Retraction Watch

Catch and kill: What it’s like to try to get a NEJM paper corrected

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a letter to the editor and a response reflecting a quite modest correction. Essentially, the three letters “miR” will be removed from throughout a manuscript as the data, to date, do not support there being a human novel microRNA blood-based biomarker for myocarditis, as the original manuscript claimed.

At the time of this posting, however, that change – which itself is well over a year in the making – has not yet occurred. And we really don’t understand why. This is our story of the arduous journey to improve the medical and scientific literature.

In May of 2021 the NEJM published “A novel circulating microRNA for the detection of acute myocarditis.” One of us (Marc Halushka), a practicing cardiovascular pathologist and microRNA researcher, recognized this paper was squarely in his wheelhouse. The concept of a novel microRNA blood-based biomarker was exciting, but also curious.

Paper co-authored by sleuth Elisabeth Bik marked with expression of concern

A paper with scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik as a co-author now has an expression of concern. It dated back to her time at the now-defunct startup uBiome and described research that the company used to develop a clinical test of bacteria living in the human gut – and that she raised concerns about some years ago.

The article, “16S rRNA gene sequencing and healthy reference ranges for 28 clinically relevant microbial taxa from the human gut microbiome,” was published in PLOS ONE in 2017 and has been cited 39 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The expression of concern detailed the journal’s investigation into allegations that some of the samples in the paper weren’t suitable for determining a healthy baseline of the human gut microbiome — being from infants, people who might have recently taken antibiotics, and pets — and the authors’ responses.

It’s a long notice, but this paragraph sums up the concerns:

What happened when a psychology professor used a peer-reviewed paper to praise his own blog – and slam others’

A psychology professor has lost a paper for failing to disclose a crucial conflict of interest about one of the subjects of the work, which critiqued various blogs.

That’s because one of those blogs was written by none other than the author of the paper, Peter Kinderman, a professor at the University of Liverpool and a former president of the British Psychological Society.

The paper’s comments about Kinderman’s Blog ‘F’ were generally positive, with phrases such as:

Former medical school dean earns sixth retraction

A kidney researcher and former dean of a medical school has now had six papers retracted and one marked with an expression of concern in a little more than a year.

The latest retraction for Joseph I. Shapiro, of a 2015 paper in Science Advances, comes two years after PubPeer commenters began posting about potentially duplicated images in the article, and one year after the authors corrected two of its figures.

Shapiro, the corresponding author on the article, stepped down as dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., on June 30th of this year, but remains a tenured professor at the institution. Neither he nor Komal Sodhi, the first author on the article and also of Marshall, have responded to our request for comment.

Retractions of work Shapiro led began last September, according to our database, following critical comments on PubPeer.

Elsevier journal retracts nearly 50 papers because they were each accepted on the “positive advice of one illegitimate reviewer report”

An Elsevier journal has retracted 47 papers that an accomplished sleuth says appear to have been generated by a paper mill.

The articles, by researchers from countries including China, Kazakhstan and Russia appeared in Thinking Skills and Creativity.

Here’s a sample notice, for a paper titled “Steal like an artist: Connection between critical thinking and creativity of a future musician in a digital environment,” whose authors come from Shandong University of Science and Technology and, somewhat improbably, the Department of Music at the Shandong Institute of Petroleum and Chemical Technology:

‘Mugged by stealth’: Team finds their paper has been plagiarized not once, but twice

In his career as a psychologist, Andrew Colman had only experienced being plagiarized once: In the early 1970s, an acquaintance tried to take credit in print for a psychometric scale that Colman had developed. Colman wrote to the journal, which quickly confirmed the plagiarism and printed a corrigendum in the next issue.

And in the past year, Colman has learned of two more instances of his work – a 2004 paper on game theory in medical consultation – being stolen. He isn’t finding the journals so responsive this time around.

Weekend reads: A bizarre turn in a plagiarism case; lessons of the ‘replication crisis’; special issues redux

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

In 1987, the NIH found a paper contained fake data. It was just retracted.
‘A big pain’: Professor up to six retractions for plagiarism and manipulated peer review
‘A display of extreme academic integrity’: A grad student who found a key error praises the original author
Concussion researcher Paul McCrory earns nine more retractions, nearly 40 expressions of concern

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):

In 1987, the NIH found a paper contained fake data. It was just retracted.

Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues.

Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted.

A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.

The recent retraction came through the efforts of psychologist Russell Warne, who unearthed the report with the help of a couple librarians, posted it on his blog, and contacted journals about its findings.

In a blog post about the report, Warne summed up the case:

‘A big pain’: Professor up to six retractions for plagiarism and manipulated peer review

A business professor has now had six papers retracted, resulting from a combination of plagiarism and manipulated peer review.

All six retractions for Bilal Afsar, an associate professor of management sciences at Hazara University in Pakistan, have come since last February. He is the only common author on all the papers, which were published in 2019 and 2020 – and in comments to Retraction Watch, blamed a research assistant whom he declined to name for the problems.

The most recent paper to be retracted, in August of this year, was “Does thriving and trust in the leader explain the link between transformational leadership and innovative work behaviour? A cross-sectional survey.” It was originally published in the Journal of Research in Nursing in December of 2019 and has been cited 10 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

According to the retraction notice:

‘A display of extreme academic integrity’: A grad student who found a key error praises the original author

Last week, we wrote about the story of Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam who had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. The paper would end up retracted. At the time, Lodder had not had a chance to respond to our questions about the case. We’re pleased to share his comments as a guest post.

I’ve had a big passion for research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics ever since I had started my undergraduate in biomedical sciences at Amsterdam University College. I am currently a MSc Artificial Intelligence student and about a year ago, in preparation for a computational neuroscience course, I wanted to expand on the model used by Rubén.

I sent him an e-mail explaining the situation, and requesting some parameters that weren’t detailed in the paper so that I could start running the simulations myself. Rubén responded very quickly and was immediately very helpful with getting me started with running the simulations.

Now that I was able to run the model properly, I wanted to start off with being able to reproduce the paper’s analysis results before looking into expanding. Using the methodology described in the paper, I re-implemented the steps needed to compute the entropy. And indeed, this is where I got some different results as presented in the paper.

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