Retraction Watch

Triple sunrise, triple sunset: Science paper retracted when it turns out a planet is a star

Artist’s impression of HD 131399 from 2016 (via European Southern Observatory)

When Kevin Wagner at the University of Arizona and colleagues published a paper in Science about their discovery of a new planet in 2016, it captured the attention of a lot of science writers.

Finding the object – HD 131399 – meant that “astronomers have discovered a planet with an even more exotic sight on its horizon: a triple sunset,” in the words of The New York Times.

Or, as the AP put it, “a planet with triple sunrises and sunsets every day for part of the year.”

Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction

It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year:

Figure 5: There is an overlap between two images taken from different experimental conditions. I’ve added a version below with the contrast enhanced. It’s difficult to match the brightness perfectly, but all of the same structures can be matched between these two sections. Would the authors comment?

Vincent Rotello of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the corresponding authors, responded right away. “Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention,” Rotello wrote on PubPeer. “We take data integrity seriously and are investigating the origin of the image duplication.”

Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.

If the writers of “Welcome Back, Kotter” wanted to issue a retraction statement, it might look something like this one from Mary Ann Liebert. We’ll call this one a hat tip to Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein, a Sweathog whose permission slips “from his mother” became a meme.

The paper in question appeared in 2016 in Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals and written by a group in China led by Liqun Yang, of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical Center and the State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology at Southwest University in Chongqing.

In November 2021, Yang emailed the journal asking to swap out the original figure in the article with a corrected version. What Yang didn’t know was that a week earlier, the journal had received word of a post on PubPeer raising questions about the figures in the paper.

The post received the following response from someone writing as co-author Hongjuan Cui:

Is a “Wall of Shame” a good idea for journals?

Today, the journal Cureus — which is no stranger to Retraction Watch — unveiled what they are calling a “Wall of Shame,” which “highlights authors and reviewers who have committed egregious ethical violations as well as the institutions that enabled them.”

Misconduct, failure to supervise earn researchers years-long funding bans

Two professors and two former graduate students are banned from funding by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) following findings by Nagoya University of misconduct and lack of supervision.

As we reported last month, Nagoya found that Yuuta Yano, a graduate student in Kenichiro Itami’s lab, had forged large swaths of data and had thrown away lab notebooks to escape detection. Itami, along with Hideto Ito, had asked for an investigation into the team’s work after retracting papers in Nature and ACS Applied Nano Materials on which Yano was an author.

Weekend reads: Should open access advocates vilify publishers?; authorship for sale, $5,000; is economics just ‘bafflegab?’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Cancer researcher faked data for 24 images in work funded by nine NIH grants: Federal watchdog
The author of a retracted paper learns to be careful what he wishes for
Journals acknowledge that a critical “reader” has a name: Elisabeth Bik

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 219. There are more than 33,000 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):

Journals acknowledge that a critical “reader” has a name: Elisabeth Bik

Followers of this blog know that “a reader” seems to be the force behind a huge number of retractions – and that, despite the apparent unwillingness of journals to name them, they are real people. One of the more prolific “readers” is Elisabeth Bik, the data sleuth whose efforts to identify problematic images has led to the removal of hundreds of dodgy papers.

Journals now seem more willing to give credit where it’s due, by identifying Bik – who has faced threats for her efforts – in their notices.

A few recent examples: Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, an Elsevier title, has name-checked Bik in a dozen retractions of papers dating back to 2017.

The author of a retracted paper learns to be careful what he wishes for

Sometimes leaving well-enough alone is the best policy. Ask Teja Santosh Dandibhotla.

Upset that a paper of his had been retracted from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Santosh, a computer scientist at the CVR College of Engineering in Hyderabad, India, contacted us to plead his case. (We of course do not make decisions about retractions, we reminded him.)

Santosh’s article, “Intelligent defaulter Prediction using Data Science Process,” had been pulled along with some 350 other papers in two conference proceedings because IOP Publishing had “uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

Cancer researcher faked data for 24 images in work funded by nine NIH grants: Federal watchdog

Toni Brand

A cancer researcher faked data in a grant application, her PhD thesis, and seven published papers, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Toni Brand, who earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin and served as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying or fabricating western blot data, by reusing and relabeling data to represent expression of proteins in control experiments measuring the purity of cytoplasmic and nuclear cell fractionation, measurements of proteins of interest, and measurements of the same protein under different experimental conditions or loading controls,” the ORI said in a report published today.

Weekend reads: Plagiarism in biblical scholarship; revelations about publishing ‘lab leak’ preprint; publishing sanctions on Russia

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Einstein fired researcher in 2019, more than two years before ORI finding
Firing, publishing ban, 15 retractions for author who ‘defrauded’ co-authors in pay-to-publish scheme
Five studies linked to Cassava Sciences retracted
Doing the right thing: Neuroscientist announces retractions in ‘the most difficult tweet ever’

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 219. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which now 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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