Retraction Watch

Science Majorana paper earns an expression of concern

Just months after Nature retracted a paper on the “Majorana” particle because other researchers found issues in the work, Science has placed an expression of concern on a different paper that suggested “a relatively easy route to creating and controlling [Majorana zero modes] MZMs in hybrid materials.”

If such particles exist, they could allow Microsoft — which employs some of the researchers involved in the work — to build a quantum computer. But scientists have suggested that the findings of various studies do not suggest the presence of Majorana particles.

The Science paper has been cited 29 times since it was published in 2020, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The EoC reads:

Prominent behavioral scientist’s paper earns an expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 17-year-old paper by one of the world’s most prominent behavioral psychologists after it partly failed a statistical stress test conducted by a group that has been trying to reproduce findings in the field.

The 2004 article, by Dan Ariely, of Duke University but then at MIT, and James Heyman, then a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, was published in Psychological Science. Titled “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets,” the article looked the relationship between labor and payment for that work:

Should a researcher who was no longer at an institution when a study began be a co-author?

A group of surgeons in Germany have retracted a 2020 paper for several errors and because a senior researcher says he should have been included as a co-author.

The article, “Assessment of Intraoperative Flow Measurement as a Quality Control During Carotid Endarterectomy: A Single-Center Analysis,” appeared on the website of the Scandanavian Journal of Surgery in early November. The authors, led by Anna Cyrek, were affiliated with the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at University Hospital Essen.

According to the retraction notice:

Vice-chancellor of university in Pakistan loses paper for plagiarizing from a thesis

Sometimes, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.

Ask Farukh Iqbal. Earlier this year, Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, was alerted to a recent paper in the journal Fuel that cited a 2020 article he’d written with some colleagues.

Iqbal read the paper and realized with dismay that not only was his work — which included parts of his thesis — cited, it was plagiarized:

Pro-tip: When claiming to use a dataset, make sure it collects what you say it does

Tilda Swinton has no more to do with TILDA than the data these authors used (credit: Manfred Werner (Tsui)

Irish eyes most definitely were not smiling on three papers that purported to contain data from a national repository from the Emerald Isle.

The articles, which appeared in a trio of journals from Dove Medical Press — part of Taylor & Francis — were written by various researchers at Nanchang University, in China.

Two of the articles have been retracted. “Serum Human Epididymal Protein 4 is Associated with Depressive Symptoms in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,” from 2020, was published in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Per the abstract:

Weekend reads: Former dean sent herself threatening letters; what it costs to sue for defamation; what a highly cited paper is worth

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

‘Tortured phrases’, lost in translation: Sleuths find even more problems at journal that just flagged 400 papers
Award-winning nursing researcher’s paper retracted for ‘failure to acknowledge the contribution of other researchers and the funding source’
Two years: That’s how long it took a PLOS journal to flag a paper after a sleuth raised concerns
Journals retract papers following publication of university investigation by Retraction Watch
Two Texas studies on COVID-19 retracted because ‘previously approved study protocols appear to violate IRB guidelines around prisoner research’
When a retraction notice leaves out important details: COVID-19, prisoners, and an IRB

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 147.

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

When a retraction notice leaves out important details: COVID-19, prisoners, and an IRB

Earlier this week, we reported on the retractions of two papers on Covid-19 in Texas inmates after the journal was told that the researchers did not have proper ethics approval for the studies.

According to the senior author on the articles, however, that’s nowhere near the whole story. Kenneth Nugent, of Texas Tech Physicians in Lubbock, told us that he’d repeatedly sought — and received — approval from an institutional review board (IRB) throughout their project, articles on which appeared last year in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication.

The first study, published in August 2020, was titled “A Retrospective Analysis and Comparison of Prisoners and Community-Based Patients with COVID-19 Requiring Intensive Care During the First Phase of the Pandemic in West Texas.”

The second, from November 2020, was titled “Basic Demographic Parameters Help Predict Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 During the First Wave of Infection in West Texas.” Only the first article has been cited (one time), according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The retraction notice for the papers states that the authors requested their removal:

Two Texas studies on COVID-19 retracted because ‘previously approved study protocols appear to violate IRB guidelines around prisoner research’

A journal has retracted a pair of studies on Covid-19 in prisoners after the authors’ institution found that they had not obtained adequate ethics approval for the research.

The two studies appeared in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication. The authors, from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, were led by Kenneth Nugent, an internal medicine specialist at the institution.

Journals retract papers following publication of university investigation by Retraction Watch

Two journals have retracted three papers by a former researcher at the University of Colorado Denver six weeks after Retraction Watch first revealed that the university had recommended correcting the research record in 2016. Another journal has issued an expression of concern for a paper flagged in the investigation.

Despite a recommendation that nine different papers be corrected and retracted, journals had, by last month, retracted just two papers by the researcher, Hari Koul, now at Louisiana State University, and corrected one. Koul, as we reported, had apparently failed to inform multiple journal editors of the need for corrections and retractions.

At the time, Jennifer Regala, the executive editor of the Journal of Urology, which just retracted two of Koul’s papers, told Retraction Watch: “We were not aware of these allegations, so of course these are of grave concern to us.” She said that the American Urological Association, which publishes the journal, planned to conduct its own investigation.

Two years: That’s how long it took a PLOS journal to flag a paper after a sleuth raised concerns

Two years after being alerted to a questionable figure in a 2016 paper by a group with a questionable publication history, a PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern about the article.

The paper, “Deprivation of L-Arginine Induces Oxidative Stress Mediated Apoptosis in Leishmania donovani Promastigotes: Contribution of the Polyamine Pathway,” was published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and was written by a team based at the Rajendra Memorial Research Institute of Medical Sciences in Patna, India, along with a few other institutions in that country.

The penultimate author of the paper is Chitra Mandal, of the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. Mandal’s name appears dozens of times on PubPeer, where posters have flagged the figures in her papers. In a 2019 article in The Hindu, Mandal hinted that an institutional investigation into her work was underway but she dismissed the problems as “unintentional minor mistakes”:

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