‘Tin Man Syndrome,’ five other case studies retracted following Retraction Watch coverage

A comparison of the images and an overlay, provided by a sleuth.

A journal has retracted a study on ‘Tin Man Syndrome’ plagiarized from a decade-old April Fools’ joke —  which the author now admits was fake.

On August 15, we wrote about a “rare case report” published in Medicine in which authors claimed they had encountered a case of “ectopia cordis interna” and described an asymptomatic man with his heart located in his abdomen. Sleuths believed the case report plagiarized images from a 2015 satirical paper describing a condition of the same name. 

A week later on August 22, Medicine, published by Wolters Kluwer, retracted the paper and five others — all published this year — with shared authors. None of the papers have been cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The retracted papers are:

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Papers continue to face retractions for failure to license pricy tool 

Donald Morisky

Two journals have retracted papers this year for unauthorized use of a controversial scale whose creator has been known to license use of the questionnaire for six-figure sums – and to aggressively pursue those payments from researchers he claims have misused the instrument without prior approval.  

The Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS) is named for its creator, Donald Morisky,  now a professor emeritus in community health at UCLA. As the name implies, the measure allows researchers to assess patients’ adherence to drug regimens.

Morisky made a business out of licensing the scale and demanding steep fees for researchers who failed to obtain the proper permissions, as we reported in Science in 2017. Researchers who cannot afford the payments Morisky and his business associate demand have been forced to retract their work.

Continue reading Papers continue to face retractions for failure to license pricy tool 

Weekend reads: Lawyer sues to retract Paxil paper; most retracted papers have ‘negligible scholarly impact’; the high costs of freely available research

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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: Lawyer sues to retract Paxil paper; most retracted papers have ‘negligible scholarly impact’; the high costs of freely available research

Embattled journal Cureus halts peer reviewer suggestions

The mega-journal Cureus is eliminating author suggestions for peer reviewers, a prompt that is standard practice at some journals when submitting a manuscript. 

According to an email sent August 25 to current and past peer reviewers, the move is “due to the potential conflict of interest” that comes from authors suggesting reviewers who may be mentors and colleagues. 

Reviewers recommended by authors are more likely to give positive feedback on papers. And such recommendations gave way to such practices as peer review rings and self-peer review, vulnerabilities that started to thrive more than a decade ago. 

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Exclusive: Cancer researcher sues MD Anderson over misconduct finding

Sonia Melo

A biochemist who worked as a postdoc at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston has sued the institution to dispute findings of research misconduct. 

The researcher, Sonia Melo, now at the University of Porto in Portugal, alleges MD Anderson did not follow its own policies while conducting its investigation. Melo lost a prestigious grant in 2016 after one of her papers was retracted for containing duplicated images. 

MD Anderson’s investigation concerned a paper published in Cancer Cell in 2014. On August 7 the journal marked it with a “temporary Expression of Concern” detailing duplicated and relabeled data found in the probe, which was completed in May 2024. The article has been cited 1,462 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

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Chemist in Japan up to 40 retractions

Naohiro Kameta

A chemistry journal has retracted a 2020 review article by a nanotube researcher who fabricated and falsified data in dozens of studies.  

The latest retraction for Naohiro Kameta brings his total to 40, earning him a place on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

In a 2020 review article in Chemical Reviews, 24 of the 610 works Kameta and his coauthors cited had themselves been retracted following the publication of the paper, according to the retraction notice. Because these references were “important components” of the review article, “the narrative and claims presented can no longer be upheld,” the notice reads. The review has been cited 164 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

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Journal let authors make undisclosed changes that masked stolen content in paper

An Elsevier journal allowed a paper containing extensive plagiarism to remain online, while letting its authors make undisclosed revisions that masked the offense, Retraction Watch has learned. But the journal’s editor-in-chief told us he has subsequently decided to retract the paper.

The article, on cognitive impairment among older adults in India, appeared online on June 15 as a pre-proof in Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics Plus. At that point, its background section included several long paragraphs that were identical, or near-identical, to text in an extended conference abstract from 2024. The study’s objectives and methods also bore strong similarity to the earlier work, which had been conducted by another group of researchers.

Poulami Barman, first author of the conference abstract and a dual-program Ph.D. student in India and Germany, became aware her work had been stolen after one of her supervisors alerted her to the new paper. It turned out she knew the article’s corresponding author well. Like Barman, Madhurima Sharma was a Ph.D. student at the International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS) in Mumbai, and she had previously asked Barman to share her code. Barman had refused to do so until her work was published.

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‘No misconduct here’: Author defends addendum that sleuth says is ‘inadequate’

A 23-year-old paper has received an addendum for “possible inadvertent errors” in the figures. But a sleuth says the update doesn’t address issues with the work. 

The 2002 paper, which describes the behavior of Langerhans cells in normal and inflamed skin, was published in Nature Immunology and has been cited 774 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

The article received a correction in 2003 to replace two “incorrect” figures. Over 20 years later, PubPeer commenter “Archasia belfragei” flagged issues with different figures, noting in December that some PCR bands were “more similar than expected.”

Continue reading ‘No misconduct here’: Author defends addendum that sleuth says is ‘inadequate’

Weekend reads: ChatGPT ignores retractions; the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ for flagging papers; plagiarism in the age of AI

Dear RW readers, can you spare $25?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500. There are more than 60,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 300 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List?

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: ChatGPT ignores retractions; the ‘Swiss Cheese Model’ for flagging papers; plagiarism in the age of AI

PLOS One slaps four papers with expressions of concern for overlapping control data

Four papers from a team of researchers in Japan have received expressions of concern for overlap in control samples, data, study design and statistical analyses. The publisher of the articles says it has closed its investigation. 

The notices were published in PLOS One from July 31 to August 3 to inform readers of “study design concerns” and to provide additional supplementary data. They also cite a pair of related papers in other journals for the same problems, but those articles remain unmarked. 

Masaya Oki, a professor of applied chemistry and biotechnology at the University of Fukui in Japan, is the corresponding author on all six papers. Each discusses the effects of a different gene inhibitor on cataracts taken from rat eyes. While the authors used multiple methods to study these effects, the EOCs concern the results obtained using microarrays to compare lens samples. 

Continue reading PLOS One slaps four papers with expressions of concern for overlapping control data