Around 2014-2015, I screened 20,000 biomedical articles for image duplication in 2014-2015. About 4% of those papers, 782 to be exact, contained inappropriate duplications. Together with my coauthors Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, I published that work in mBio in 2016 here.
Unfortunately, many of these problematic papers are still not addressed by the journals now, ten years later, even though the concerns in some of them are far beyond what could be blamed on an innocent error. Two of those examples were published in Cytokine, a journal that seems to care little about the problematic papers they published in the past.
Five-second retractions
These two papers, both from the same Elsevier / ScienceDirect journal, contain what appears to be extensive alteration of photos, with multiple cases of potentially copied/pasted bands within the same photo.
Paper 1: Hwa-Jeong Lee et al., Roles of p38 and ERK MAP kinases in IL-8 expression in TNF-α- and dexamethasone-stimulated human periodontal ligament cells, Cytokine (2006), DOI: 10.1016/j.cyto.2006.07.009 [PubPeer]
Paper 2: Yong-Duk Park et al., Porphyromonas gingivalis lipopolysaccharide regulates interleukin (IL)-17 and IL-23 expression via SIRT1 modulation in human periodontal ligament cells, Cytokine (2012), DOI: 10.1016/j.cyto.2012.05.021 [PubPeer]
These are what I call “5 second retractions” – no matter what the authors will tell you (“the original photos were lost in an airplane crash”; “our basement got flooded”, or “the intern did it”), there is no conceivable way that these duplications could have happened by accident.
Both papers were published by the same group of researchers at the School of Dentistry at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. The senior researcher, Professor Eun-Cheol Kim, is the current director of the Research Center for Tooth and Periodontal Tissue Regeneration.
Dr. Kim has 15 papers discussed on PubPeer, mostly for image problems. Four of those were identified during the 20K paper screen I published in 2016, and I reported them to the editors-in-chief of the journals in which they were published. Two of those four, published in BioMed Research International and PLOS ONE, respectively, have been retracted, but the two remaining ones have not been touched.
Cytokine does not care
These two papers were both published in Elsevier/ScienceDirect’s Cytokine. Cytokine has been one of the journals that did very little with the 30 papers I reported to them in October 2015. Of those papers, only 2 have been retracted, and another 2 have been corrected. The remaining 26 (87%!) have not been touched.
It is cases like these that are extremely frustrating. The problems are obvious, but the editors refused to take action. Is science self-correcting? Not for Cytokine.
Science Integrity Digest 