Retraction Watch

‘The PubPeer conundrum:’ One view of how universities can grapple with a ‘waterfall of data integrity concerns’

As Retraction Watch readers no doubt know, PubPeer has played a key role in a growing number of cases of misconduct, allowing sleuths to publicly shine light in shadowy corners and prompting action by many universities. (Disclosure: Our Ivan Oransky is a volunteer member of the PubPeer Foundation’s board of directors.) But that has also meant that universities can feel overwhelmed by a deluge of PubPeer comments.

In a new article, three attorneys from Ropes & Gray in Boston who advise universities on such cases, along with Barbara Bierer, a researcher and former research integrity officer at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also in Boston, examine “the origins of PubPeer and its central role in the modern era of online-based scouring of scientific publications for potential problems and outlines the challenges that institutions must manage in addressing issues identified on PubPeer.” Attorneys Mark Barnes, Minal Caron and Carolyn Lye, and the Brigham’s Barbara Bierer, also recommend ways federal regulations could change to make the investigation process more efficient. We asked them to answer some questions about the article.

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Faked data prompts retraction of Nature journal study claiming creation of a new form of carbon

The journal Nature Synthesis has pulled a high-profile article describing the creation of a new type of carbon after a university investigation found some data were made up.

“The authors of the original paper claimed to have created an entirely new form or carbon, graphyne, which is fundamentally different common diamond or graphite,” said Valentin Rodionov, an assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, whose team has been investigating the now-retracted work for the past two years.

“If true, this would have been a groundbreaking discovery,” Rodionov told Retraction Watch. His team described its findings in a commentary published on September 2 in the journal.

Exclusive: Editor resigns after he says publisher blocked criticism of decision to retract paper on gender dysphoria

A Springer Nature journal has rescinded the acceptance of a paper criticizing the publishing giant’s controversial retraction last year of an article that surveyed parents of children with gender dysphoria, leading an associate editor to resign, Retraction Watch has learned.

According to emails we obtained, the blocked paper was slated to appear as a commentary in a special issue of Springer Nature’s Current Psychology that aimed “to stimulate discussion of all aspects of the ‘unpublication’ of scientific articles.”

“This is the only time I’ve had an accepted paper overruled in 4 years” as an associate editor at this journal, Christopher Ferguson of Stetson University in Florida, one of two guest editors of the special issue, told us by email.

Journal to retract two articles more than six months after VA said they had fake images

The Journal of Cellular Physiology, a Wiley title, will retract two articles by an arthritis researcher the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs found to have engaged in research misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.

Last November, the VA published findings stating Hee-Jeong Im Sampen, formerly a research biologist at the Jesse Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Chicago, faked images and inflated sample sizes in three published papers, a grant application, a presentation, and an unpublished manuscript.

Based on the findings, the VA banned Sampen, who publishes under the name Hee-Jeong Im, from conducting research for the department and requested retractions of the three publications.

Two of the papers, “Development of an Experimental Animal Model for Lower Back Pain by Percutaneous Injury-Induced Lumbar Facet Joint Osteoarthritis” and “Environmental Disruption of Circadian Rhythm Predisposes Mice to Osteoarthritis-Like Changes in Knee Joint,” appeared in the Journal of Cellular Physiology in 2015, and don’t currently have any sort of notice about the VA finding they contain faked images.

Weekend reads: When retracted work is cited; another retraction for a Nobelist; should scientific fraud be illegal?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Researcher whose work was plagiarized haunted by impostor emails

A researcher who posted on LinkedIn about a paper that plagiarized his work says he’s now the subject of an email campaign making false allegations about his articles.

In July, we reported that Sasan Sadrizadeh, researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, had his work plagiarized in a now-retracted paper.

“In what seems to be a direct response to our efforts,” as Sadrizadeh wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, his bosses, colleagues, and journals have been inundated with emails from impostors, accusing Sadrizadeh of misuse of funds and calling for the removal of his articles. At least one journal editor seems to have taken the allegations seriously.

First-time scientific sleuths prompt nine retractions for neurosurgery group

Two Dutch researchers were preparing a review of preclinical animal models for hemorrhagic stroke last July when they stumbled across a disturbing pattern in the literature.

First, they found many more papers on the topic than the 50 or so they expected based on their experience: more than 600.

Also, nearly every study proposed a different intervention, which was “very unusual,” said René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “Why would you show a very beneficial effect and then say, ‘let’s do something else?’”

Exclusive: Thousands of papers misidentify microscopes, in possible sign of misconduct

One in four papers on research involving scanning electron microscopy (SEM) misidentifies the specific instrument that was used, raising suspicions of misconduct, according to a new study.

The work, published August 27 as a preprint on the Open Science Framework , examined SEM images in more than 1 million studies published by 50 materials science and engineering journals since 2010.

Researchers found only 8,515 articles published the figure captions and the image’s metadata banners, both of which are needed to determine whether the correct microscope is listed in papers. Metadata banners usually contain important information about the experiments conducted, including the operating voltage of the microscope and the instrument’s model and parameters.

Of these papers, 2,400 (28%) listed the wrong microscope manufacturer or model, raising questions about the integrity of the conducted research.

A journal editor said he’d retract a paper for plagiarism. A year later, it hasn’t happened.

In June of last year, Salvador Pineda received an email from a researcher at Zhejiang University in China informing him one of his articles had been plagiarized.

The researcher pointed Pineda to a paper, “A robust optimization method for optimizing day-ahead operation of the electric vehicles aggregator,” which appeared in Elsevier’s International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems in November 2021. The article, by researchers at the University of Lahore, Pakistan, contained several figures copied from Pineda’s 2020 paper “An efficient robust approach to the day-ahead operation of an aggregator of electric vehicles,” as well as similar text.

Pineda, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Málaga in Spain, immediately wrote to the journal’s editor-in-chief, who said he’d retract the article, according to emails seen by Retraction Watch.

Yet the article remains intact, more than a year later, with the publisher blaming the delay on staffing changes at the journal.

Weekend reads: Why scientist rankings should be ignored; misconduct claims in court; mining company demands retraction

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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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