Retraction Watch

Exclusive: UCLA found a longtime researcher faked data – but made a strange mistake in its report

A few years ago, funding for the UCLA pathology lab where Janina Jiang had worked since 2010 was running out.

The head of the lab was grateful when another scientist offered to chip in $50,000 to keep Jiang on for six more months.

But some of the experiments Jiang – perhaps feeling that her job was on the line, a colleague speculated – ran for that scientist raised suspicions. Other experiments didn’t corroborate her results, and Jiang failed to provide all her raw data.

Jiang’s benefactor asked another staff scientist to review and reanalyze her work.

What he found spurred an institutional investigation, which in July 2021 found Jiang faked data representing flow cytometry experiments in several figures included in 11 grant proposals, resulting in 19 counts of research misconduct.

Weekend reads, double edition: Science’s ‘nasty Photoshopping problem’; Dr. Oz’s publication ban; image manipulation detection software

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This week, it’s a special double edition of Weekend Reads, thanks to a site outage that meant we couldn’t post last Saturday. The last two weeks at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 267. There are more than 36,000 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):

How many ducks do you need to line up to get a publication retracted?

In July 2017, we notified the Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism (JBMM) of concerns about a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in rats which featured, among other problems, extensive duplication of data in a separate publication, large numbers of discrepancies in the methods and results between the publications, and serious concerns about the governance and conduct of the research.

The journal sought an explanation from the authors, Jun Iwamoto and Yoshihiro Sato, who currently have 119 retractions between them. The response avoided addressing most of the concerns and attributed all the discrepancies to minor errors, and was accepted by JBMM.

In the intervening years, however, evidence about problems in the group’s work has mounted. And yet the paper remains neither retracted nor corrected. It has become just another in a long list of studies, along with ten others in the journal, that we have beaten our heads against the wall to have journals fix.

Exclusive: Elsevier retracting 500 papers for shoddy peer review

Elsevier is retracting 500 papers from a journal dedicated to conference proceedings because “the peer-review process was confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected,” Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported a month ago, “data thug” James Heathers “found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing ‘tortured phrases’ that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.”

Shortly thereafter, Elsevier told us they were beginning an investigation of the title, Materials Today: Proceedings. Yesterday, they said the retractions were beginning.

“Horrible!”: Scientist finds plagiarized copy of his paper – and can’t get the journal that published it to pay attention

Earlier this month, Werther Ramalho, an environmental scientist in Brazil, got some bad news from a colleague: A paper he’d published in 2013 as a postdoctoral researcher had been plagiarized in its entirety.

“They stole years of effort and dedication that I had at the beginning of my career as a scientist! Horrible!” Ramalho, who is currently affiliated with the Instituto Boitatá de Etnobiologia e Conservação da Fauna, told us.

Ramalho’s original paper, “Study on the population structure of the paradoxical frog, Pseudis bolbodactyla (Amphibia: Anura: Hylidae), using natural markings for individual identification,” was published in the journal Zoologia and has been cited three times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

NIH asked to replace a PI on grants after university said she violated policy

An office of the National Institutes of Health requested earlier this year that a university designate a new principal investigator (PI) for two grants after the institution found she had violated its policy in a research misconduct investigation, Retraction Watch has learned.

The NIH’s Office of Extramural Research, which oversees funding granted to external institutions, made the request after SUNY Downstate sent the office a summary of its investigation report that found Stacy Blain, an associate professor in the departments of pediatrics and cell biology at Downstate, had committed research misconduct in 11 instances.

As we reported in August, Blain is suing SUNY for discrimination and retaliation related to the finding of research misconduct, seeking, among other things, reinstatement on the grants.

When editors confuse direct criticism with being impolite, science loses

In January 2022, motivated by our experience with eClinicalMedicine, we wrote about mishandling of published errors by journal editors. We had noticed that the methods used for the analysis of a cluster randomized trial published in the journal were invalid. Using a valid approach, we reanalyzed the raw data, which were shared with us by the original authors. The trial’s results were overturned.

As Retraction Watch readers may recall, we subsequently submitted a manuscript describing why the original methods were invalid, what a valid analysis should be, and our results after conducting a valid analysis. After an initial desk rejection “in light of [the journal’s] pipeline” and further exchanges of correspondence, the journal shared our findings with the statistician involved in the original review and the original authors and sought their responses.

After receiving the responses, both of which we thought contained factually incorrect statements, the editorial team eventually suggested that we summarize our full manuscript as a 1000-word letter for submission to the journal. We did not agree that a letter would allow us to fully communicate our methods and reanalysis. Thus, to meet the journal’s word limit while fully laying out our arguments, we posted our additional points as a preprint and cited the preprint in a letter we submitted to the journal.

It was then that we met another roadblock to correcting the literature.

Iran’s science minister earns four retractions

The science minister of Iran has amassed four retractions recently over concerns about the authenticity of chemicals used in the studies.

Mohammad Ali Zolfigol, who has held the post of Minister of Science, Research and Technology for more than a year, is first or second author in all four of the papers, which appeared between 2015 and 2016 in journals published by the UK Royal Society of Chemistry.

The authors acknowledge that they had been using the wrong substance – a molecule called tricyanomethane – claiming to have purchased a fake form of the chemical. But Zolfigol and his colleagues object to the retractions, on grounds that aren’t clear.

Meet a sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions

Nick Wise had always been “slightly interested” in research integrity and fraud, just from working in science.

Then, last July, from following image sleuth Elisabeth Bik on Twitter, he learned about the work of Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and Alexander Magazinov identifying “tortured phrases” in published papers.

Such phrases – such as “bosom peril,” meaning “breast cancer” – are computer-generated with translation or paraphrasing software, perhaps by authors seeking to fill out their manuscripts or avoid plagiarism detection.

Cabanac, Labbé, and Magazinov had started with tortured phrases in the field of computer science, so Wise decided to try his hand at finding them in his own field, fluid dynamics.

He got a thesaurus widget, started plugging in phrases like “heat transfer,” and Googled the results – “heat move,” “warmth exchange,” etc.

“Up popped a load of papers,” said Wise, age 30, who recently wrapped up his PhD in architectural fluid dynamics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and will be starting a postdoc there soon.

It was the beginning of a sleuthing hobby that has already resulted in more than 850 retractions.

US federal research watchdog wants your input

A U.S. government watchdog for scientific misconduct has floated the possibility of revising some of its regulations, and it wants your thoughts on what should change.

The Office of Research Integrity recently issued a Request for Information – essentially an email inbox open for suggestions – to help shape its potential revision of the 2005 Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct, 42 C.F.R. Part 93 in the federal code.

These regulations define what “research misconduct” means for work funded by the U.S. Public Health Service – the oft-quoted “falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism” – and establish how the government and research institutions respond to these issues.

The current regulations replaced rules issued in 1989, the same year the Office of Scientific Integrity in the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Scientific Integrity Review in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were created. These two offices were merged into the Office of Research Integrity in 1992.

Here’s the meat of the request:

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