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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Researcher leaves Wistar Institute as he retracts a Nature paper
- Scale whose copyright owner defends zealously falls under scrutiny — and journal takes two years to publish a critique
- Springer Nature slaps more than 400 papers with expressions of concern all at once
- Paper that ripped off a PhD thesis is retracted
- Kyoto University fires researcher for fraud in Kumamoto earthquake studies
- Criticism engulfs paper claiming an asteroid destroyed Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 160. And there are now more than 30,000 retractions in our database.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Two major research funders in China have conducted a spate of misconduct investigations, punishing at least 23 scientists for using ‘paper mills’…”
- “After Investigation Finds ‘Mismanagement’ UT Austin Suspends PI, Repays NSF $1.3M.”
- “Mexican Government Seeks Arrest of Top Scientists in Funding Dispute.”
- “A wave of sexual harassment complaints against a famed plant geneticist brings up thorny issues of permissiveness and power in Mexican labs.”
- “Did Baylor fire two medical school scientists because their spouses worked in China?”
- “University under pressure to rehire scientist acquitted of hiding China links.”
- “Major Quantum Computing Strategy Suffers Serious Setbacks.”
- Was an “extremely significant repeating complication” covered up in radiation studies?
- “A teenager on TikTok disrupted thousands of scientific studies with a single video.”
- “Virus Research Has Exploded Since Covid-19 Hit. Is It Safe?”
- “High-profile autism genetics project paused amid backlash.”
- Six retractions for faked peer review “fuel concerns over Chinese practices.” Here are the retractions.
- “The ‘lost art’ of mischief-making academic indexes.”
- “NIH tells Congress it lacked authority to investigate whistleblower complaints about Axel Grothey’s sexual misconduct.”
- “An unsupervised approach to central monitoring, using mixed-effects statistical models, is effective at detecting centers with fraud or other data anomalies in clinical trials.”
- “Top secret: U.S. National Academy of Medicine keeps expulsions quiet.”
- “‘It’s like a second extinction’: Retraction deepens legal and ethical battle over rare dinosaur.”
- “Two Indian CROs under lens as United States raises data integrity issues.”
- Papers, a reference manager from ReadCube, has integrated our database so that users will receive expanded retraction alerts.
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Regarding bullet 4: a talk about apomixis (asexual reproduction without fertilization in plants) presented by Jean Philippe Vielle four years ago, and intended for the general public, is available on YT. It includes some weird comments. The geneticist introduces his speech saying “Yo vengo a confesar aquí una serie de desviaciones sexuales […] y me veo obligado primero en convertirme, como ya lo soy, en un especialista de sexo oral”. (I am here to confess a series of sexual deviations […] and I have first to put myself in the shoes of a specialist in oral sex, as I already am). The glib joke if probably fine in the context of the speech introduction, however, several times during the talk, he comes back with similar sick jokes, about his aunt Carmen, about pornography, etc., which add nothing to the presentation. This results in a strange situation: the speaker has clearly a brilliant mind, his conference is really fascinating (including the Q&A session), but the whole stuff is spoiled by these irrelevant comments.
YT link (in Spanish):
https://youtu.be/hFEbBVwByXE?t=355
I followed the link to the retracted COVID papers – is it just me, or can you retract a paper BEFORE it’s published?
“A Retrospective Analysis and Comparison of Prisoners and Community-Based Patients with COVID-19 Requiring Intensive Care During the First Phase of the Pandemic in West Texas,” published on August 29, 2021 in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health; retracted on July 16, 2021
The first date was an error. Fixed. Thanks for catching that!
“8th bullet point: Was an “extremely significant repeating complication” covered up in radiation studies?”
This is very interesting and troubling report. I was not sure why the author has not published this when both Russells were active and alive. Liane (Lee) Brauch Russell died in July 2019 while William (Bill) Lawson Russell in 2003. The author (PSB) retired in 2000 and this commentary was published in February 2020. Moreover, I am skeptical about the journal in which this is published. Editor of that journal has published similar articles about Nobel Laureate Hermann J Muller (https://peh-med.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13010-018-0060-5).
It is not clear what is the motivation behind such commentaries when both Russells are no more. It appears to derail the entire radiation mutagenesis and radiation embryology field at the moment. Understood – there might be something going on at that moment. Russells papers were cited well in the field and i have used their publications in my research as well. However, author of this commentary coauthored at least 6 papers from 1980s to 1990 (with both Russells)!!