Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: A lawsuit over a cell line; criminal charges for a science agency; nonsense in prestigious journals

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper
How one US organization hopes to make retractions more visible
Here’s what happened when a publisher looked more closely at a paper milled paper
Retraction of review of broccoli’s health benefits is 22nd for deceased author, 5th for one of his postdocs
Author defends paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save
Elsevier corrects a retraction notice following questions from Retraction Watch

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 162. And there are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper

A marine ecologist at Oregon State University now helping lead the Biden White House’s climate and environmental initiatives violated the conflict of interest policy at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when she edited a paper in the journal last year.

Jane Lubchenco, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2009 to 2013 under President Obama, joined the White House in March of this year as Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Last year, while still at Oregon State, Lubchenco, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was the handling editor for an article titled “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” by Reniel Cabral and Steven Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues. Such marine protected areas, aka MPAs, have come under scrutiny, as Yale’s E360 noted in 2019:

How one US organization hopes to make retractions more visible

As Retraction Watch readers likely know, there’s ample evidence that retracted papers — 2,500 per year and growing — continue to attract citations that do not mention the fact the paper has been retracted. Some of that may be because it’s not clear on publishers’ sites and databases that these papers have been retracted or flagged. (That is one of the main reasons we created our database, which now contains more than 30,000 retractions.)

The U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) project would like to make things better. We spoke to Todd Carpenter, NISO’s executive director in Baltimore, Maryland, about the new project, which aims to address the lack of visibility of notices added to published papers.

Retraction Watch (RW): You recently launched the ‘Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern’ project. Why did you do this, and what do you hope to achieve?

Here’s what happened when a publisher looked more closely at a paper milled paper

Although it’s never too late to say sorry, sometimes the apology turns out to be worse than keeping quiet.

Consider the case of a group in China, who admitted that their 2020 paper on brain tumors was the work of a paper mill.

The article, “LncRNA SNHG16 Promotes Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion of Glioma Cells Through Regulating the miR-490/PCBP2 Axis,” came from a group led by Fangen Kong, of the Department of Neurosurgery at The Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University, in Zhuhai.

Missing from the list of authors, however, was another…well, something, as the retraction notice points out:

Retraction of review of broccoli’s health benefits is 22nd for deceased author, 5th for one of his postdocs

Broccoli almost certainly is good for you — but just how good might have taken a bit of a hit with the retraction of a 12-year-old review on the vegetable’s health benefits by a notorious fraudster.

By our count, the retraction, which appeared in July, marks the 22nd for Das, formerly of the University of Connecticut, who died in 2013.

It’s also the fifth retraction for Das’ co-author, and former postdoc, Hannah Vasanthi; four of those papers were collaborations with Das but the most recent, in Carbohydrate Polymers, was not. Several other papers by Vasanthi have been flagged on PubPeer — over concerns about plagiarism, image issues and problematic data — and she has had at least four corrections and one expression of concern. (One article by Vasanthi that Elisabeth Bik identified in 2019 appears to contain text lifted from a 2010 article by Bharat Aggarwal, formerly of MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose name may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers.)

Author defends paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save

The corresponding author of a new paper in an Elsevier journal that claims “there are five times the number of deaths attributable to each inoculation vs those attributable to COVID-19 in the most vulnerable 65+ demographic” says he “fully expected” the criticisms — and that the “real-world situation is far worse than our best-case scenario.”

Ronald Kostoff and colleagues published “Why are we vaccinating children against COVID-19?” in Toxicology Reports in mid-September. In the paper, they colleagues conclude:

Elsevier corrects a retraction notice following questions from Retraction Watch

An Elsevier journal has corrected a retraction notice after we asked questions about what exactly it was saying — but not before the journal’s editor tried to defend what turned out to be a mistaken passage.

The article, “Measurement of performance parameters and improvement in optimized solution of WEDM on a novel titanium hybrid composite,” was published online in Measurement in December 2020. The retraction notice, which appeared online on September 17 of this year, read:

Weekend reads: Paper mill sanctions; UT Austin suspends prof, repays grant funds; researchers in Mexico threatened with arrest

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Researcher leaves Wistar Institute as he retracts a Nature paper
Scale whose copyright owner defends zealously falls under scrutiny — and journal takes two years to publish a critique
Springer Nature slaps more than 400 papers with expressions of concern all at once
Paper that ripped off a PhD thesis is retracted
Kyoto University fires researcher for fraud in Kumamoto earthquake studies
Criticism engulfs paper claiming an asteroid destroyed Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 160. And there are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Criticism engulfs paper claiming an asteroid destroyed Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah

Scientific Reports is taking heat on social media and from data sleuths for publishing a paper implying that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might have been the retelling of the devastation wrought by an exploding asteroid in or around the year 1,650 BCE.

To the lay reader — and to peer reviewers and editors, evidently — the article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” makes at least a superficially plausible and scientifically rigorous case.

According to the abstract:

Kyoto University fires researcher for fraud in Kumamoto earthquake studies

Damage from the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake

Kyoto University has fired a researcher after determining that he committed fraud in at least five papers about the deadly Kumamoto earthquake of 2006.

In a report released earlier this week (Sept 28), the institution said it found Aiming Lin guilty of 37 counts of “fraudulent activity” in four of the articles, not including a 2017 paper Lin published in Science which the journal retracted in 2019. The university suspended Lin for a year at the time.

Kyoto University said (courtesy of Google translate) earlier this month Lin was subject to “disciplinary dismissal” in the case:

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