the front page of the Academic Research and Development Association (ARDA), based in Chennai, India.

ARDA presents itself as a professional organization that offers services including “Conferences and Meetings”, “Journal Publications” and “Article Writing Services”. ARDA also maintains lists of indexed journals in which it can guarantee publication, along with guidelines on how long acceptance should take and instructions to limit plagiarism to a journal-specific threshold. All of these journals claim to be peer-reviewed on their own websites. Many of the titles listed on ARDA’s site are well-known hijacked journals already found on the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker. Other journals, such as the International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education and the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results, are favorites of authors from Saveetha Dental College, a school caught inflating its rankings in a large self-citation scheme.

Web of Science puts mega-journals Cureus and Heliyon on hold

Web of Science, Clarivate’s influential database of abstracts and citations, has paused indexation of new content from the open-access journals Heliyon and Cureus, apparently due to concerns about the quality of their articles.

Indexation in WoS or Scopus, another major bibliometric database owned by Elsevier, has become an important stamp of approval for scholarly publications worldwide and can make or break a journal.

WoS is “making a big call here, taking aim at two of the mega-journals that have grown massively in recent years,” said Nick Wise, a scientific sleuth and a researcher at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “WoS appears to be one of the only organisations with the power to compel big publishers to act. I don’t think that’s a sign of a healthy academic publishing system, but it’s how things are currently.”

Weekend reads: Top NIH neuroscientist out amid suspicion; the issue with special issues; an ingredient derailed experiments

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):

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: