Whistleblowers flagged 300 scientific papers for retraction. Many journals ghosted them
Saga highlights how slow, opaque action by publishers threatens the integrity of the research literature
23 JAN 2024
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A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 383, Issue 6681.Download PDF
Over the past decade, a team of scientific sleuths uncovered one of the most extensive known bodies of faked research. They notified 78 journals about almost 300 papers by a pair of Japanese physicians that bore signs of fabrication and other ethical lapses. Nearly half have been retracted, putting the authors, Yoshihiro Sato and Jun Iwamoto, in fourth and sixth place, respectively, on Retraction Watch’s list of authors with the most retractions. But when the investigators contacted editors to encourage reviews of the remaining papers, the response was mostly silence.
The critics’ efforts to correct the record, which they detail in a paper published last month in Accountability in Research, offer a high-profile example of familiar problems in scientific publishing. Retractions come slowly—often years after complaints arise, if at all—in part because journals may defer to institutional investigations, which can be slow, unreliable, or absent. Journals’ decisions also lack transparency. As such, efforts to track the fate of suspect papers are vital to “ensure that journal articles represent a robust and dependable body of evidence,” says Ursula McHugh, an anesthesiologist at St James’s Hospital in Dublin who has studied retractions.
In 2016, the investigator team—Andrew Grey, Mark Bolland, and Greg Gamble of the University of Auckland and Alison Avenell of the University of Aberdeen—published an analysis of 33 papers by Sato, Iwamoto, or both. It described implausible data and other suspicious aspects of the papers, about bone fractures and osteoporosis. Some, for example, claimed to have recruited thousands of research subjects with no obvious staff or funding. In time, the list of suspect papers grew. Before his death, Sato admitted fabricating results but absolved Iwamoto, Science reported.
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The investigators reported their findings to publishers and editors at journals where the papers had appeared and tracked their responses. In 2020, they sent a final wave of prompts and notifications, and in April 2023 they tallied the results.
Journals ultimately took editorial action for 136 papers, retracting 121, correcting three, and marking 12 with editorial expressions of concern. For 57 other papers, journals told the team they had conducted reviews and determined that 22 should be retracted. No further action was taken until last month, when industry giant Elsevier retracted seven of them, 3.5 years after the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) threatened sanctions, Retraction Watch reports. The team received no responses about an additional 107 papers in 41 journals across 21 publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature. The unretracted papers have since drawn citations.
COPE recommends that journal editors wait for results of institutions’ probes before acting, and lack of such an investigation stalled action on at least some papers. Editors at the Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism (JBMM) told the investigators that they recommended retracting 11 papers. Yet the publisher, Springer Nature, retracted just one, declining to retract others on grounds that an institutional investigation had not been completed. (Across its journals, Springer Nature has retracted 13 of the 45 Sato-Iwamoto papers it published.) Co–Editor-in-Chief Toshio Matsumoto of the University of Tokushima told Science that Keio University, where Iwamoto was a lecturer, has not responded to inquiries from the journal. He calls the impasse frustrating, but says, “We’re stuck.”
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The new study casts doubt on whether publishers should in fact wait on these investigations: After institutions concluded that 84 of the papers were not problematic, publishers nevertheless retracted two-thirds of them. Many institutions are conflicted about criticizing their scholars, Grey says.
In written responses to questions from Science, Chris Graf, director of research integrity at Springer Nature since 2021, says the company is prepared to act on suspicious papers in the absence of institutional findings. Describing its decision not to retract the 10 papers in JBMM, Graf cited a different consideration, the company’s need to prioritize scrutiny of “papers with well articulated concerns” that are “valid, specific, and actionable.” The investigators’ allegations of implausibly high research productivity by Sato and Iwamoto in those papers put them “at the lower end of the priority list.” (Grey says the team’s critique of those papers uncovered additional flaws.)
For the papers Springer Nature has retracted, Graf concedes, “We should have acted faster to assess and act, where appropriate, on the issues that have been identified.” The age of some of the papers, several published more than 2 decades ago, complicates matters, he adds.
Elsevier has published the most papers from the pair, 70, and has retracted 39. For another 28, its editors did not respond to the investigator team’s inquiries. In a written statement, the company said it is seeking additional information from Sato’s and Iwamoto’s institutions and would consider more retractions if warranted. Elsevier did not respond to written questions from Science about why it has delayed retracting some papers and not announced decisions about other, remaining ones.
Grey calls it “astonishing” that they and other publishers haven’t announced a comprehensive review of the remaining papers. If editors and institutions determine that a paper has flaws, “the literature can be promptly corrected, and the institution can then initiate an investigation” if researchers are suspected of misconduct, he says.
Grey wonders how many of Sato’s and Iwamoto’s papers would have been retracted if his group had not pestered the journals and their publishers. Almost never did a journal retract a paper or tell the team that it was investigating before the team made contact, he says. But as years have passed, responses dwindled. “There was a growing sense that they actually were a bit sick of us,” he says. So, a decade after they began to prod journals and publishers about the Sato-Iwamoto papers, Grey says he and his colleagues “have had enough. We’re not doing this
From an "Old School" scientist: ths article is an important to read as this trend is an absolute debasement of the very foundations of society. I have Professor friends whose original research has been reprinted and hijacked by........
Guess which group is most prolific in scientific fraud?
Elderly White Women ? Hispanic men ?
Think again: the Chinese in the PRC.
See: https://tucoschild.substack.com/p/chinas-fake-science-industry-fraudulant