Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: ‘The fall of a prolific science journal’; Clinical trials by ‘super-retractors’; ‘How to Study Things That May Not Exist’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases
Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change
The case of the fake references in an ethics journal
Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching‘
Glyphosate safety article retracted eight years after Monsanto ghostwriting revealed in court
Nature paper retracted after one investigation finds data errors, another finds no misconduct

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Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Nature paper retracted after one investigation finds data errors, another finds no misconduct

Nature has retracted a paper on melanoma after an investigation by the journal found issues with data that rendered certain results statistically insignificant. A separate institutional investigation concluded misconduct wasn’t involved, the lead author says.

The research behind the article, published in April 2016, was conducted in the lab of Ashani Weeraratna, then at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. The paper has been cited 332 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study investigated how the tumor microenvironment affected the spread of young versus aged cells.

An editorial investigation found some results in a figure were “no longer statistically significant, which affects the conclusions about therapy resistance,” according to the October 29 retraction notice. The inquiry also found “several errors in image and source data consistency,” as well as errors with the sample numbers given in the original study.

Glyphosate safety article retracted eight years after Monsanto ghostwriting revealed in court

*Credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)*

A review article concluding the weed killer Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans” has been retracted eight years after documents released in a court case revealed employees of Monsanto, the company that developed the herbicide, wrote the article but were not named as coauthors.

The safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is hotly debated and currently under review at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, in 2015 declared glyphosate “possibly carcinogenic.”

The now-retracted article appeared in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, an Elsevier title, in 2000. Gary Williams, then a pathologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla, Robert Kroes, a toxicologist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and Ian C. Munro, a toxicologist at Cantox Health Sciences International in Ontario, Canada, were listed as the authors. The paper has been cited 614 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Number of ‘unsafe’ publications by psychologist Hans Eysenck could be ‘high and far reaching’

A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a professor emeritus when he died in 1997.

A 2019 investigation launched by the U.K. institution found 26 papers coauthored by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a social scientist in Germany, were based on questionable data and contained findings that were “incompatible with modern clinical science and the understanding of disease processes.”

For example, the two researchers’ data showed people with a “cancer-prone” personality were more than 120 times as likely to die from the disease as were those with a “healthy” personality, Anthony Pelosi, a longtime Eysenck critic, pointed out in an article preceding the university probe.

Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change

The authors of a highly publicized study predicting climate change would cost $38 trillion a year by 2049 have retracted their paper following criticism of the data and methodology, including that the estimate is inflated.

“The economic commitment of climate change,” which appeared April 17, 2024, in Nature, looked at how changes in temperature and precipitation could affect economic growth. Forbes, the San Diego Union-Tribune and other outlets covered the paper, which has been accessed over 300,000 times. It has been cited 168 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

But after two commentaries published this August raised questions about the study’s data and methodology, the researchers revisited their findings. “The authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction,” the retraction notice, published today, states.

The case of the fake references in an ethics journal

Many would-be whistleblowers write to us about papers with nonexistent references, possibly hallucinated by artificial intelligence. One reader recently alerted us to fake references in … an ethics journal. In an article about whistleblowing.

The paper, published in April in the Journal of Academic Ethics, explored “the whistleblowing experiences of individuals with disabilities in Ethiopian public educational institutions.”

Erja Moore, an independent researcher based in Finland, came across the article while looking into a whistleblowing case in that country. “I started reading this article and found some interesting references that I decided to read as well,” Moore told Retraction Watch. “To my surprise, those articles didn’t exist.”

Iraqi journal suspected of coercion, two others dropped from major citation databases

The influential citation database Scopus has delisted three journals from Iraq in a blow to recent government efforts to boost the standing of the country’s scholarly publications. One of the titles, which was included in Clarivate’s Web of Science, was dropped from that index as well.

Last month we reported on allegations that one of the delisted journals, the Medical Journal of Babylon, a publication of the University of Babylon in Hilla, was coercing authors to cite its articles. Citation manipulation is widespread in Iraq and elsewhere, but is considered a form of scientific misconduct.

“The Medical Journal of Babylon was flagged for re-evaluation at the end of September when we received concerns, and because we observed outlier publication performance,” said a spokesperson from Elsevier, which owns Scopus. The publisher marked the journal as delisted in its October update of indexed and delisted titles.

Weekend reads: How an MIT student’s AI study ‘Fell Apart’; Egyptian scientists, Russian affiliations; the ‘dangers’ of bibliometrics with ‘polluted data’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Exclusive: ‘Highly problematic’ policy has Saudi university pressuring faculty to cite its research
Meet the researcher aiming to halt use of ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality
After realizing a fungus contaminated their experiments, researchers retract and redo study

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

After realizing a fungus contaminated their experiments, researchers retract and redo study

Late blight in potatoes
*Source (CC BY 4.0)*

A team of researchers in Belgium got more than they expected when they tried to study potato pathogens: an unwelcome contaminant, a retraction, and a new paper the authors say is “an improvement over the first.”

In a now-retracted paper in Metallomics originally published in January 2024, researchers at the University of Liège described how availability of nitrogen and iron changes how the bacterium responsible for potato common scab interacts with each of the two microorganisms responsible for early and late blight while infecting the same host. The results suggested the bacterium had antimicrobial properties against both microbes, with nearly all of the experiments focusing on the fungus that causes late blight.

After publication, the authors realized their strain of the late blight-causing microorganism was not the one described in the paper. While the lab originally received the correct strain, “the plates became contaminated, and the fungal contaminant eventually overgrew the strain we intended to study,” Sébastien Rigali, corresponding author and professor at the University of Liège, told Retraction Watch.

Meet the researcher aiming to halt use of ‘fundamentally flawed’ database linking IQ and nationality

Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence.

To maintain the integrity of scientific literature, the professor of psychology at Brunel University of London and her colleagues are writing to journals that are publishing papers that rely on the so-called National IQ database, which aims to rank countries based on intelligence. It has drawn criticism for the way the data were collected. Sear’s efforts have so far led to two retractions.

“There is absolutely no scientific merit whatsoever in the National IQ database,” Sear told Retraction Watch. “That means that any conclusions drawn from the database will be faulty and worthless.”

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