Month: December 2020

Bad, Medicine: Journal publishes doubly-brutal retraction notice

A journal has retracted a paper it published earlier this year for pretty much every sin under the sun, scoring an own-goal in the process. 

The article, “Effects and safety of tanreqing injection on viral pneumonia: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis,” was led by Yue Qiu, of the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and appeared in Medicine on September 11.

The tl;dr version of this post: We have questions.

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COVID-19 pneumonia paper earns expression of concern — for being similar to a pre-pandemic article

Researchers in China have received an expression of concern for a recent paper on COVID-19 pneumonia after editors were alerted to suspicious similarities between the tables in the article and those in a 2018 study by members of the same group.

In case you missed that: The pandemic started long after 2018.

Continue reading COVID-19 pneumonia paper earns expression of concern — for being similar to a pre-pandemic article

Journal retracts 70-year-old article on homosexuality for “long discredited beliefs, prejudices, and practices”

We wrote in September in WIRED about a trend among journals of purging racist and sexist work from their archives. To that trend we can now add papers that are homophobic and racist.

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease has retracted a 1951 article by one Benjamin H. Glover, at the time a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The article, “Observations on Homosexuality Among University Students,” claimed that:

Continue reading Journal retracts 70-year-old article on homosexuality for “long discredited beliefs, prejudices, and practices”

A year after a federal misconduct finding, a cancer researcher loses a paper

Sudhakar Yakkanti

A cancer specialist formerly affiliated with Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska who was found to have committed misconduct in nearly 20 grant applications and papers has lost an article in Scientific Reports — a year after his misconduct case became public. 

According to the journal, which, to its credit, flagged the paper with an editor’s note last February, the delay stemmed from efforts to verify information that was not part of the official inquiry. 

The article, “Type IV collagen α1-chain noncollagenous domain blocks MMP-2 activation both in-vitro and in-vivo,” was written by a group led by Yakkanti Akul Sudhakar, whose name — last, at least — might be familiar to RW readers. 

In November 2019, Sudhakar — who also has published as Sudhakar Yakkanti and Akulapalli Sudhakar — was sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for: 

Continue reading A year after a federal misconduct finding, a cancer researcher loses a paper