Retraction Watch

Behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt’s PhD dissertation withdrawn

Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist and Canada 150 Research Chair who has had a dozen papers retracted following allegations of data fraud, now appears to have had his doctoral dissertation withdrawn.

The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.

Science journal retracts paper after university investigation finds ‘carelessness and lack of attention to detail’

Science Signaling has retracted a 2017 paper marred by nearly a dozen instances of problematic figures which an institutional investigation concluded were the result of shoddy work on the federally-funded study — but not deliberate misconduct.

The article, “The receptor tyrosine kinase AXL mediates nuclear translocation of the epidermal growth factor receptor,” came from a group led by Toni Brand, then of the Department of Human Oncology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, in Madison, where most of the co-authors were based as well.

The paper has been cited 28 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The researchers presented an abstract of the study at the 2017 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, although that does not appear to have been cited.

According to the retraction notice:

‘Clear evidence of theft’ brings down meningitis paper with dodgy images

A group of neurosurgery researchers in Tunisia have lost a 2021 case study on childhood meningitis after the editors discovered evidence of plagiarism and image manipulation.

The article, “A case of meningitis due to Achromobacter xylosoxidans in a child with a polymalformative syndrome: a case report,” appeared in the Pan African Medical Journal and was written by a team lead by Mehdi Borni, of the Department of Neurosurgery at University Hospital Center Habib Bourguiba, in Sfax.

According to the notice:

Bad MATH+? Covid treatment paper by Pierre Kory retracted for flawed results

A Wisconsin physician who has been pushing unproven treatments for Covid-19 has lost a paper on a hospital protocol his group says radically reduced deaths from the infection after one of the facilities cited in the study said the data were incorrect.

Pierre Kory, whose titles have included medical director of the Trauma and Life Support Center Critical Care Service and chief associate professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, in Madison, has become a key figure in the controversy over the use of ivermectin — the deworming agent that proponents insist can treat Covid-19 despite a lack of evidence that it does.

In late December 2020, Kory — who rails on Twitter about unfair and incompetent journals — and another ivermectin advocate, Paul Marik, of Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, and several other authors published a paper in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine on a group they’d created called the Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. Per the article:

Anatomy journal retracts 13 papers

The Anatomical Record is correcting itself in a big way, pulling 13 articles, including several linked to paper mills.

The papers, all by authors in China, were published between 2019 and 2021.

Some were flagged in a September 2021 report on research misconduct by the Chinese government. They join a slew of articles The Anatomical Record has retracted since 2020 for similar concerns.

Here’s an example of a retraction notice, this one for “Long noncoding RNA TUG1 facilitates cell ovarian cancer progression through targeting MiR-29b-3p/MDM2 axis,” which appeared in January 2020 from a group at the Department of Pharmacy at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University:

Springer Nature geosciences journal retracts 44 articles filled with gibberish

Springer Nature has retracted 44 papers from a journal in the Middle East after determining that they were rubbish.

The articles, which showed up in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences starting earlier this year, many of which involve at least some researchers based in China, and from their titles appear to be utter gibberish — yet managed still to pass through Springer Nature’s production system without notice.

The retractions follow the flagging of more than 400 papers by the publisher for concerns about “serious research integrity” breaches in the articles. Those concerns were first surfaced by a commenter on PubPeer and by a group of researchers who have been identifying and exposing nonsense papers.

Astronomer apologizes, withdraws preprint slated for PNAS about impact in the field after criticism

A prominent astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin has withdrawn a preprint and a published paper after critics accused him of perpetuating inequality in the field, saying he is more sorry “than words can say” about the matter and that he is taking a hiatus from his work to allow the controversy to subside. He is also putting publication of a book he wrote on the subject on hold.

At the heart of the controversy was an article by John Kormendy, a specialist in black holes, titled “Metrics of research impact in astronomy: Predicting later impact from metrics measured 10-15 years after the PhD.”

Kormendy published the work last week as a preprint on arXiv before it appeared in PNAS but after he’d received word from the journal that it had been accepted.

According to a summary of the article:

Ivermectin-COVID-19 study retracted; authors blame file mixup

The authors of a study purportedly showing that ivermectin could treat patients with SARS-CoV-2 have retracted their paper after acknowledging that their data were garbled.

The paper, “Effects of a Single Dose of Ivermectin on Viral and Clinical Outcomes in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Infected Subjects: A Pilot Clinical Trial in Lebanon,” appeared in the journal Viruses in May. According to the abstract:

Paper on how trans youth come of age is retracted following ethics board investigation

A journal devoted to LGBT issues has retracted a paper on the “process by which transgender youth come of age” because “the reported outcomes can no longer be considered valid.”

The article, “Becoming trans adults: Trans youth, parents, and the transition to adulthood, Journal of LGBT Youth,” was written by Jonathan Jimenez, at the time a graduate student in sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).

The paper, which appeared in the Journal of LGBT Youth, was his first solo article, Jimenez tweeted when the publication came online in August 2020, saying he was “unbelievably happy” to share the news.

HHS takes three and a half years to tell us “there are no records responsive to your request”…for a letter we know exists

If you file public records requests regularly, you have likely become used to how long they can take, and how few documents you may end up with. We certainly have. But we’re prompted to share a particularly frustrating experience with the NIH.

Settle in. This is a three-and-a-half year tale — and counting.

On May 8, 2018, we made a public records request to the NIH under the Freedom of Information Act for “Any Correspondence between the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration (OPERA) and officials at Duke University during the month of March 2018.” We did so because, as we reported on March 23, 2018 in Science, the NIH had:

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