Retraction Watch

‘A big pain’: Professor up to six retractions for plagiarism and manipulated peer review

A business professor has now had six papers retracted, resulting from a combination of plagiarism and manipulated peer review.

All six retractions for Bilal Afsar, an associate professor of management sciences at Hazara University in Pakistan, have come since last February. He is the only common author on all the papers, which were published in 2019 and 2020 – and in comments to Retraction Watch, blamed a research assistant whom he declined to name for the problems.

The most recent paper to be retracted, in August of this year, was “Does thriving and trust in the leader explain the link between transformational leadership and innovative work behaviour? A cross-sectional survey.” It was originally published in the Journal of Research in Nursing in December of 2019 and has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to the retraction notice:

‘A display of extreme academic integrity’: A grad student who found a key error praises the original author

Last week, we wrote about the story of Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam who had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. The paper would end up retracted. At the time, Lodder had not had a chance to respond to our questions about the case. We’re pleased to share his comments as a guest post.

I’ve had a big passion for research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics ever since I had started my undergraduate in biomedical sciences at Amsterdam University College. I am currently a MSc Artificial Intelligence student and about a year ago, in preparation for a computational neuroscience course, I wanted to expand on the model used by Rubén.

I sent him an e-mail explaining the situation, and requesting some parameters that weren’t detailed in the paper so that I could start running the simulations myself. Rubén responded very quickly and was immediately very helpful with getting me started with running the simulations.

Now that I was able to run the model properly, I wanted to start off with being able to reproduce the paper’s analysis results before looking into expanding. Using the methodology described in the paper, I re-implemented the steps needed to compute the entropy. And indeed, this is where I got some different results as presented in the paper.

Concussion researcher Paul McCrory earns nine more retractions, nearly 40 expressions of concern

A prominent sports medicine researcher who earlier this year had an editorial from his time as the top editor of the British Journal of Sports Medicine retracted for plagiarism has lost nine more articles for stealing and recycling text and misrepresenting a reference.

The British Journal of Sports Medicine has also placed expressions of concern on all other articles on which Paul McCrory, who was the journal’s editor-in-chief from 2001-2008, is the sole author, totalling 38 articles, according to a press release from the journal. (We count 78 single author papers for McCrory in BJSM.)

McCrory is a widely cited expert on concussions, and has worked with major sporting agencies and leagues as a consultant.

Weekend reads: Whistleblowers win a victory; a look at COVID-19 retractions; journals as sewage treatment plants

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Paper by gene therapy Zolgensma developer retracted because of discrepancies in mouse survival rates
Med school vice dean says he’s correcting paper amid negative misconduct inquiry
A grad student finds a ‘typo’ in a psychedelic study’s script that leads to a retraction
When failure to correct a flawed paper could put patients’ lives at risk
Frankincense extract paper is 30th retracted by former MD Anderson researcher who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 265. 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):

Paper by gene therapy Zolgensma developer retracted because of discrepancies in mouse survival rates

A paper describing preclinical work that was foundational for the gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy now sold as Zolgensma has been retracted for data inaccuracies.

The article, “Rescue of the spinal muscular atrophy phenotype in a mouse model by early postnatal delivery of SMN,” was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2010. Its corresponding author, Brian Kaspar, was at The Ohio State University at the time. Kaspar went on to become the scientific founder and chief scientific officer of AveXis, which created Zolgensma and was acquired by Novartis in 2018 for $8.7 billion.

The paper has been cited 557 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and referenced in at least 59 patents, according to Altmetric.

According to the retraction notice, the authors contacted the journal last year about “inaccuracies” in the data. After the journal’s investigation, the editors decided to retract the article over the author’s objections. The notice explained:

Med school vice dean says he’s correcting paper amid negative misconduct inquiry

A gastroenterology research group led by a vice dean at a medical school has requested that a journal correct a paper with an image duplicated from an earlier study by the same group, Retraction Watch has learned. The journal has not yet determined what kind of notice to place on the article.

The group’s leader informed us of the correction request in emails asking us to remove a comment on a post from June pointing out the duplicated image. He also told us that he requested the correction before his employer received an allegation of research misconduct and started an inquiry, which found he and his group had not committed research misconduct.

Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va. and chair of the department of clinical and translational science, is corresponding author on both of the papers that share an image. Sundaram also has a dual appointment at a VA medical center in Huntington.

A grad student finds a ‘typo’ in a psychedelic study’s script that leads to a retraction

Sometime after it was published, Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports.

The original article was written by a group led by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. Titled “A mechanistic model of the neural entropy increase elicited by psychedelic drugs,” the paper purported to help illuminate what happens in the brain under the influence of substances like LSD.

But the findings of the study wouldn’t replicate. And unlike some researchers who might blow off criticism of their work, or blame the replicators for the failure, Herzog sent Lodder the scripts his team had used.

Lodder found the problem quickly. As Herzog related to Retraction Watch, Lodder (whose schedule has been challenging the past few weeks as we’ve played phone tag) [See update on this post.]:

When failure to correct a flawed paper could put patients’ lives at risk

On April 15, 2021, as COVID-19 was waning several months prior to the surge in deaths associated with arrival of the Delta variant, the journal Cell published an eye-catching paper.

Titled “Soluble ACE2-mediated cell entry of SARS-CoV-2 via interaction with proteins related to the renin-angiotensin system,” the article stood in stark contrast to the contemporary understanding of the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which until then held that ACE2 on the membranes of susceptible cells served as the “receptor” for the virus.

The paper was notable because it claimed that vasopressin, also known as antidiuretic hormone, worsened COVID-19 infections. Vasopressin is known for its ability to promote water retention in the kidneys as well as to constrict blood vessels, but had not previously been associated with COVID-19 infections.

Upon reading the paper, one of us (MB) noted a large number of inaccuracies. The authors had used the wrong reagent: a high molecular weight precursor of vasopressin rather than vasopressin itself. They also incorrectly portrayed ACE2, the V_1B vasopressin receptor, and the AT₁ angiotensin II receptor – the primary mediators of their hypothetical mechanism of COVID-19 infection. (PubPeer commenters also pointed out problems in the paper, including a failure of the authors to post their original data.)

Frankincense extract paper is 30th retracted by former MD Anderson researcher who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch

A cancer researcher in Texas who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch is up to 30 retractions, the latest involving a 2011 article which earned a correction the following year.

The paper, “Boswellic Acid Suppresses Growth and Metastasis of Human Pancreatic Tumors in an Orthotopic Nude Mouse Model through Modulation of Multiple Targets,” came from the lab of Baharat Aggarwal, formerly of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston.

The paper, which was corrected in 2012, has received 50 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, all of which came after the correction. The latest of these references appears to be a recent preprint claiming to find that frankincense extract helps treat breast cancer.

Per the retraction notice:

Weekend reads: Troubles in Romania; an erroneous erratum about fraud; Nature and discriminatory science

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Dental school dean up to five retractions for cancer research papers
Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?
Exclusive: Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings
When emails asking to withdraw manuscripts started repeating themselves, an editor got suspicious

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 264. There are nearly 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):

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