Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Plagiarism in biblical scholarship; revelations about publishing ‘lab leak’ preprint; publishing sanctions on Russia

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Einstein fired researcher in 2019, more than two years before ORI finding
Firing, publishing ban, 15 retractions for author who ‘defrauded’ co-authors in pay-to-publish scheme
Five studies linked to Cassava Sciences retracted
Doing the right thing: Neuroscientist announces retractions in ‘the most difficult tweet ever’

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 219. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which now 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):

Doing the right thing: Neuroscientist announces retractions in ‘the most difficult tweet ever’

A group of neuroscientists in Germany and Hungary is calling for the retraction of two of their recent papers after discovering a fatal error in the research.

Myriam Sander, a memory researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, took to social media on Wednesday to alert her followers to the decision. In what Sander called the “most difficult tweet ever,” she wrote:

Five studies linked to Cassava Sciences retracted

A researcher at the center of questions about a biotech’s controversial experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease has lost five papers in PLOS One.

The journal says it is retracting the articles, by Hoau-Yan Wang and colleagues, over concerns about the integrity of the data and the images in the papers. Wang does not agree with any of the retractions.

As we’ve reported, Wang, of the CIty University of New York, helped conduct the studies that formed the backbone of the regulatory filing for the drug simufilam, which Cassava Sciences — formerly Pain Therapeutics — has been trying to bring to market. Cassava, according to a citizen’s petition to the FDA, has funded Wang’s lab for more than 15 years, and two of the now-retracted papers feature Lindsay Burns, a Cassava employee, as a co-author. (The citizen’s petition, which called on the FDA to halt Cassava’s trials, was filed by a law firm representing Cassava short sellers but eventually denied by the FDA because it was not an appropriate venue.)

Firing, publishing ban, 15 retractions for author who ‘defrauded’ co-authors in pay-to-publish scheme

Cureus has retracted 15 papers, including three on Covid-19, after concluding that the articles were produced in a scheme by a researcher in Pakistan who charged his co-authors to join the manuscripts, lied about the ethics approval for the studies and may have fabricated data.

The journal says Rahil Barkat~~, who already had lost a pair of articles in Cureus,~~ charged researchers – some in Pakistan, others elsewhere – “editing fees” of as much as $300 to proofread and sign on to his manuscripts.

Barkat’s name appears on a few of the now-retracted articles but not all. However, the journal has linked him to the 15 papers.

Einstein fired researcher in 2019, more than two years before ORI finding

A researcher who agreed to a dozen years of supervision for NIH-funded research was fired from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at the end of 2019, Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported last week, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that the researcher, Hui (Herb) Bin Sun, and a colleague, Daniel Leong, faked data in 50 figures in 16 NIH grant applications going back to 2013. The ORI findings are dated March 21, 2022.

A spokesperson told Retraction Watch:

Weekend reads: Concussion researcher faces more scrutiny; ‘Mendel the fraud?’; seeking redemption after misconduct finding

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The 21-year-old apology – and retraction from JAMA
Harvard eye researchers have eight papers retracted for lack of ethical approval
Einstein duo faked data in 16 federal grant applications: ORI
So what happened with that Biogen Aduhelm study, anyway?
Will the real Tim Chen please stand up? A trip down the rabbit hole of deceit
Fake sex researcher loses zoophilia paper over ethical concerns
How critics say a computer scientist in Spain artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 215. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which now 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):

How critics say a computer scientist in Spain artificially boosted his Google Scholar metrics

Want a higher h-index? Here’s a way – but be warned, it’s a method that will raise some eyebrows.

Take the example of Juan Manuel Corchado, a computer scientist at the University of Salamanca in Spain. He has the 145th-highest h-index in the country. But many of the nearly 39,000 citations are by him to his own work.

This conference abstract, about the Internet of things and blockchain for smart cities, for instance, cites 44 references to Corchado’s own papers out of a total of 322 references. While this conference abstract, presented to a conference about artificial intelligence in educational technology in Wuhan, China, in July 2021, contains the exact same references as the one about blockchain for smart cities.

Other examples of short conference abstracts by Corchado listing dozens of citations to his own previous papers also exist.

Fake sex researcher loses zoophilia paper over ethical concerns

An alleged sex researcher with a history of making things up has lost a 2019 paper on the habits of people who have sex with animals over concerns about the ethics approval for the research.

The paper, “Digital Ethnography of Zoophilia — A Multinational Mixed-Methods Study,” was written by Damian Jacob Sendler and a co-author, Michal Lew-Starowicz and appeared in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.

Despite an impressive-looking webpage, Sendler, in the words of Gizmodo reporter Jennings Brown, is a:

serial fabulist. The accomplished doctor character Sendler has created has appeared in numerous media outlets—Vice, Playboy, Savage Lovecast, Huffington Post, Insider, Bustle, Thrive Global, Women’s Health, and Forbes, among others. Many of these platforms have published Sendler’s lies and publicized his bizarre and irresponsible studies on necrophilia, zoophilia, lethal erotic asphyxiation, and sexual assault. And until recently, he was soliciting patients through his website where he offered online psychotherapy and sex therapy.

Sendler, whose affiliation is listed as the Felnett Health Research Foundation, in Staten Island, N.Y., claims to have earned an MD and a PhD from Harvard:

Will the real Tim Chen please stand up? A trip down the rabbit hole of deceit

When Marianne Alunno-Bruscia, the research integrity officer at France’s national oceanographic science institute, uncovered nearly a dozen papers with fraudulent authorship, she thought she’d stumbled on something bizarre.

She didn’t know how right she was.

As we reported in early February, the problems arose during an audit the research activities of the L’Institut Français de Recherche pour l’Exploitation de la Mer (iFREMER), which the organization was conducting to satisfy a request from the French High Council for Evaluation of Research and Higher Education – a bureaucratic headache, to be sure, but one which in this case proved well worthwhile.

The bibliographic deep-dive turned up two curious articles bearing the name of Bertrand Chapron. That part wasn’t unusual. Chapron, a wave researcher, is prolific. Odd was the nature of the two papers. Neither was in Chapron’s fields of interest. Chapron disavowed any involvement in the work, and insisted that he’d never met the two main authors of the articles: Tim Chen and C.Y.J. Chen.

So what happened with that Biogen Aduhelm study, anyway?

Apologies in advance for the fact that this post is really just for the science publishing completists out there. But we know you’re out there.

Last week, Endpoints News, STAT and a few other outlets reported that Biogen had, in Endpoint’s words, “finally” published the key data behind the approval of Aduhelm by the U.S. FDA – a controversial green light, to say the least. The company had previously withdrawn the manuscript from JAMA because the journal had – gasp! – demanded edits, Axios reported last year.

Critics pointed out that the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (JPAD) – where the study was eventually published – was a far cry from JAMA, and suggested that the paper was subjected only to peer-review lite.

Then the paper disappeared.

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