Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Whistleblowers win a victory; a look at COVID-19 retractions; journals as sewage treatment plants

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Paper by gene therapy Zolgensma developer retracted because of discrepancies in mouse survival rates
Med school vice dean says he’s correcting paper amid negative misconduct inquiry
A grad student finds a ‘typo’ in a psychedelic study’s script that leads to a retraction
When failure to correct a flawed paper could put patients’ lives at risk
Frankincense extract paper is 30th retracted by former MD Anderson researcher who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 265. There are more than 36,000 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):

Paper by gene therapy Zolgensma developer retracted because of discrepancies in mouse survival rates

A paper describing preclinical work that was foundational for the gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy now sold as Zolgensma has been retracted for data inaccuracies.

The article, “Rescue of the spinal muscular atrophy phenotype in a mouse model by early postnatal delivery of SMN,” was published in Nature Biotechnology in 2010. Its corresponding author, Brian Kaspar, was at The Ohio State University at the time. Kaspar went on to become the scientific founder and chief scientific officer of AveXis, which created Zolgensma and was acquired by Novartis in 2018 for $8.7 billion.

The paper has been cited 557 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and referenced in at least 59 patents, according to Altmetric.

According to the retraction notice, the authors contacted the journal last year about “inaccuracies” in the data. After the journal’s investigation, the editors decided to retract the article over the author’s objections. The notice explained:

Med school vice dean says he’s correcting paper amid negative misconduct inquiry

A gastroenterology research group led by a vice dean at a medical school has requested that a journal correct a paper with an image duplicated from an earlier study by the same group, Retraction Watch has learned. The journal has not yet determined what kind of notice to place on the article.

The group’s leader informed us of the correction request in emails asking us to remove a comment on a post from June pointing out the duplicated image. He also told us that he requested the correction before his employer received an allegation of research misconduct and started an inquiry, which found he and his group had not committed research misconduct.

Uma Sundaram, vice dean of research and graduate education at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va. and chair of the department of clinical and translational science, is corresponding author on both of the papers that share an image. Sundaram also has a dual appointment at a VA medical center in Huntington.

A grad student finds a ‘typo’ in a psychedelic study’s script that leads to a retraction

Sometime after it was published, Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports.

The original article was written by a group led by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. Titled “A mechanistic model of the neural entropy increase elicited by psychedelic drugs,” the paper purported to help illuminate what happens in the brain under the influence of substances like LSD.

But the findings of the study wouldn’t replicate. And unlike some researchers who might blow off criticism of their work, or blame the replicators for the failure, Herzog sent Lodder the scripts his team had used.

Lodder found the problem quickly. As Herzog related to Retraction Watch, Lodder (whose schedule has been challenging the past few weeks as we’ve played phone tag) [See update on this post.]:

When failure to correct a flawed paper could put patients’ lives at risk

On April 15, 2021, as COVID-19 was waning several months prior to the surge in deaths associated with arrival of the Delta variant, the journal Cell published an eye-catching paper.

Titled “Soluble ACE2-mediated cell entry of SARS-CoV-2 via interaction with proteins related to the renin-angiotensin system,” the article stood in stark contrast to the contemporary understanding of the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which until then held that ACE2 on the membranes of susceptible cells served as the “receptor” for the virus.

The paper was notable because it claimed that vasopressin, also known as antidiuretic hormone, worsened COVID-19 infections. Vasopressin is known for its ability to promote water retention in the kidneys as well as to constrict blood vessels, but had not previously been associated with COVID-19 infections.

Upon reading the paper, one of us (MB) noted a large number of inaccuracies. The authors had used the wrong reagent: a high molecular weight precursor of vasopressin rather than vasopressin itself. They also incorrectly portrayed ACE2, the V_1B vasopressin receptor, and the AT₁ angiotensin II receptor – the primary mediators of their hypothetical mechanism of COVID-19 infection. (PubPeer commenters also pointed out problems in the paper, including a failure of the authors to post their original data.)

Frankincense extract paper is 30th retracted by former MD Anderson researcher who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch

A cancer researcher in Texas who once threatened to sue Retraction Watch is up to 30 retractions, the latest involving a 2011 article which earned a correction the following year.

The paper, “Boswellic Acid Suppresses Growth and Metastasis of Human Pancreatic Tumors in an Orthotopic Nude Mouse Model through Modulation of Multiple Targets,” came from the lab of Baharat Aggarwal, formerly of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston.

The paper, which was corrected in 2012, has received 50 citations, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, all of which came after the correction. The latest of these references appears to be a recent preprint claiming to find that frankincense extract helps treat breast cancer.

Per the retraction notice:

Weekend reads: Troubles in Romania; an erroneous erratum about fraud; Nature and discriminatory science

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Dental school dean up to five retractions for cancer research papers
Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?
Exclusive: Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings
When emails asking to withdraw manuscripts started repeating themselves, an editor got suspicious

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 264. There are nearly 36,000 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):

When emails asking to withdraw manuscripts started repeating themselves, an editor got suspicious

In late 2021, editors at Laboratory Investigation noticed something strange. The journal was receiving far more emails than usual asking to withdraw manuscripts that were already being peer reviewed. And some of the emails were strikingly similar, even using the same unusual language.

A total of five identical emails said that the authors had new results to add to the manuscript:

Exclusive: Hindawi and Wiley to retract over 500 papers linked to peer review rings

After months of investigation that identified networks of reviewers and editors manipulating the peer review process, Hindawi plans to retract 511 papers across 16 journals, Retraction Watch has learned.

The retractions, which the publisher and its parent company, Wiley, will announce tomorrow in a blog post, will be issued in the next month, and more may come as its investigation continues. They are not yet making the list available.

Hindawi’s research integrity team found several signs of manipulated peer reviews for the affected papers, including reviews that contained duplicated text, a few individuals who did a lot of reviews, reviewers who turned in their reviews extremely quickly, and misuse of databases that publishers use to vet potential reviewers.

Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?

The Internet of Things. Computer science. Botany. COVID-19.

All worthwhile subjects, to be sure. But what do they have to do with materials science?

That’s what James Heathers, who will be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch as a “data thug,” found himself wondering after he spent a weekend looking into articles published by Materials Today: Proceedings. He found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing “tortured phrases” that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.

He detailed his findings in a blog post today, and says that the journal – an Elsevier title – has published many articles that look like the work of a paper mill.

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