What we’ve learned from public records requests. Please help us file more.

Ivan Oransky

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

You may have noticed an increasing number of posts over the past few years that contain the phrase “obtained through a public records request.” Some examples:

Continue reading What we’ve learned from public records requests. Please help us file more.

Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper

The authors of a case report involving a patient who died of a rare disorder of the bone marrow have removed an image from the article after the person’s mother objected to the use of the photograph. 

The paper, “Dyskeratosis congenita,” appeared in Autopsy Case Reports in 2020 and was written by a group from Upstate Medical University, part of the State University of New York system, in Syracuse. 

We saw the notice in November and were curious if we could learn more. So we filed a public records request for documents related to the article – and received a response last week disclosing correspondence between Robert Stoppacher, a co-author of the report, and the editor-in-chief of the journal.  

In a letter to the journal on Sept. 12, 2021, Stoppacher stated that:

Continue reading Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper

8 years after three papers are flagged — and after losing original correspondence — PLOS ONE retracts

Emile Levy

A group of nutrition researchers in Canada led by the prominent diabetes scientist Emile Levy has lost three papers in PLOS ONE over concerns about the integrity of the data. 

The concerns were raised nearly eight years ago by Elisabeth Bik, early in her career as a data sleuth.  

In May 2014, Bik told us, she contacted the journal to point out problems with images in the articles, as well as a fourth paper that has received an expression of concern:

Continue reading 8 years after three papers are flagged — and after losing original correspondence — PLOS ONE retracts

Weekend reads: White academic’s book about Black feminism pulled; retraction notices as a genre; forget the scientific paper?

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 219. There are more than 33,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: White academic’s book about Black feminism pulled; retraction notices as a genre; forget the scientific paper?

Triple sunrise, triple sunset: Science paper retracted when it turns out a planet is a star

Artist’s impression of HD 131399 from 2016 (via European Southern Observatory)

When Kevin Wagner at the University of Arizona and colleagues published a paper in Science about their discovery of a new planet in 2016, it captured the attention of a lot of science writers.

Finding the object – HD 131399 – meant that “astronomers have discovered a planet with an even more exotic sight on its horizon: a triple sunset,” in the words of The New York Times. 

Or, as the AP put it, “a planet with triple sunrises and sunsets every day for part of the year.”

Continue reading Triple sunrise, triple sunset: Science paper retracted when it turns out a planet is a star

Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction

via PubPeer

It all started – as more and more retractions do – with a post on PubPeer, this one in November 2021. The comment was about a paper titled “Efficient in vivo wound healing using noble metal nanoclusters” that had appeared in Nanoscale in March of that year: 

Figure 5: There is an overlap between two images taken from different experimental conditions. I’ve added a version below with the contrast enhanced. It’s difficult to match the brightness perfectly, but all of the same structures can be matched between these two sections. Would the authors comment?

Vincent Rotello of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of the corresponding authors, responded right away. “Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention,” Rotello wrote on PubPeer. “We take data integrity seriously and are investigating the origin of the image duplication.”

Continue reading Hundreds of dead rats, sloppy file names: The anatomy of a retraction

Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.

Dan Century, via Flickr

If the writers of “Welcome Back, Kotter” wanted to issue a retraction statement, it might look something like this one from Mary Ann Liebert. We’ll call this one a hat tip to Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein, a Sweathog whose permission slips “from his mother” became a meme.

The paper in question appeared in 2016 in Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals and written by a group in China led by Liqun Yang, of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical Center and the State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology at Southwest University in Chongqing.   

In November 2021, Yang emailed the journal asking to swap out the original figure in the article with a corrected version. What Yang didn’t know was that a week earlier, the journal had received word of a post on PubPeer raising questions about the figures in the paper. 

The post received the following response from someone writing as co-author Hongjuan Cui: 

Continue reading Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.

Is a “Wall of Shame” a good idea for journals?

Today, the journal Cureus — which is no stranger to Retraction Watch — unveiled what they are calling a “Wall of Shame,” which “highlights authors and reviewers who have committed egregious ethical violations as well as the institutions that enabled them.”

Continue reading Is a “Wall of Shame” a good idea for journals?

Misconduct, failure to supervise earn researchers years-long funding bans

Two professors and two former graduate students are banned from funding by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) following findings by Nagoya University of misconduct and lack of supervision.

As we reported last month, Nagoya found that Yuuta Yano, a graduate student in Kenichiro Itami’s lab, had forged large swaths of data and had thrown away lab notebooks to escape detection. Itami, along with Hideto Ito, had asked for an investigation into the team’s work after retracting papers in Nature and ACS Applied Nano Materials on which Yano was an author.

Continue reading Misconduct, failure to supervise earn researchers years-long funding bans

Weekend reads: Should open access advocates vilify publishers?; authorship for sale, $5,000; is economics just ‘bafflegab?’

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

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 219. There are more than 33,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Should open access advocates vilify publishers?; authorship for sale, $5,000; is economics just ‘bafflegab?’