Retraction Watch

Nanotech group up to nine retractions

A group of nanotechnology researchers in Iran is up to nine retractions after losing four papers in a go for problematic figures.

The work was led by Abolfazl Akbarzadeh, a medicinal chemist at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, who has spent time as a visiting professor at Boston University and UCLA. Commenters on PubPeer including Elisabeth Bik and “Hoya camphorifolia” have raised questions about the papers, with posts dating back to November 2020.

The latest retractions involve articles that appeared in Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology, a Taylor & Francis title. Evidently, the papers appear to have had…artificial data.

Dermatology journal calls for investigation into Bordeaux-INSERM work

Two and a half years after critics raised concerns, a dermatology journal says it has called on two French institutions to launch an inquiry into a 2017 paper.

The Journal of Investigative Dermatology has issued an expression of concern for the article, “NADPH Oxidase-1 Plays a Key Role in Keratinocyte Responses to UV Radiation and UVB-Induced Skin Carcinogenesis,” which it published in June 2017.

The authors of the group were led by Hamid Reza Rezvani, the head of the dermatology team at Université de Bordeaux, and a research director with INSERM, France’s publicly funded science agency.

According to the article’s abstract:

Authors retract second Majorana paper from Nature

A year after retracting a Nature paper claiming to find evidence for the elusive Majorana particle that many hope would have paved the way for a quantum computer, a group of researchers have retracted a second paper on the subject from the same journal.

In the August 2017 paper “Epitaxy of advanced nanowire quantum devices,” Erik Bakkers of QuTech and Kavli Institute of NanoScience, Delft University of Technology, in The Netherlands, and colleagues claim that the work is a “substantial materials advancement that paves the road for the first Majorana braiding experiments.” The paper has been cited 189 times, earning it a “highly cited paper” designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

But the Majorana story has been unraveling after other physicists began raising questions. In March 2021, the group retracted a Nature paper. That was followed by an expression of concern for related work in Science in July, and another expression of concern in Science in December.

Weekend reads: Should ‘peer reviewers be paid?’; Kim Kardashian and conflicts of interest; scandal costs millions in grants

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

COVID-19-vitamin D paper retracted by Springer Nature journal
Study on reducing parents’ anxiety about children’s circumcision retracted
More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings
What we’ve learned from public records requests. Please help us file more.
Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper
8 years after three papers are flagged — and after losing original correspondence — PLOS ONE retracts

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 221. There are more than 33,000 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):

COVID-19-vitamin D paper retracted by Springer Nature journal

A journal has retracted a 2021 paper claiming that vitamin D “significantly reduced the inflammatory markers associated with COVID-19 without any side effects” following criticism that led them to “no longer have confidence in the conclusions.”

The paper “Impact of daily high dose oral vitamin D therapy on the inflammatory markers in patients with COVID 19 disease,” appeared in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature journal, on May 20, 2021. The paper earned a correction on August 30, and has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong who has been involved in efforts to clean up the literature around COVID-19 and other subjects, tells us that he told the journal about the errors in early November 2021. Meyerowitz-Katz outlined his criticisms of the paper – which he called “one of the most influential” in the push to use vitamin D for COVID-19 – in a Medium post on April 3.

Study on reducing parents’ anxiety about children’s circumcision retracted

A pair of researchers in Turkey have lost a 2021 paper on a randomized controlled trial in pediatric surgery after a reader raised concerns about the methodology reported in the article.

However, the retraction notice – detailed though it might be – reveals that the problems could, and likely should, have been caught during peer review.

The paper, “Effect of care programme based on Comfort Theory on reducing parental anxiety in the paediatric day surgery: Randomised controlled trial,” appeared last July in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, a Wiley title. The authors, Fahriye Pazarcikci and Emine Efe, were affiliated with Isparta University of Applied Sciences and Akdeniz University, respectively.

“Paediatric day surgery” turns out to be male circumcision in boys ages 4 to 7 years, as the trial registration information on ClinicalTrials.gov indicates. Circumcision is mentioned in the full text of the paper, but not the abstract.

More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings

The tip came from the leadership of another scientific conference.

Did the Association for Computing Machinery know that they had published the proceedings of a conference with essentially the same name as that organization, IEEE, on the same dates, in the same venue, and with lots of overlapping authors?

The two versions of the meeting – the International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech) – both allegedly happened in Jakarta, Indonesia from Aug. 19-20, 2021, the tipster told ACM.

When ACM dug deeper, Scott Delman, the organization’s director of publications, told us, they saw something that looked familiar because of an investigation that led to a mass retraction of conference proceedings months earlier: A company in China billing itself as a conference organizer had handled all of the peer review.

What we’ve learned from public records requests. Please help us file more.

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

You may have noticed an increasing number of posts over the past few years that contain the phrase “obtained through a public records request.” Some examples:

It’s how we learned that a pharmacology researcher was demoted after a misconduct investigation – and then became chair at another school. That story led to a front-page piece in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
It’s how we learned that a Science journal took three years to do anything about a retraction request made by a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The case later led to sanctions from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for the graduate student involved.
It’s how we learned that a child psychiatrist’s research had been suspended indefinitely after one of her study’s participants had been hospitalized. ProPublica later reported that her university had paid back millions in NIH grants because of the incident and others.
It’s how we learned that a professor at The Ohio State University had kept a six-figure job for a year after a misconduct finding.
It’s how we learned that PLOS ONE had failed to retract a paper for three years after a university requested its removal.
It’s how we learned that a PubPeer comment led the University of Michigan to reopen a misconduct investigation.

Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper

The authors of a case report involving a patient who died of a rare disorder of the bone marrow have removed an image from the article after the person’s mother objected to the use of the photograph.

The paper, “Dyskeratosis congenita,” appeared in Autopsy Case Reports in 2020 and was written by a group from Upstate Medical University, part of the State University of New York system, in Syracuse.

We saw the notice in November and were curious if we could learn more. So we filed a public records request for documents related to the article – and received a response last week disclosing correspondence between Robert Stoppacher, a co-author of the report, and the editor-in-chief of the journal.

In a letter to the journal on Sept. 12, 2021, Stoppacher stated that:

8 years after three papers are flagged — and after losing original correspondence — PLOS ONE retracts

A group of nutrition researchers in Canada led by the prominent diabetes scientist Emile Levy has lost three papers in PLOS ONE over concerns about the integrity of the data.

The concerns were raised nearly eight years ago by Elisabeth Bik, early in her career as a data sleuth.

In May 2014, Bik told us, she contacted the journal to point out problems with images in the articles, as well as a fourth paper that has received an expression of concern:

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