Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: ‘Papermill alarm’ software; questions about a study of prosthetics; what do publishers stand for?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Journal says ivermectin study met standard for ‘credible science’
Former Iranian government official up to two retractions, five corrections
A journal did nothing about plagiarism allegations for a year. Then the tweets (and an email from Retraction Watch) came.
Fired postdoc faked recommendation letters from supervisor, OSU alleges
UCLA walks back claim that application for $50 million grant included fake data

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 261. 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):

UCLA walks back claim that application for $50 million grant included fake data

More than a month after a federal watchdog announced that a UCLA scientist had included fake data in a grant application worth more than $50 million, the university says the application didn’t have issues, after all.

In early August, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said that Janina Jiang faked data in eleven grant applications from UCLA. At the time, based on what was available in the ORI’s report, we noted:

Fired postdoc faked recommendation letters from supervisor, OSU alleges

A major research institution has accused a former postdoc of forging letters of recommendation from a supervisor, according to a court complaint.

Georgios Laliotis was terminated by The Ohio State University on Nov. 30, 2021, according to the complaint filed in Franklin County Municipal Court, which we’ve made available here. Earlier that month, his PI, cancer researcher Philip Tsichlis, had uncovered manipulated data in two papers on which Laliotis was the first author, and emailed journal editors to retract them, as we previously reported.

Emails released to us by OSU following a public records request indicated that Laliotis had been working at Johns Hopkins at the time, but OSU staffers had been told he had resigned his position effective November 24 and would go back to Greece. Whether he was employed by both universities simultaneously is unclear.

A journal did nothing about plagiarism allegations for a year. Then the tweets (and an email from Retraction Watch) came.

On August 10 of last year, Jim Stagge, an environmental engineering professor at The Ohio State University, emailed editors of Water Resources Management, a Springer Nature title, to let them know that a paper in the journal had taken significant blocks of his text without attribution.

The Water Resources Management paper in question, “Recommendations for Modifying the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) for Drought Monitoring in Arid and Semi-arid Regions,” was published July 16, 2021. Stagge said that it borrowed liberally from a paper of his, “Candidate Distributions for Climatological Drought Indices (SPI and SPEI),” that was published in the International Journal of Climatology in 2015.

The 2021 paper, with first author Peyman Mahmoudi from the University of Sistan and Baluchestan in Iran, did cite Stagge’s 2015 work, but didn’t indicate that large sections taken directly from Stagge and his co-authors were quotes.

Former Iranian government official up to two retractions, five corrections

A lung specialist who has held positions in Iran’s Ministry of Health and National Medical Council now has two retractions and five corrections of his published papers for re-using text.

In the case of the retractions, the re-used text was an entire paper.

Esmaeil Idani (who also spells his last name “Eidani”), now affiliated with Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences in Tehran, is a middle author on two papers retracted for republication, and corrections to two of his papers acknowledge duplicated text with each other and a third paper.

According to an online CV, Idani has worked as “Deputy Secretary of the Medical Education and Training Council” for Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education, and from 2013-2017 was chairman of the Supreme Medical Council of Iran. He has not responded to our request for comment.

Journal says ivermectin study met standard for ‘credible science’

A journal editor is defending his decision to publish a new paper showing that ivermectin can prevent Covid-19, despite more than a dozen retractions of such papers from the literature.

The article, “Regular Use of Ivermectin as Prophylaxis for COVID-19 Led Up to a 92% Reduction in COVID-19 Mortality Rate in a Dose-Response Manner: Results of a Prospective Observational Study of a Strictly Controlled Population of 88,012 Subjects,” appeared in Cureus August 31.

The authors included Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist better known as the leader of the Front-Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, based in Madison, Wis. Kory has been an active promoter of the use of ivermectin and other questionable remedies for Covid-19 – even testifying before Congress about his ideas – although his most high-profile paper on the topic was retracted last November.

Weekend reads: Russian co-authorship ban; predatory conferences; ‘Does peer review improve the statistical content of manuscripts?’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Stanford prof appeals order to pay $428K in legal fees after dropping defamation suit
Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids
How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions
One chiropractic manipulation patient injury. Two case reports. Two editor’s notes.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 260. 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):

One chiropractic manipulation patient injury. Two case reports. Two editor’s notes.

What happens when two different groups from two different medical specialties see a patient, and then write up separate case reports?

Ask teams of doctors in the neurology and rheumatology departments of the Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil. They both published case reports about a patient was injured after undergoing chiropractic spinal cord manipulation. And now both journals have editor’s notes acknowledging dual publication.

The patient’s case appeared in Neurology as “Spinal Cord Injury, Vertebral Artery Dissection, and Cerebellar Strokes After Chiropractic Manipulation” and as “Breaking the diagnosis: ankylosing spondylitis evidenced by cervical fracture following spine manipulation” in the journal Internal and Emergency Medicine. The two publications included the same figure and reported many of the same details about the patient with undiagnosed ankylosing spondylitis who experienced spinal cord injury and cerebellar strokes after experiencing spinal cord manipulation.

The editors of both journals published notes flagging the cases, an expression of concern in Internal and Emergency Medicine and a “notice of dual publication” in Neurology.

The notices are nearly identical, and state, in part:

How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions

In July of 2017, Mohamed Rezk, of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Menoufia University in Egypt, submitted a manuscript to the journal Anesthesia with a colleague.

The manuscript, “Analgesic and antiemetic effect of Intraperitoneal magnesium sulfate in laparoscopic salpingectomy: a randomized controlled trial,” caught the attention of John Carlisle, an editor at the journal whose name will be familiar to Retraction Watch readers as the sleuth whose statistical analyses have identified hundreds of papers with implausible clinical trial data.

The baseline data appeared unremarkable, Carlisle told us, but the same wasn’t true of the outcomes data. Of 24 values that could have been odd or even numbers, all of them were even.

The probability of that was “0.000000000000000000000 something,” Carlisle said.

Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids

StellaLife’s Vega Oral Care Recovery Kit

Stephen Barrett, a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatch, makes a point of calling out homeopathy and other health products and practices that lack evidence.

In that vein, earlier this year he emailed the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery to critique a 2019 article by Walter Tatch titled “Opioid Prescribing Can Be Reduced in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Practice,” which has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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