Retraction Watch

Paper on ‘language reclamation’ and decolonization plagiarized from eight papers, journal acknowledges

Talk about cultural misappropriation.

A cultural studies journal has retracted a 2021 article on storytelling among the Quandamooka people in Australia for widespread plagiarism.

The article, “Reconceptualising a Quandamooka Storyweave of language reclamation,” appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies in July and was written by a group led by Sandra Delaney, a scholar of indigenous languages in Australia.

As the journal, a Sage title, makes clear, the article went through the typical course of peer review and, presumably, some editing – which somehow managed to miss plagiarised text from not one but at least eight sources. Three of those involved rip-offs from unpublished university theses, while the rest were from published articles.

According to the retraction notice:

Authors unhappy as “battlefield acupuncture” paper earns an expression of concern

A journal has slapped an expression of concern on a 2021 paper reporting on the utility of self-administered “battlefield” acupuncture in soldiers, citing readers who said the FDA has not approved the devices for that use – a point the authors, who object to the move, dismissed as irrelevant and misleading.

The study, which appeared in Medical Acupuncture, looked at the experiences of a dozen veterans at an Ohio VA hospital who’d purportedly self-administered acupuncture to treat chronic pain. According to this 2010 article from the U.S. military:

Cancer journal with hefty retraction record retracts another 15

A cancer journal with a history of batch retractions has pulled 15 articles dating back to 2014 after concluding that they contained manipulated or misused images.

As we reported in 2017, Tumor Biology was forced to retract 107 papers that had been corrupted by fake peer review – a record at the time. That move had followed a similar, if smaller, sweep in 2016 by the journal, which was owned by Springer but purchased by SAGE in December 2016 after the more massive cleanse.

University of Rochester cancer researchers included ‘incorrect images’ in 13 papers, committee finds

A group of cancer researchers at the University of Rochester have now lost three papers over concerns about the data in the articles – issues that evidently did not rise to the level of misconduct, according to the institution.

The work came from the lab of Yuhchyau Chen, of the university’s Wilmot Cancer Institute. A common co-author was Soo Ok Lee, who is no longer affiliated with the University of Rochester. In addition to the three retractions, Lee has several corrections and an expression of concern.

The most recent retraction involves a 2019 article in the Journal of Molecular Medicine titled “Radiation-induced glucocorticoid receptor promotes CD44 + prostate cancer stem cell growth through activation of SGK1-Wnt/β-catenin signaling” for which Chen and Lee were corresponding authors. The paper has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the retraction notice, dated December 10:

‘This is really ridiculous’: An author admitted plagiarism. His supervisor asked for a retraction. The publisher said, “nah.”

Behrouz Pourghebleh is perplexed. And also exasperated.

Pourghebleh, of the Young Researchers and Elite Club at the Urmia branch of Islamic Azad University in Iran, noticed a paper published on December 15, 2020 in an IEEE journal that overlapped 80 percent with an article he’d co-authored the year before.

Pourghebleh wrote to Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, the associate editor who had handled the paper, on December 31, 2020, expressing concern. Bhuiyan responded the same day, saying the paper hadn’t been flagged in a similarity check, and that he would contact the authors for a response.

The first author, Karim Alinani, wrote to Pourghebleh less than two weeks later, admitting the plagiarism but citing personal circumstances:

Weekend reads: A Russian paper mill under an X-ray; AI and doctored images; COVID-19 vaccine paper earns scrutiny

Last chance to make a tax-deductible contribution for 2021. Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

2021: A review of the year’s 3,200 retractions
‘A clusterf**K’: Authors plagiarize material from NIH and elsewhere, make legal threats — then see their paper retracted
‘Highly professional, but the process seems to take a long time’: Is this the best way to correct the record?
Medical journal retracts letter calling hijab ‘an instrument of oppression’

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 205. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, 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):

2021: A review of the year’s 3,200 retractions

2021 was – as is always the case – a busy year at Retraction Watch. How could it not be, with our database of retractions surpassing 30,000 – and then 32,000 – with ten percent happening this year alone?

Oh, and the pandemic. There were 72 retractions on our list of retracted COVID-19 papers when we wrote this end-of-year message in 2020. Today, there are 205.

Perhaps it was scrutiny of pandemic-related scientific claims, or recognition of paper mills and other industrialized fakery as a serious problem, or just gathering momentum as sleuths began to get their due in wider circles, but it did feel as though 2021 was a year in which retractions – and larger issues in scientific integrity – played a big role.

‘A clusterf**K’: Authors plagiarize material from NIH and elsewhere, make legal threats — then see their paper retracted

“clusterfuck,” by J E Theriot, via CC BY 2.0 license

Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style.

Last May, the journal Cureus published a paper titled “Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia Due to Homozygous Loss of the CD4 Start Codon.” The paper caught the notice of Andrea Lisco, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, who earlier this month was looking for his own article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on the same topic. Lisco told us:

I did accidentally run in the Cureus paper while I was looking for my original publication on JID and I did report it immediately to Cureus and JID editorial offices.

The journal acted with what we’d consider to be remarkable haste. Within a few weeks came the following retraction notice:

‘Highly professional, but the process seems to take a long time’: Is this the best way to correct the record?

A Nature journal has retracted a 2021 paper which made a bold claim about certain chemical reactions after several researchers raised questions about the analysis – but not before another group pulled their own article which built on the flawed findings.

The first article, “The amine-catalysed Suzuki–Miyaura-type coupling of aryl halides and arylboronic acids,” appeared in Nature Catalysis in January. Most of the authors were affiliated with Hefei University of Technology, in China. The paper has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

After publication, at least three groups of researchers published Matters Arising letters in the journal questioning the validity of the results, all of which appeared on December 2:

Medical journal retracts letter calling hijab ‘an instrument of oppression’

A major Canadian medical journal has retracted a letter to the editor by a prominent surgeon in Quebec who expressed reservations about a photo the journal had published of two young girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab.

The photo in question (above) ran on the cover of the November 8, 2021 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.The image prompted a letter from Sherif Emil, an endowed chair of surgery at Montreal Children’s Hospital of McGill University. Published December 20, the letter voiced concern that the photograph used “an instrument of oppression [the headcovering] as a symbol of diversity and inclusion.” (That’s in the title of the letter, which the journal now acknowledges writing, not Emil.)

As the CBC reported, Emil wrote that:

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