Retraction Watch

Retraction Watch grows again, thanks to a $250,000 grant from the WoodNext Foundation

Dear Retraction Watch readers, we have some exciting news to share.

The WoodNext Foundation has awarded The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent 501(c)3 nonprofit, a two-year $250,000 grant that will allow us to add another editor.

The WoodNext Foundation is the philanthropy of tech innovator and Roku CEO/founder Anthony Wood and his wife Susan, and its mission is “to advance human progress and remove obstacles to a fulfilling life.”

With the grant, we have hired Frederik Joelving, an experienced investigative reporter focused on health and science, and added to our freelance budget. Joelving, who is based in Copenhagen, will start on January 3. His award-winning work has had a big impact, including a ban by the Indian government on lucrative but troubling sales practices by drugmakers.

The top 10 retraction stories of 2022

What retractions grabbed the most attention in 2022?

As we’ve now done for a decade, we took a look through the year’s stories about retractions for our friends at The Scientist and gathered the ten that seemed to most capture the limelight. As we write there, the cases ranged from “typo-laden code in psychedelics research to paper mills and plagiarism.”

Contamination leads to swift retraction for Science paper on the origins of Omicron in Africa

The authors of a paper that proposed the Omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 had evolved in Western Africa months before it was first detected in South Africa have retracted their study after discovering contamination in their samples, as several scientists had suggested on Twitter was the case.

The article, “Gradual emergence followed by exponential spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Africa,” was published in Science on December 1 by a team led by Jan Felix Drexler of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Soon after publication, many geneticists expressed skepticism on social media about the study, including questioning whether the results came from contamination during the sequencing process.

Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tweeted on December 4 about “weaknesses” in the study, including that “the quality of the sequences seems problematic”:

Contempt judgment in penile implant spat leads to retraction

The authors of a 2021 paper on a method of male enhancement have been forced to retract the paper after losing a legal battle over the technology.

At the heart (er, groin?) of the matter is a dispute over the ownership of a penile implant. According to court documents, James Elist, a urologist in Beverly Hills, Calif., developed the device, which he commercialized as Penuma for men who want a bit more than nature provided.

Penuma received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2004, becoming the first such product to reach the market. (As Elist told GQ in 2016, the surgically-implanted devices come only in large sizes because “nobody wants a small.”)

Elist alleges in a lawsuit that in 2018, a urologist in Texas named Robert Cornell contacted him with questions about how to use the Penuma in practice – questions the California physician claims were really efforts at corporate espionage:

Article on sexual orientation and psych disorders retracted – without the author’s knowledge, he says

A paper about the potential influence of neurotransmitters on the development of sexual orientation and psychiatric disorders that caught flack on social media a year ago has now been retracted – so recently that the corresponding author said he didn’t know about the retraction until we asked him about it.

Late last year, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, an Elsevier journal, published an expression of concern for the article “Sexual orientation, neuropsychiatric disorders and the neurotransmitters involved.” It was published online in September 2021 and has not been cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notice said only that “some readers have raised concerns” about the article, which the journal was discussing the the authors, a group led by Dick Swaab of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam.

Weekend reads: Fringe race science and journals; flags for Stanford president’s papers; rise and fall of peer review

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 279. There are more than 37,000 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):

‘I never asked or expected to be included as an author’: Retired Penn State prof has three retractions for manipulated peer review

A retired professor of education has lost three papers – which he said he helped edit for a former student – after the publisher discovered manipulated peer review led to their acceptance.

Roger Shouse, an associate professor emeritus at Penn State College of Education, spent the 2018-2019 academic year at Sichuan University in China as a professor of public administration. While there, he helped several students write research articles in English, and advised one who listed him as a coauthor on three papers even though Shouse didn’t ask for authorship, he told us.

Those papers – on land use, climate vulnerability and disaster response among rural communities in Bangladesh – were retracted from the journal Land Use Policy this past August, after an investigation revealed the peer review process had been manipulated.

Shouse was listed as the last author, and researcher Md Nazirul Islam Sarker of Neijiang Normal University was the first author. A fourth paper retracted at the same time, with an identical retraction notice, listed Sarker as second author but did not include Shouse.

The retracted papers are:

Cancer researcher banned from federal funding for faking data in nearly 400 images in 16 grant applications

A former associate professor at Purdue University faked data in two published papers and hundreds of images in 16 grant applications, according to a U.S. government research watchdog.

Alice C. Chang, whose publications and grants listed her name as Chun-Ju Chang, received nearly $700,000 in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through grant applications that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said contained fake data. She will be banned from receiving federal grants for a decade – a more severe sanction than ORI has typically imposed in recent years.

In its findings, ORI said Chang, who was an associate professor of basic medical sciences at Purdue’s College of Veterinary Medicine:

PLOS flags nearly 50 papers by controversial French COVID researcher for ethics concerns

The publisher PLOS is marking nearly 50 articles by Didier Raoult, the French scientist who became controversial for promoting hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, with expressions of concern while it investigates potential research ethics violations in the work.

PLOS has been looking into more than 100 articles by Raoult, but determined that the issues in 49 of the papers, including reuse of ethics approval reference numbers, warrant expressions of concern while the publisher continues its inquiry.

In August of 2021, scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik wrote on her blog about a series of 17 articles from IHU-Méditerranée Infection that described different studies involving homeless people in Marseille over a decade, but all listed the same institutional ethics approval number. One of those papers, “Distinguishing Body Lice from Head Lice by Multiplex Real-Time PCR Analysis of the Phum_PHUM540560 Gene,” about which Bik also posted on PubPeer, was published in PLOS ONE in 2013, and is receiving an expression of concern today.

Penn says access to former Twitter employee’s thesis was ‘mistakenly closed off’ following Elon Musk tweets

An Ivy League university is blaming an “error” for the brief disappearance of the doctoral dissertation of a former Twitter employee whose writings on gay dating apps drew public scorn from Elon Musk.

As Fox News first reported, on Saturday the PhD thesis by Yoel Roth, who until November had been Twitter’s head of trust and safety, seemed to have been removed from the University of Pennsylvania’s ScholarlyCommons website.

A Penn official told Fox:

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