Retraction Watch

Reddit post prompts retraction of article that called Trump ‘the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter’

In October 2021, a Reddit user on the r/badscience subforum posted a long critique of an article published in PLOS ONE earlier that year that had analyzed the “anti-vaccination infodemic” on Twitter and concluded that former U.S. president Donald Trump was “the main driver of vaccine misinformation” on the platform before his account was suspended.

The critique, titled “Terrible PlosOne Paper Dissected,” listed concerns about the sample size (50 pro-vaccine and 50 anti-vaccine accounts), method of selecting the sample and control groups, and data analysis. The Redditor also looked at the reviews of the article which PLOS ONE made available, and concluded that “clearly neither reviewer actually read it in any detail.”

The day after the comment was posted, an account for PLOS Communications responded, thanking the user “for your post publication peer review” and saying that PLOS ONE was looking into the article.

Weekend reads: ChatGPT fools scientists; did COVID-19 trials cut corners?; do scientific societies need journals?

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 285. There are more than 38,000 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):

Was a paper from Taiwan retracted because of a geopolitical dispute?

A study in the journal Smart Materials in Medicine has earned a retraction, seemingly not because of scholarly malfeasance or an inadvertent oversight, but because of a “lack of agreement on affiliation format.”

The crucial fact seems to be that almost all of the article’s authors, including its two senior authors, list affiliations in Taiwan, raising the question if the retraction is based on the geopolitical dispute about whether Taiwan is an independent nation or part of China.

The article, “Anti-microbial/oxidative/inflammatory nanogels accelerate chronic wound healing,” was published online in late 2021. The journal is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science, although there are 10 citations of the article listed on the article’s web page as of January 12. There is no Twitter chatter indicating anything amiss with the article’s conclusions or methods, and no discussion about it on PubPeer.

It’s unclear when exactly the paper was retracted. Its cryptic retraction notice states:

Russian publishing watchdog decries ‘retraction misuse’ following ban on ‘LGBT propaganda’

In the wake of a new law that bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and (or) preferences” in Russia, some journals have retracted articles they fear could attract state attention, a move a publishing watchdog in the country has called “self-censorship.”

As we reported in December, the Russian philosophy journal Logos retracted an article about lesbian fashion magazines for being “in violation of standards,” citing the new ban.

More journals have followed suit, according to the Russian Council on Publication Ethics, which issued a statement decrying “retraction misuse” by journals in response to the law, though it also expressed concern for the safety of journal staff and authors if they ignored it. The statement began:

Japanese university asks surgeon to retract eight ‘fraudulent’ papers

An oral surgeon in Japan falsified images in several papers, granted authorship to whomever he saw fit and stored experimental data sloppily, according to an investigation by Showa University in Tokyo, where the physician was a lecturer at the time of the misconduct.

As a result of the findings, the university has recommended retracting eight papers by the surgeon, Masayasu Iwase, according to a translation commissioned by Retraction Watch of a December report from the committee that investigated the case.

The university also is discussing revoking the graduate degrees of two of Iwase’s former students whose dissertations were based on the “fraudulent” papers, the report explains.

Tadashi Hisamitsu, Showa’s president, wrote on the university’s website:

Judge orders OSU cancer researcher to pay $1 million to lawyers from failed libel suit

Lawyers who represented Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus, in failed libel and defamation suits – and who later sued him for not paying his tab – have won a judgment for $1 million against the scientist.

The judgment, dated Dec. 8, 2022, orders Croce to pay just shy of $1.1 million plus interest to Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, one of the firms that represented him in his libel lawsuit against the New York Times and his defamation case against David Sanders, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., both of which he lost.

The firm sued Croce in 2020, seeking more than $920,000 in unpaid fees. After the case went to trial, a jury awarded the full amount to the firm in damages, and the judge ruled that the lawyers were entitled to prejudgment interest at a rate of 4%, totaling an additional $175,000. The judgment amount can continue accruing interest, and Croce is responsible for the court costs.

In his post-trial decision, judge Richard A. Frye wrote:

Police investigating after Polish journal accuses authors of ‘crime of plagiarism’

Polish police are investigating alleged plagiarism in a series of articles by a group of researchers at the University of Life Sciences in Lublin, Retraction Watch has learned.

A university commission also is looking into the allegations, which one of the authors told Retraction Watch had “greatly damaged” his career. While plagiarism is not usually considered a crime, it can be prosecuted under national copyright laws in Poland and elsewhere.

The alleged plagiarism was first discovered by a reviewer for Postępy Mikrobiologii – Advancements of Microbiology, a quarterly of the Polish Society of Microbiologists, said Radosław Stachowiak, who worked as the journal’s deputy editor-in-chief until the end of last year.

Weekend reads: China cracks down; unearned authorship rife; new jargon for a new year

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Elsevier journal temporarily removes article by prolific psychologist – with a typo at “frist”
President of Iranian university in ‘serious breach of ethical standards’
Paper on writing centers as ‘neocolonial tools’ is retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 283. There are more than 38,000 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 on writing centers as ‘neocolonial tools’ is retracted

Are academic writing centers agents of US hegemony, spreading the evils of colonialism as they work to topple rogue syntax and rehabilitate failing grammatical states?

So argued a pair of authors in Canada in a now-retracted 2022 article which claimed that such centers have been used as “neocolonial tools” to push American foreign policy goals.

But according to critics, that claim – which seems like it might have emerged from a cross between Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” and Graham Greene’s, well, lots of his books – suffered from a fatal flaw or two, as we’ll shortly see.

President of Iranian university in ‘serious breach of ethical standards’

The president of an Iranian university and a colleague appear to have published the same microelectronics paper twice, according to allegations seen by Retraction Watch.

The articles, by Bahram Azizollah Ganji and Kamran Delfan Hemmati of Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, deal with the design of a new capacitive accelerometer with a high dynamic range and sensitivity. Both appeared online in 2020, first in the Slovenia-based Journal of Microelectronics, Electronic Components and Materials and later in the higher-impact Springer journal Microsystem Technologies. The former version has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, while the latter has been cited twice.

The editors of Microsystem Technologies were made aware of the allegations on November 16 in an email that cited “significantly identical content” in the two papers. “Pretty much the entire introduction section and almost all figures are an exact copy from” the authors’ previous article, the email stated.

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