Journal run by new AMA president-elect caught in special issue scam

Jesse Ehrenfeld

A med-tech journal whose editor-in-chief is the president-in-waiting of the American Medical Association has retracted six papers for compromised peer review and related problems.  

The Journal of Medical Systems, led by Jesse Ehrenfeld – an anesthesiologist in Wisconsin who this week became president-elect of the AMA –  said the articles were part of a special issue that ran in 2018 titled “Advancements in Internet of Medical Things for Healthcare System.”

Here’s the retraction notice for “LSTM Model for Prediction of Heart Failure in Big Data”:

Continue reading Journal run by new AMA president-elect caught in special issue scam

‘This has been a nightmare’: One paper was retracted. The other still lingers.

Philip Tsichlis

On a Saturday last November, Philip Tsichlis of The Ohio State University received an email no researcher wants to get. 

Another scientist had tried to replicate a finding in a recent paper of his, and couldn’t. “We believe that our results should lead to some revision of the model you propose,” stated the email, which was released to us by OSU following a public records request. 

It turned out that was an understatement. The email eventually led Tsichlis to discover data fabrication in that paper and a related article. Within a week, he requested the retraction of both papers, one in Communications Biology and the other in Nature Communications, both Springer Nature journals. One was retracted in December, but not the other.

In an email to a Nature Communications editor on November 22nd, Tsichlis wrote: 

This has been a nightmare and I blame myself for not having detected it earlier. However, we cannot go back. I hope that we will retract this paper as soon as possible. 

Seven months later, it remains unflagged. 

Continue reading ‘This has been a nightmare’: One paper was retracted. The other still lingers.

Retraction leads to review change at SAGE journal

A cancer journal has retracted a 2016 paper by a group in China after deciding – more than five years after publication – it couldn’t stand behind the work. 

The article, “The preoperative platelet–lymphocyte ratio versus neutrophil–lymphocyte ratio: which is better as a prognostic factor in oral squamous cell carcinoma?”, appeared in Therapeutic Advances in Medical Oncology, a SAGE title. The authors were led by Shan Chen, of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. 

The notice reads: 

Continue reading Retraction leads to review change at SAGE journal

Weekend reads: ‘Foul play’ among protective scholars; how to increase rigor; science and a ‘culture of misinformation’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 236. There are more than 34,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘Foul play’ among protective scholars; how to increase rigor; science and a ‘culture of misinformation’

Researcher attacks journal for retracting his paper on COVID-19 drug

Flavio Cadegiani

A journal has retracted a paper reporting the results of a clinical trial in which a drug cut COVID-19 hospitalization for men by 90%. 

The research group’s other work has attracted a lot of attention in Brazil – including praise from  president Jair Bolsonaro and criticism from research regulators – for their dramatic results. In a Twitter thread, one of the authors claimed, without evidence, that the journal “may have received bribery to persecute us and retract our study.”

The article, “Proxalutamide Reduces the Rate of Hospitalization for COVID-19 Male Outpatients: A Randomized Double-Blinded Placebo-Controlled Trial,” was published in Frontiers in Medicine last July and has been cited 15 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The study quickly attracted criticism, according to the retraction notice: 

Continue reading Researcher attacks journal for retracting his paper on COVID-19 drug

Chemistry group at Hokkaido up to three retractions

Masaya Sawamura

A group of researchers in Japan who lost a paper earlier this spring in Science for misconduct have notched two more retractions, bringing their total to three. 

As we reported in April, Science pulled a 2020 article led by Masaya Sawamura, of Hokkaido University, in Sapporo, saying the authors discovered: 

Continue reading Chemistry group at Hokkaido up to three retractions

Medical school dean up to five retractions

Joseph Shapiro

A kidney research group led by a medical school dean has accumulated five retractions. 

All five came within the last year, after commenters on PubPeer pointed out image similarities. 

Joseph I. Shapiro, vice president and dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, is an author on each of the five papers and corresponding author for two. (Shapiro recently said he will be stepping down at the end of this month after ten years as dean, but will remain a tenured professor, according to a news report.) 

Continue reading Medical school dean up to five retractions

A paper claimed to describe ‘the first potent and specific anti-COVID-19 drug.’ Now it’s retracted.

Amgad Rabie

A paper about the discovery of “the first potent and specific anti-COVID-19 drug” has been retracted after it emerged that the compound wasn’t so novel after all. 

The article, published in May 2021 in Chemical Papers has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

As the paper’s sole author, Amgad M. Rabie, writes in the abstract: 

Continue reading A paper claimed to describe ‘the first potent and specific anti-COVID-19 drug.’ Now it’s retracted.

A stolen manuscript, part two: The plagiarist begs for forgiveness as another group plagiarizes the same work

via James Kroll

In 2019, we wrote about a reviewer who stole a manuscript and published it under his own name. Today, we bring you the sequel.

The sequel involves a plea for forgiveness after the plagiarized paper was retracted, and a second allegation of stealing work – which has prompted the target of the plagiarism to wonder if a more serious response from the journal to the first instance would have discouraged the second. 

We obtained an email the reviewer, Yuvarajan Devarajan, sent after the retraction to Mina Mehregan, a mechanical engineer at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran whose work he copied. In it, he explains what happened, and asks, beginning in all caps in the subject line, for her to “FORGIVE ME IF POSSIBLE”:

Continue reading A stolen manuscript, part two: The plagiarist begs for forgiveness as another group plagiarizes the same work

Weekend reads: Researcher has paper retracted, then earns promotion; is peer review ‘more cavalier, self-serving, and ignorant?’; a ‘weird notice’ for all a publisher’s papers

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 229. There are more than 34,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Researcher has paper retracted, then earns promotion; is peer review ‘more cavalier, self-serving, and ignorant?’; a ‘weird notice’ for all a publisher’s papers