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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 236.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.) 

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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

Widely touted abstract on ivermectin and COVID-19 retracted

The authors of a controversial meeting abstract linking ivermectin to lower mortality from Covid-19 have retracted the study, saying that the work has been widely “misinterpreted” and might be leading to patient harm. 

The abstract, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database,” was presented at the 2021 International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance.

According to the researchers, from the University of Miami, Covid-19 patients who took ivermectin were about 70% less likely to die of the disease than those who took remdesivir. 

Continue reading Widely touted abstract on ivermectin and COVID-19 retracted

Former Weill Cornell cancer researcher up to 20 retractions; investigation’s findings are with Feds

Andrew Dannenberg

The journal Cancer Prevention Research has retracted nine papers at once from a group of cancer researchers led by Andrew Dannenberg, formerly of Weill Cornell Medicine. 

The bundle of retractions brings Dannenberg’s total to 20, according to our database, nearly doubling the 11 he had previously. Kotha Subbaramaiah, also formerly of Weill Cornell Medicine, is a coauthor on all of the newly retracted papers, and two of the notices point the finger at figures that he prepared. 

Dannenberg and Subbaramaiah retired from Cornell in the space of three months in late 2020 and early 2021, Retraction Watch has learned, and the university has forwarded a report of their investigation into the matter to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Continue reading Former Weill Cornell cancer researcher up to 20 retractions; investigation’s findings are with Feds

A hare-raising expression of concern after an author hires a third party to get a paper published

By Worm That Turned, via Wikimedia

An Elsevier journal has issued a rather remarkable expression of concern for a 2021 paper on rabbit husbandry after learning that the lead author misrepresented the authorship of the article – and possibly more. 

The paper, “Supplementing rabbit diets with butylated hydroxyanisole affects oxidative stress, growth performance, and meat quality,” appeared in animal and ostensibly came from a group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia led by Tharwat Imbabi.

But as the journal explains, the article wasn’t the first rabbit rodeo for Imbabi, of the department of animal production at Benha University. According to the notice, the researcher had failed repeatedly to publish his manuscript in other journals, so he turned to “third parties” for help. 

Those contributors did the bulk of the work  – but wanted none of the credit. Meanwhile, Imbabi appears to have found other authors willing to join the list. 

We’ll let the expression of concern tell the rest: 

Continue reading A hare-raising expression of concern after an author hires a third party to get a paper published