August 2020 – Page 4 – Retraction Watch

Cancer surgery group in China may lose second paper

After whistleblowers in China prompted the retraction of a 2018 paper that overstated the number of patients treated in a study, another journal says it’s investigating a second article by the same group.

Last month, as we reported, the Journal of Surgical Oncology retracted “Long‐term outcomes of 530 esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients with minimally invasive Ivor Lewis esophagectomy.” The move was prompted by whistleblowers who notified the journal that the 530 cases could not have been performed at the authors’ institution, Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou.

After our post, a Twitter user pointed us to a second article by the group, in BMC Cancer, which claimed to report data on 697 subjects over just one additional year — a highly improbable figure.

Journal editor breaks protocol to thank an anonymous whistleblower

As Retraction Watch readers may recall, we’ve been highlighting — and championing — the work of anonymous whistleblowers throughout the 10-year history of the blog. Our support for such anonymity, however, is not universally shared.

In 2011, for example, in our column at Lab Times (unfortunately no longer online), we wrote:

A bitter aftertaste: Legal threats, alleged poisoning muddy the waters for a trial of a tea to treat malaria

Xavier Argemi first heard the claim that tea made from artemisia herbs could be useful in the treatment of malaria from a TV documentary in 2017.

The documentary, featuring Lucile Cornet-Vernet, the director of the La Maison de l’Artemisia, a non-profit organization that grows artemisia and promotes its use in centers across Africa, focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The film claimed that for decades major pharmaceutical companies have been profiting from expensive malaria drugs based on artemisinin — the antimalarial for which Tu Youyou won a Nobel Prize in 2015, after distilling it from the Artemisia annua plant — while the tea itself, an ancient Chinese herbal remedy, was just as effective at treating the disease.

His interest piqued, Argemi reached out to Cornet-Vernet, an orthodontist at Paris’ Descartes University. She shared with him the unpublished manuscript of a study — their first large-scale clinical trial — which she said showed that artemisia outperformed a go-to treatment for schistosomiasis, a different parasite-induced disease.

Argemi immediately saw red flags. “I am not a specialist of malaria or schistosomiasis, but when I read the study I was simply totally surprised by the number of inconsistencies at the very first read,” Argemi, of the Clinique Axium in Strasbourg, France, told Retraction Watch by email.

Fallout over Fukushima fallout papers continues as two are retracted

A radiology journal has retracted two papers about the fallout from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan over concerns that the researchers used “ethically inappropriate data” from the people they studied.

The articles, which appeared in the Journal of Radiological Protection in 2017, were written by Makoto Miyazaki, of the Department of Radiation Health Management at Fukushima Medical University, and Ryugo Hayano, a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Tokyo. As we reported, both papers were initially subject to expressions of concern last year.

The papers have been cited a total of 26 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The retraction notice for “Individual external dose monitoring of all citizens of Date City by passive dosimeter 5 to 51 months after the Fukushima NPP accident (series): 1. Comparison of individual dose with ambient dose rate monitored by aircraft surveys” reads:

Ten takeaways from ten years at Retraction Watch

As we celebrate our tenth birthday and look forward to our second decade, we thought it would be a good time to take stock and reflect on some lessons we — and others — have learned.

Retractions are more common than we — or anyone else — thought they were. Two decades ago, journals were retracting roughly 40 papers per year. Although we were pretty sure they needed to be doing more to police the literature, we had no idea how much more. We also assumed the number was somewhat similar in 2010, but we were off by at least an order of magnitude, depending how you count. Journals now retract about 1,500 articles annually — a nearly 40-fold increase over 2000, and a dramatic change even if you account for the roughly doubling or tripling of papers published per year — and even that’s too few.

Retraction Watch turns 10: A look back, and a look forward

Ten years.

On Aug. 3, 2010, we published our first post on Retraction Watch. Titled, “Why write a blog about retractions?”, the welcome letter to readers outlined our hopes for the new blog. Retractions, we felt then, offered “a window into the scientific process,” as well as a source of good stories for journalists. In both regards, we have not been disappointed.

Weekend reads: ‘Self-promotion journals;’ co-authorship for money, flattening the COVID-19 publication curve

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

We turn 10 years old on Monday. Can you help us celebrate?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

The planned retraction of a paper about homeopathy for COVID-19
The retraction of a paper linking 5G technology to COVID-19
Clarivate reversing its decision not to give two journals an Impact Factor this year
The retraction of 46 papers at once for faked peer review
The retraction of a paper called “overtly racist”

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 30.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

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