Retraction Watch

Happy 12th birthday, Retraction Watch: And what a year it was

Every year in the days leading up to August 3 – our birthday – we find some time to review where we’ve been and where we’re going. We often start with the very first post we published on August 3, 2010.

That post begins with a mention of Anil Potti – remember him? – and the first comment is from one Ed Yong. “This sounds excellent and I look forward to the posts,” Yong wrote in a characteristically encouraging note. Yong has of course gone on to become one of the world’s most eloquent and well-known science journalists, winning a Pulitzer last year for “lucid, definitive pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic.”

We did not win a Pulitzer in 2021, or 2022, or any other year, for that matter. Given our narrow focus and approach to stories, the likelihood of that moving forward seems to lie somewhere between zero and nil. That’s just fine.

But on this, our 12th birthday, we find plenty to celebrate. The virtual party started early, when our co-founder Ivan Oransky published a World View column in Nature yesterday. “Retraction Watch has seen the retraction process change dramatically over the past decade,” Ivan wrote, reflecting on what we’ve learned over the last 12 years. “We’ve come to feel that the community is falling short.”

We’ll focus on the past 12 months, as is our wont. Some highlights, in no particular order:

Exclusive: PLOS ONE to retract more than 100 papers for manipulated peer review

In March, an editor at PLOS ONE noticed something odd among a stack of agriculture manuscripts he was handling. One author had submitted at least 40 manuscripts over a 10-month period, much more than expected from any one person.

The editor told the ethics team at the journal about the anomaly, and they started an investigation. Looking at the author lists and academic editors who managed peer review for the papers, the team found that some names kept popping up repeatedly.

Within a month, the initial list of 50 papers under investigation expanded to more than 300 submissions received since 2020 – about 100 of them already published – with concerns about improper authorship and conflicts of interest that compromised peer review.

14 retractions for researchers who falsely claimed US physicist as co-author

Groups of researchers from around the world have racked up a total of 14 retractions for faked authorship. And one author seems to have been up to those and other shenanigans for a decade.

All of the 14 papers include David Ross, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. There was just one problem: Ross retired in 2003.

We first reported on two of the retractions in March 2021. At the time, we noted that two papers in journals published by Emerald also included Ross’ name somewhat improbably. Emerald apparently retracted those two articles in June of this year, along with four others. (Emerald does not date the retraction notices, nor does it give the notices their own DOIs. Both steps are considered best practice.)

All of the notices include this passage:

‘One would not want to tarnish another journal’: Why a republished COVID-19 masks study doesn’t say it was retracted

When a retracted paper is republished in a new journal, should it note the retraction?

A few readers have asked us that question as they forwarded a paper published in May in Environmental Research, an Elsevier title. The study, “Carbon dioxide rises beyond acceptable safety levels in children under nose and mouth covering: Results of an experimental measurement study in healthy children,” bore striking similarities to a paper by the same authors that was retracted from JAMA Pediatrics in July 2021.

That retraction was the second for the paper’s first author, Harald Walach, who also lost an affiliation with a university in Poland. Walach tells us that he let the editor know about the JAMA Pediatrics retraction before he submitted the manuscript:

Weekend reads: 50 years after Tuskegee; ‘Is psychological science self-correcting?’; ‘The peer review system is broken’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

An editor invited me to submit a commentary, then he rejected it – and named and blamed me in an editorial
University of Fukui professor called out for fake peer review, loses “love hormone” paper
Crystallography database flags nearly 1000 structures linked to a paper mill
University’s story changes: It requested 33 retractions, not ‘several’
Exclusive: OSU investigation finds dishonesty and “permissive culture of data manipulation” in cancer research lab

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 253. There are more than 35,000 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):

An editor invited me to submit a commentary, then he rejected it – and named and blamed me in an editorial

The American Journal of Public Health is the flagship publication of the American Public Health Association, which has more than 25,000 members worldwide. The AJPH boasts that it is “a highly influential publication,” which is why I accepted an invitation from editor-in-chief Alfredo Morabia in 2020 to comment in a journal forum on FDA regulation of e-cigarettes. At that time Morabia invited a range of experts, both advocates and supporters of FDA tobacco regulation and critics.

Notably, I and Derek Yach, former president of the Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, acknowledged our conflicts of interest with the tobacco industry. My commentary, which was critical of FDA actions, was published here. (I had first published in AJPH a quarter century before.)

At the time of the forum, AJPH editors wrote, “we will invite everyone to reassess the situation in a year.” After a delay perhaps caused by Covid, on March 16, 2022 I was invited by Morabia to submit a commentary by April 1. Neither AJPH invitation email provided any guidance as to form or content for my submission.

I did so, and you can read the draft here. On April 22, Morabia summarily rejected my commentary. That same day, I wrote to him, expressing my confusion and asking for reconsideration (available here). There was no response.

University of Fukui professor called out for fake peer review, loses “love hormone” paper

A researcher in Japan appears to have written laudatory comments about her articles that a colleague passed off as his own during peer review. This may have happened for as many as five papers, two of which have been retracted.

Akemi Tomoda, of the Child Development Research Center at the University of Fukui, collaborated with Kenji Hashimoto of Chiba University’s Center for Forensic Mental Health on multiple fraudulent peer reviews, the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported in June. Neither Tomoda nor Hashimoto has responded to requests for comment.

Tomoda is an established researcher with some articles that have hundreds of citations, such as a 2009 study in Neuroimage claiming that corporal punishment harms the mental capacity of children. She has also given a TED talk about the importance of bonding between parents and children to a child’s mental health.

Crystallography database flags nearly 1000 structures linked to a paper mill

A chemistry database of crystal structures has marked nearly 1000 entries with expressions of concern after finding they were linked to articles identified as products of a paper mill.

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) added notes to 992 structures in its database, according to a notice posted to its website in May. And a crystallography researcher tells us the impact on the field could be significant.

The notes state:

University’s story changes: It requested 33 retractions, not ‘several’

The University of Wyoming has requested that journals retract 33 papers by a former associate dean and “highly cited researcher” at the institution.

The news came just a week after we broke the story that heart researcher Jun Ren had been demoted following an earlier investigation. At the time, a university spokesperson told us that “Based on the findings of this examination, the university is recommending retraction of several publications due to concerns regarding data irregularities inconsistent with published conclusions.”

Exclusive: OSU investigation finds dishonesty and “permissive culture of data manipulation” in cancer research lab

A university investigation found an emeritus professor had committed research misconduct after reviewing dozens of allegations, culminating in a recommendation to retract 10 papers and revoke his emeritus status.

The Ohio State University investigated 20 manuscripts by the cancer research group of Samson Jacob after the university received allegations in 2017 of image manipulation stretching over years of work, according to a misconduct investigation report we obtained via a public records request.

The 209-page report, dated February 9, 2021, tells the story of an investigation spanning more than a decade of Jacob’s lab’s work that encountered “dishonesty” from the lab members interviewed.

After determining that Jacob had committed research misconduct, the investigation committee recommended sanctions and asked for the immediate retraction of 10 papers in addition to the 10 that had already been addressed (nine retracted and one corrected) prior to the close of the inquiry. The school revoked Jacob’s emeritus position in May 2021, the OSU Lantern reported at the time.

The investigation committee reviewed 67 allegations, but declined to probe many more concerns that surfaced for the sake of time, according to the report.

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