July 2021 – Page 4 – Retraction Watch

Britney Spears story “remains as part of the publication record,” says Nature

A 2008 story in Nature about Britney Spears that prompted an apology from the author and the journal earlier this week “remains as part of the publication record,” Nature said in an editor’s note.

The story, titled “When Britney Spears comes to my lab,” appeared in a section of the journal called Nature Futures and refers to Spears “wearing a silver strapless stretch top that doesn’t show too much of her belly (unless she actually moves her arms), and black Capri pants with a little dip in the waistband.”

Spears, it said, would eventually go on to earn a PhD from Harvard and develop a treatment for diabetes. Before that, however, “Britney will pump out a lot of good data (she is something of a workaholic), but gradually, with her music, her intermittent marriages and pregnancies, not to mention her classes, the amount of time she spends in lab will begin to dwindle.”

In a note appended to the article sometime this week, following thousands of tweets and a Retraction Watch post, the editors write:

Journal retracts paper claiming two deaths from COVID-19 vaccination for every three prevented cases

Just days after adding an expression of concern to a paper published last week claiming that two people died from COVID-19 vaccinations for every three cases the vaccines prevented, the journal Vaccines has retracted the paper.

[See an update on this post, with more fallout from this case.]

As we have previously noted:

How well do databases and journals indicate retractions? Hint: Inconsistently.

Retraction Watch readers may recall the work of Elizabeth Suelzer, a librarian at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Two years ago, she and colleagues published a study on why the infamous — and fraudulent — 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield alleging a link between vaccine and autism had been cited more than 1,000 times. As Suelzer notes in the Q&A below, that work led to more questions about how well bibliographic databases and journal publishers display retraction status, when appropriate. The answer, they report in JAMA Network Open this week: They were inconsistent.

Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to do this study?

“If the data were not [correct], whose fault is this?” Authors of highly criticized COVID-19 vaccine study defend it

Earlier this week, we reported that a paper claiming that two deaths resulted from COVID-19 vaccination for every three cases that were prevented had earned an expression of concern.

[Please see an update on this post; the paper has been retracted.]

The authors, including Harald Walach, who was also co-author of a just-published paper in JAMA Pediatrics questioning the safety of masks in children, had used data from the Dutch national registry of side effects. That registry carries a warning label about its use. The editors of Vaccines, which published the study last month, wrote that there were concerns over “misrepresentation of the COVID-19 vaccination efforts and misrepresentation of the data.”

A scientist critic was sued, and won — but did not emerge unscathed. This is his story.

Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the name David Sanders. Sanders, a biologist at Purdue University, has become a scientific sleuth, ferreting out problems in numerous papers. In one of those cases, that of Ohio State University professor Carlo Croce, Sanders ended up being sued — before an article in which he was quoted even came out. He eventually prevailed, but the episode left a mark, as readers will learn in this Q&A. (It has left a mark on Croce, too, in the form of 10 retractions and two suits brought by teams of lawyers for unpaid bills.)

Retraction Watch (RW): Carlo Croce sued you in 2017. Why?

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: