Retraction Watch

Medical school dean up to five retractions

A kidney research group led by a medical school dean has accumulated five retractions.

All five came within the last year, after commenters on PubPeer pointed out image similarities.

Joseph I. Shapiro, vice president and dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, is an author on each of the five papers and corresponding author for two. (Shapiro recently said he will be stepping down at the end of this month after ten years as dean, but will remain a tenured professor, according to a news report.)

A paper claimed to describe ‘the first potent and specific anti-COVID-19 drug.’ Now it’s retracted.

A paper about the discovery of “the first potent and specific anti-COVID-19 drug” has been retracted after it emerged that the compound wasn’t so novel after all.

The article, published in May 2021 in Chemical Papers has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

As the paper’s sole author, Amgad M. Rabie, writes in the abstract:

A stolen manuscript, part two: The plagiarist begs for forgiveness as another group plagiarizes the same work

In 2019, we wrote about a reviewer who stole a manuscript and published it under his own name. Today, we bring you the sequel.

The sequel involves a plea for forgiveness after the plagiarized paper was retracted, and a second allegation of stealing work – which has prompted the target of the plagiarism to wonder if a more serious response from the journal to the first instance would have discouraged the second.

We obtained an email the reviewer, Yuvarajan Devarajan, sent after the retraction to Mina Mehregan, a mechanical engineer at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran whose work he copied. In it, he explains what happened, and asks, beginning in all caps in the subject line, for her to “FORGIVE ME IF POSSIBLE”:

Weekend reads: Researcher has paper retracted, then earns promotion; is peer review ‘more cavalier, self-serving, and ignorant?’; a ‘weird notice’ for all a publisher’s papers

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Want to know whether that journal is scamming you? Introducing the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker
Cornell food marketing researcher who retired after misconduct finding is publishing again
Urology researcher under investigation for double-dipping has another paper retracted
A hare-raising expression of concern after an author hires a third party to get a paper published
Former Weill Cornell cancer researcher up to 20 retractions; investigation’s findings are with Feds
Widely touted abstract on ivermectin and COVID-19 retracted

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 229. There are more than 34,000 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):

Widely touted abstract on ivermectin and COVID-19 retracted

The authors of a controversial meeting abstract linking ivermectin to lower mortality from Covid-19 have retracted the study, saying that the work has been widely “misinterpreted” and might be leading to patient harm.

The abstract, “Treatment with Ivermectin Is Associated with Decreased Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: Analysis of a National Federated Database,” was presented at the 2021 International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance.

According to the researchers, from the University of Miami, Covid-19 patients who took ivermectin were about 70% less likely to die of the disease than those who took remdesivir.

Former Weill Cornell cancer researcher up to 20 retractions; investigation’s findings are with Feds

The journal Cancer Prevention Research has retracted nine papers at once from a group of cancer researchers led by Andrew Dannenberg, formerly of Weill Cornell Medicine.

The bundle of retractions brings Dannenberg’s total to 20, according to our database, nearly doubling the 11 he had previously. Kotha Subbaramaiah, also formerly of Weill Cornell Medicine, is a coauthor on all of the newly retracted papers, and two of the notices point the finger at figures that he prepared.

Dannenberg and Subbaramaiah retired from Cornell in the space of three months in late 2020 and early 2021, Retraction Watch has learned, and the university has forwarded a report of their investigation into the matter to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

A hare-raising expression of concern after an author hires a third party to get a paper published

An Elsevier journal has issued a rather remarkable expression of concern for a 2021 paper on rabbit husbandry after learning that the lead author misrepresented the authorship of the article – and possibly more.

The paper, “Supplementing rabbit diets with butylated hydroxyanisole affects oxidative stress, growth performance, and meat quality,” appeared in animal and ostensibly came from a group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia led by Tharwat Imbabi.

But as the journal explains, the article wasn’t the first rabbit rodeo for Imbabi, of the department of animal production at Benha University. According to the notice, the researcher had failed repeatedly to publish his manuscript in other journals, so he turned to “third parties” for help.

Those contributors did the bulk of the work – but wanted none of the credit. Meanwhile, Imbabi appears to have found other authors willing to join the list.

We’ll let the expression of concern tell the rest:

Urology researcher under investigation for double-dipping has another paper retracted

A urology researcher who stepped down from his post as department chair after an institutional investigation prompted by Retraction Watch reporting has lost another paper.

The article apparently was not flagged during a misconduct investigation, but a PubPeer commenter noted overlapping images in August 2021.

Hari Koul had been interim chair of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at LSU Health New Orleans until last December. He stepped down from the post (but remains a professor) amid the university’s investigation of allegations that he secured grants from two federal agencies for the same research project, following reporting by Retraction Watch in October.

An LSU Health New Orleans spokesperson told Retraction Watch the “process has not been completed.”

Cornell food marketing researcher who retired after misconduct finding is publishing again

Brian Wansink, the food marketing researcher who retired from Cornell in 2019 after the university found that he had committed academic misconduct, has published two new papers.

The articles, in Cureus and the International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health, appear to use data that are at least a decade old. Wansink’s only coauthor on the papers is Audrey Wansink, a high school student and, evidently, his daughter. Brian Wansink did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.

Wansink’s work came under scrutiny beginning in 2016, after he published a blog post that described research practices that sounded like p-hacking to some readers. Other researchers started reviewing his published papers and found many issues.

Want to know whether that journal is scamming you? Introducing the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker

Have you heard about hijacked journals?

Hijacked journals mimic legitimate journals by adopting their titles, ISSNs, and other metadata. Usually, hijacked journals mirror legitimate journals without permission from the original journal. In rare instances, publishers will buy rights to a legitimate journal but continue the publication under considerably less stringent publishing protocols and without clearly noting to the reader the change in ownership or publication standards (sometimes known as “cloned” journals).

Scholars can be duped into publishing in hijacked journals – many of which require fees – by offers of fast publication and indexing in databases such as Scopus; being indexed in such databases is viewed by many universities and governments as a mark of legitimacy. Even the WHO’s COVID literature database has been fooled.

We’re hoping to put an end to that sort of thing: Introducing the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker.

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