Sadrizadeh told us the methodology reported in the article was “so amusing that I felt compelled to share it” on LinkedIn. In his post, Sadrizadeh calls out “unique Stockholm data magically transformed into an Iraq case study, courtesy of 16 authors from six different countries!” He also included the following picture of data presented in the two papers:
The left image is from Sadrizadeh’s paper, while the right is from the article in Energy and Buildings.
The lead author of the May study, Qusay Hassan, is a researcher at the University of Diyala in Baqubah, Iraq. He did not respond to our requests for comment.
Jianlei Niu, the editor-in-chief of Energy and Buildings, saw Sadrizadeh’s LinkedIn post calling out the similarities in data and reached out to him, Sadrizadeh told Retraction Watch. The paper was later withdrawn. Niu forwarded our request for comment to the publisher’s ethics team, which did not respond to our emails.
The withdrawal statement from the journal reads:
This article has been withdrawn by the editor. The journal concluded that there were possible duplicates/manipulations in Figures 2, 5, 6, 11, 15, and 16 with the published article, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2023.117420. The explanation provided by the author was not able to resolve these issues. The article has therefore been withdrawn. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.
A journal has retracted an entire special issue over concerns the guest-edited papers underwent a “compromised” peer review process.
In a supplement to Volume 337 Issue 1 of Annals of Operations Research, 23 papers were retracted with the same statement:
The Editor-in-Chief and the publisher have retracted this article. The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue. An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised editorial handling and peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references or not being in scope of the journal or guest-edited issue. Based on the investigation’s findings the Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions of this article.
The articles in the guest-edited issue, Prescriptive Analytics Using Machine Learning and Mathematical Programming for Sustainable Operations Research, were published between June 2022 and October 2023.
A landing page for the issue doesn’t appear on the journal’s website because the concerns came before the special issue was completed, a representative from Springer told us in an email. They didn’t provide information on how these concerns came to light or the specifics of the investigation’s findings, saying the investigation is still ongoing.
The guest editor, Abbas Mardani, is a researcher at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He was named in the top 1% of Highly Cited Researchers in 2021 and 2022 in Clarivate’s Web of Science. Several of his papers have comments on PubPeer questioning the theorems. Mardani did not respond to our request for comment.
His colleague, Deepa Bhatt Mishra, disagreed with the retraction, according to the notice. “I fully support Dr. Deepa Bhatt Mishra and my other co-authors in placing the blame on the publisher,” Gunasekaran told us in an email. He denied having any connection to Mardani prior to submitting the article.
Gunasekaran said his research group submitted a draft to the call for papers posted on the website of Annals of Operations Research. They expected “the individual responsible for editing the special issue is a respected scholar in their field.” He continued:
It is not the responsibility of the authors to know how the papers are processed, or the circumstances under which decisions are made. All we know is that our submission underwent more than two rounds of rigorous revisions and took quite some time. Unfortunately, we received a retraction email from the publisher that lacked clarity and transparency, and in the end, we authors paid a heavy price for the irresponsible actions of Guest Editor, the EIC of the journal, and the publisher.
Last July, the journal retracted 81 papers from another special issue, using the same notice as the recent retractions. “These papers comprise the one other special issue in the journal that the Springer Nature Research Integrity unit identified as part of their ongoing investigations work,” a spokesperson for the publisher said. “We are committed to ensuring the integrity of the publication record and these retractions reflect our ongoing work in that regard.”
A 2020 paper that claimed to find a link between microbial genomes in tissue and cancer has been retracted following an analysis that called the results into question.
The paper, “Microbiome analyses of blood and tissues suggest cancer diagnostic approach,” was published in March 2020 and has been cited 610 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. It was retracted June 26. The study was also key to the formation of biotech start-up Micronoma, which did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Rob Knight, corresponding author and researcher at the University of California San Diego, also did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
After downloading and analyzing the original data, “we found almost right away that the authors of the Nature paper had made some huge mistakes – that most of the bacteria they found simply weren’t there, or else were present in quantities that were 100s of times smaller than they reported. Oops,” Steven Salzberg, a researcher at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and corresponding author of the 2023 paper, told Retraction Watch in an email.
Salzberg and his colleagues found “some of these species were ‘nonsensical,’” he told us. For example, the Knight paper found that Hepandensovirus was the most important species to identify adrenocortical carcinoma. “Well, that’s a shrimp virus! Makes no sense as it doesn’t exist in humans,” he told us.
Knight’s group responded to the criticism in a follow-up paper, “Robustness of cancer microbiome signals over a broad range of methodological variation,” published in February 2024 in Oncogene. In it, they defended their original findings: “These extensive re-analyses and updated methods validate our original conclusion that cancer type-specific microbial signatures exist in TCGA, and show they are robust to methodology.”
The retraction notice cites Salzberg’s paper and the response from the authors. It reads:
The Editors have retracted this article. After publication, concerns about the robustness of specific microbial signatures reported as associated with cancer were brought to the attention of the Editors. The authors have provided responses to the issues in a separate publication.
Expert post-publication peer review of the issues raised and the authors’ responses has confirmed that some of the findings of the article are affected and the corresponding conclusions are no longer supported. All authors agree with this retraction.
While presenting a paper in journal club, neurology resident at Baylor College of Medicine, Peter Campbell, noticed a potential problem. Two infants in a 2018 paper were reported to have died, but their data also appeared in a follow-up study published two years later with no mention of them being deceased.
“It is unclear how a patient who reportedly died could be available for follow-up at 2 years,” he wrote in an email reporting his concerns to Frontiers, the publisher of the articles. The email, sent in April, went unanswered.
The 2018 paper has been cited 22 times and the 2020 paper eight times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The data in question concerns patients 1 and 3 from table 2 of the 2018 paper, who are labeled as having died. Yet their data matches those of participants 4 and 2 in table 3 of the 2020 paper as “babies with cerebral palsy,” without any indication of death. The data from the second study were purportedly collected after the children were 18 months old.
Irene Litvan, editor-in-chief of the journal, told Retraction Watch she was “not made aware of this matter” but that the research integrity team at Frontiers is investigating the issue after receiving Campbell’s email.
A representative from the publisher confirmed “we are actively checking the discrepancy brought to our attention by Dr Campbell.”
Shah defended the data. The two children died “later after developing cerebral palsy” and were therefore represented in both studies, he told us in an email. “We have neurodevelopment outcomes for them although they later died,” he said.
Campbell was unsatisfied with that explanation: “Is it reasonable to say in a first paper that the children died and then in the next simply say they had poor developmental outcomes? That seems strange.”
The authors should have included more information about the deaths of the patients, and “been more clear,” he added.
In a second email to Retraction Watch, Shah clarified that patient 1 died “after 2 years of age with severe global cerebral palsy” and patient 3 died “at 19 months of age with again the most sever [sic] global impairment and cerebral palsy.” The patients were recruited “between January 2014 and January 2016,” he said, so when the 2018 paper was written, “we already had information about later outcomes for some of these children.”
A March 2020 paper that helped spur the discredited claim hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19 is under investigation – again – after some of its authors asked to take their names off the article.
The lead author, retired researcher Didier Raoult, has 12 retractions, according to The Retraction Watch Database. Those retractions involved violations of ethics rules. Journals are investigating many other articles by Raoult and his colleagues, including their work on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID.
Soon after publication, critics pointed out flaws in the article. The journal commissioned a review, in which Frits Rosendaal, of Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands, called the researchers “fully irresponsible” for presenting flawed information “coupled with the potentially serious side-effects of hydroxychloroquine.” In an official statement, The International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC), which co-owns the journal with Elsevier, said in April 2020 that the article “does not meet the Society’s expected standard.”
Still, the journal did not retract the paper. In an editorial published along with the critical reviews, ISAC leadership wrote:
We believe, in addition to the importance of sharing observational data at the height of a pandemic, a robust public scientific debate about the paper’s findings in an open and transparent fashion should be made available.
A group of scientists again called for its retraction in a June 3 email sent to Elsevier and seen by Retraction Watch. Despite ISAC’s April 2020 statement of concern, “nothing happened during the last four years, which seems unusually long to us,” the scientists wrote. In addition, three of the authors told the group they had asked for their names to be removed from the paper at the end of 2023, the group wrote.
A representative from Elsevier responded to the group’s email three days later, confirming three of the authors had asked to take their names off the paper “on the grounds of their having concerns about the article of a methodological nature.” The representative told us they “can’t divulge” which authors made the request, or when they did so.
The representative also stated that the journal was re-opening the previously closed investigation after receiving the authors’ requests.
Raoult has not responded to our emails seeking comment.
Fabrice Frank, one of the email’s authors and retired independent researcher, told us at least two of the authors had been added “without their consent and without knowing it.” The authors asked to remain anonymous.
Lonni Besançon, a researcher at Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden, called the fact the article remains available “unacceptable,” adding: “All of the concerns were raised years ago and the paper is clearly responsible” for a waste of scientific efforts, money, and time.
Besançon and Frank have raised concerns about other papers by authors affiliated with the Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire Méditerranée Infection (IHU-MI) in Marseille, France, where Raoult was the former director. Nearly all of the authors of the March 2020 paper have ties to IHU-MI.
Two years after a journal told sleuths it wouldn’t retract flawed papers, it changed course and pulled them.
Mark Bolland, a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who is no stranger to unearthing academic wrongdoing, first sent complaints about one of the papers to The International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (IJGO) in March 2021. He said the data on bone mineral density in “Isosorbide mononitrate versus alendronate for postmenopausal osteoporosis,” which has been cited 26 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, were “impossible.”
Bolland said the data the researchers reported were not consistent with the reference values provided by the maker of the device used to measure bone density in the study. The normal ranges are 0.96 +/- 0.12 g/cm2, whereas the experiment reported much lower values of 0.21-0.24 g/cm2.
In an email to Retraction Watch, Bolland’s colleague Andrew Grey called the data “laughable, frankly.”
A portion of the email Bolland sent to the journal reads:
The findings of this study which reported large effects of nitrates and alendronate are totally inconsistent with clinical trials from other groups, the lead author previously extensively plagiarized a report of another nitrate trial, and a systematic evaluation using the REAPPRAISED checklist raises a number of concerns about the integrity of the publication including concerns regarding trial ethics, participant recruitment and that the bone density baseline and outcome data are implausible or incorrect.
A spokesperson from the journal assured Bolland three times in September 2021 they had reviewed the data and found them to be correct – only for IJGO to retract the article two years later in December of 2023.
The lead author of the study, Ashraf Nabhan of Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt, was editor for Contemporary Issues in Women’s Health and systematic reviews until April of 2023. His name no longer appears on the editorial board. He currently sits on the senior editorial board for BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, where 10 editorial board members resigned earlier this year because they felt the journal mishandled allegations of data fabrication. He didn’t respond to our request for comment.
But this wasn’t an isolated instance for IJGO. In March 2020, Grey notified the journal of issues with a second, unrelated article led by Indian researcher Subrata Seal. The paper, “Randomized controlled trial of elevation of the fetal head with a fetal pillow during cesarean delivery at full cervical dilation,” which has been cited 24 times, is part of a trio of papers by Seal published in different journals. Grey’s concerns included implausibly high reductions in relative risks for maternal outcomes, data discrepancies between study groups, and calculation errors.
The paper was used in a licensing document for a medical device called a fetal pillow in 2017, which is still available for purchase. In his email to the journal, Grey raised concern about the device being used clinically, even after the retraction: “According to the manufacturer’s website, the fetal pillow is now used in more than 20 countries and in >85 hospitals in the United Kingdom, and more than 26,000 devices have been used worldwide,” he wrote.
IJGO responded in October 2020 that all concerns had been investigated:
The authors provided responses to each of the concerns raised, and although they did concede that there were some errors in terms of timeline reporting, they gave satisfactory explanations regarding the different authors on the publications you mention, as well as the apparent discrepancy in study sites.
When Grey took the issue directly to the publisher, Wiley responded that it wanted to share his identity with the authors: “We feel this would be helpful in eliciting a more detailed response,” a representative said in December 2020. Grey did not respond, and didn’t hear anything for three years — until the paper was retracted in June 2023 for inconsistency in trial results.
The same spokesperson from the journal, Amy Goggins, told Retraction Watch that IJGO revisited the cases after appointing a research integrity editor in 2022. “We have re-opened investigation of some older cases where there was uncertainty over the outcome, in an effort to achieve consensus on these,” Goggins said.
Bolland said he was both surprised and not surprised that the original outcome was uncertain, “but they certainly never indicated any uncertainty in their correspondence with me- quite the opposite: they didn’t address the concerns we raised and simply dismissed them, without making any effort to engage with us about the concerns.”
In an email to Retraction Watch, Grey noted that the journal’s initial assessments were “extremely poor” for the articles. “Again, not unusual. The problems with the data and the publications were really obvious.”
IJGO published an expression of concern in January of 2023 regarding the fetal pillow paper. They also contacted the FDA to re-evaluate its licensing. Goggins told Retraction Watch that IJGO had been contacted by the manufacturer of the pillow device, Cooper Surgical, but didn’t share what the manufacturer said.
A representative from the FDA told Retraction Watch: “As a general matter, the FDA does not comment on potential or ongoing investigations.”
Not only were the cases similar — so were the retractions.
A portion of Nabhan’s retraction reads:
Concerns were raised by a number of third parties regarding the authenticity of the data and results presented in this study. In light of these concerns, the authors were asked to provide the raw data for the study. The authors cooperated fully and provided the raw data. Following review of the raw data by the journal’s research integrity team, it was found that there were highly similar sequences of values of in the data for the two study groups, suggesting duplication of data. Since the data of are incompatible with randomisation, this invalidates the study results and gives rise to considerable uncertainty around the observed effect of the intervention. As a result, the journal is issuing this retraction.
A portion of Seal’s reads:
Following the publication of an Expression of Concern on this article,1 further concerns were emphasized by a number of third parties regarding discrepancies between the retrospective trial registration and the published article. Following further review by the journal’s research integrity team, it was found that there were a considerable number of inconsistencies in the results presented. Unfortunately, there is no patient data available to explain or clarify these inconsistencies. This gives rise to considerable uncertainty around the benefit of the treatment intervention. As a result, the journal is issuing this retraction.
Jim Thornton, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Nottingham in the UK, left comments on PubPeer about another paper listing Nabhan as a contributing author, Thornton and his colleagues released a manuscript in October 2021 discussing the ethics of clinical trials led by Mohamed Sweed, a colleague of Nabhan.
In February, Steffen Barra Googled his name. A clinician working in the field of forensic psychiatry, he was in the habit of periodically checking if anything negative had been written about him. What he didn’t expect to find was a plagiarized paper with his name attached to it.
Concerned he might be blamed for the misconduct, Barra immediately contacted the publisher, Hilaris.
A company representative responded to Barra the same day, February 29, with one phrase: “We will remove the link.”
Once Barra pressed for an explanation, a representative from the journal named Jennifer responded: “We will take necessary action against the person who is responsible for the uploading of wrong file with your details.”
But Hilaris’ author page for Barra is still live, as is the link to the PDF of the article.
We attempted to contact the email listed in the paper, but it forwarded automatically to Barra’s email address.
Barra also reached out to Hjördis Czesnick, head of Office of the German Research Ombudsman, for help investigating the case. Czesnick found Hilaris’ registered address on their website: a PO box in Brussels. On behalf of Barra, Czesnick contacted the Secretary of the Flemish Commission for Research Integrity, as well as Belgian police.
Czesnick told us the journal in which the article appeared, Abnormal and Behavioural Psychology, is “known for dubious practices” and is “probably fake.” The title appears on Cabell’s List of predatory publishers.
The website for Abnormal and Behavioural Psychology says the open-access journal charges $99 for a“Fast Editorial Execution and Review Process,” which promises a decision in three days, review comments in five days after submission, and a galley proof two days after acceptance. Any manuscript accepted for publication incurs an article processing charge.
ilaris did not respond to our request for comment. Their page on plagiarism states:
Ethical standards of very high-quality ensures [sic] the authenticity of the scientific publication and wins [sic] the public trust on scientific findings so that it [sic] enhances the credibility of the research work or idea.
Barra said he feels “perplexed” by the situation: “[N]o one could think of any good reason for a ‘Publisher’ to do something like that,” he told us in an email.
Past instances of false authorship could provide a hint. In April 2023, we covered a similar case in which a researcher was listed as an author on a plagiarized paper that had nothing to do with her field of study. Commenters on the post said including a reputable researcher in the publication may have been an attempt to improve the journal’s image.
Michalik has associations with the Institute of Mathematics, the same institution with which Furdzik, now deceased, earned his PhD. As of August of 2023, she was a researcher at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland.
The retraction statements for both papers read:
This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief after receiving a complaint about citation issues. The editors solicited further independent reviews which indicated that the statements in this paper substantially overlap with the PhD thesis of Z. Furdzik [O własnościach pewnych rozkładów przestrzeni topologicznych na iloczyny kartezjańskie, 1968 (unpublished, in Polish), Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw], without proper citation.
Elsevier received the complaint in June of 2023, according to a spokesperson, who did not say who had sent it.
The 2016 paper was cited once – in Michalik’s 2017 paper, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. In the citation, Michalik compares her work with Furdzik’s:
This part of our work is contained in Section 4; here, the main result is Theorem 3, which was independently proved by the author and Furdzik
The 2017 paper has not been cited.
Michalik hasn’t responded to our request for comment.
A former professor and vice provost for research at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York, falsified data in two published papers, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Shaker Mousa, who was also chairman and executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute at Albany, already has at least 10 retractions and two corrections, by our count.
The ORI found seven micrograph panels appeared in both the Nanomedicine and Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology papers and were relabeled to “report pro-angiogenic factors as alternate pro-angiogenic factors, anti-angiogenic drug treatments as alternate anti-angiogenic drug treatments, and control treatments and anti-angiogenic treatments as the same treatment.”
The findings relate to research funded by two grants. One, on which Mousa was the sole principal investigator from 2009-2010, received nearly $375,000 in funding. The other grant awarded over $6 million from 1997-2020 to Thomas Scanlan, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, as principal investigator. Mousa received nearly $1.9 million in total funding as sole principal investigator.
Mousa, whose work attracted other scrutiny, defended the recurring image by claiming it was the result of using the same positive control, FGF2, in both studies: “That is why you see the same representative FGF2-mediated stimulation of angiogenesis selected in both reports.”
Mousa has not yet responded to our requests for comment. As part of a settlement with ORI, he agreed to have his research supervised for four years and will not serve on federal committees, boards, or peer review committees during that time.
A university vice president has received his first retraction – and disagrees with it, according to the journal.
The retraction for Jaydutt Vadgama, the Vice President for Research and Health Affairs at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, comes after a commenter on PubPeer noted similarities between data in two papers from the same group. Similar comments have led to corrections to two other papers by Vadgama, who is also professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles.
The retraction notice, published this month, states:
After publication, concerns were raised regarding image overlap with the authors’ earlier article [1] and highly similar bands in the western blot images presented in the figures. Specifically:
Figure 1d Twist, E-Cadherin and β-actin blots appear highly similar to the same proteins in Fig. 3a of [1];
Figure 3d α-Tubulin blot appears highly similar to the same protein in Fig, 4c of [1];
A number of bands in Figs. 1d, 2c, 2d, 3a, 3b, 3d, 4b, 4c, 5a, 5d and S2 appear to be duplicated.
Additionally, in Fig. 5b, the 4 h images for pSmad3 and pSmad3/DAPI don’t seem to correspond to the same area, and two nuclei in the pSmad3/DAPI image appear highly similar.
The Editor-in-Chief therefore no longer has confidence in the presented data.
In April 2023, PubPeer user “Actinopolyspora biskrensis” raised concerns about “possible data reuse between papers, as well as possibly duplicated signals.”
The authors responded, and posted photos of what they said were the original gels:
Thank you for your interest in our research and being critical of the figures. We wish to reassure the commentator that there is NO data reuse between the two papers identified, even though the loading controls β-actin and α-Tubulin look similar under each blot. The first author is the primary lead investigator who conducted the studies, while the last author is the senior author and PI whose grants have funded this study. All of our data presented in the papers were produced several times by different individuals in the lab. We made sure that the data were reproduced with accuracy and reproducibility.
I am unable to locate the published bands in these images, with one exception.
The authors didn’t respond to this comment, also from April 2023. The paper’s retraction came over a year later.
Vadgama has not responded to our request for comment, nor has first author Yanyuan Wu. Both did “not agree to this retraction,” according to the notice.
Many of Vadgama’s other papers have comments on PubPeer questioning the validity of images, which commenters have claimed appear to be repeated, overlaid, or superimposed.
Some PubPeer comments on Vadgama’s articles have spurred corrections. The journal Cancers issued a correction last April to a paper after first author Pranabananda Dutta said “an inadvertent error” resulted in the same image being used twice with slightly altered brightness. In another case, after Actinopolyspora biskrensis raised concerns of image splicing, horizontal stretching, and duplication, study author Nalo Hamilton admitted the image was “inadvertently duplicated” and the International Journal of Molecular Sciencesissued a correction.
Vadgama and a coauthor admitted mistakes or said they were looking into the issues raised for twoother papers, which have yet to be corrected.
