Year: 2021

‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke

File this under “doing the right thing:” A group of stroke researchers in Germany have retracted a paper they published earlier this year after finding an error in their work shortly after publication that doomed the findings. 

Julian Klingbeil, of the Department of Neurology at the University of Leipzig Medical Center, and his colleagues had been looking at how the location of lesions in the brain left behind by cerebral strokes were associated with the onset of depression after the attacks. According to the study, “Association of Lesion Location and Depressive Symptoms Poststroke”:

Continue reading ‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke

Elsevier says “integrity and rigor” of peer review for 400 papers fell “beneath the high standards expected”

Elsevier says it is reassessing its procedures for special issues after one of its journals issued expressions of concern for six such publications, involving as many as 400 articles, over worries that the peer review process was compromised. 

The journal, Microprocessors & Microsystems, published the special issues using guest editors.  

The EoCs vary slightly, but the journal has issued the following blanket statement for these six issues:

Continue reading Elsevier says “integrity and rigor” of peer review for 400 papers fell “beneath the high standards expected”

Weekend reads: How many scientists commit misconduct?; science ‘moved beyond peer review during the pandemic’; Juul pays for entire journal issue

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.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 139.

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

Continue reading Weekend reads: How many scientists commit misconduct?; science ‘moved beyond peer review during the pandemic’; Juul pays for entire journal issue

‘They seem to mean business’: Cardiology journal flags papers cited hundreds of times

A European cardiology journal has issued expressions of concern for seven widely-cited papers dating back to 2009 after a reader flagged suspicious images in the articles. 

Although the cast of characters changes, the senior author on all seven papers is Chao-Ke Tang, of the First Affiliated Hospital of the University of South China, in Hengyang, Hunan. To date, at least 15 of Tang’s papers have come under scrutiny on PubPeer. Two months ago, for example, Elisabeth Bik posted about “unexpected similarities” in multiple figures in a 2013 paper by Tang and colleagues that appeared in PLoS ONE.  

But Sander Kersten,  the chair of Nutrition, Metabolism and Genomics and Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, said he believes that the researcher’s output for roughly the past decade is unreliable. 

Kersten said his concerns about Tang date back to 2014, when he reviewed — negatively — a manuscript for Atherosclerosis, an Elsevier title, from the researcher: 

Continue reading ‘They seem to mean business’: Cardiology journal flags papers cited hundreds of times

Authors of widely panned study of masks in children respond to critics

Harald Walach

The authors of a paper claiming that children’s masks trap concentrations of carbon dioxide higher than allowable standards in Germany have responded to critics who said the study was plagued with poor methods and unreasonable conclusions.

As we reported earlier this week, the corresponding author of the paper, Harald Walach, had his affiliation with Poznan University in Poland terminated because of a different paper he had co-authored, in the journal Vaccines. That paper has been retracted.

In the response, which we’ve made available in full here, Walach and his co-authors on the masks paper in JAMA Pediatrics write that

Continue reading Authors of widely panned study of masks in children respond to critics

Researchers forfeit $10,000 award when paper’s findings can’t be replicated

The authors of a prizewinning paper on how large financial institutions hedge risk have retracted their article and have returned the award after another researcher could not replicate the findings. 

The paper, “Risk Management in Financial Institutions,” was published in 2019 in the Journal of Finance by a group from Duke University, in Durham, N.C., and HEC Paris, in France. In January 2021, the article received a 2020 Brattle Prize Distinguished Paper in Corporate Finance for the work, which has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The prize carries a $10,000 award.

But when Paul Guest, a finance scholar at King’s College London, in the United Kingdom, tried to replicate the study, he found he could not. In an article published earlier this month in the Journal of Finance, Guest detailed his approach, which revealed: “six discrepancies in [the article’s] reporting, coding, and data.”

According to the retraction notice, the authors say they are returning the Brattle Prize: 

Continue reading Researchers forfeit $10,000 award when paper’s findings can’t be replicated

Critique topples Nature paper on belief in gods

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

A widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the other way around — has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions. 

The article, “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,” came from a group of scholars in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, and was led by Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist and the the director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at the University of Oxford. 

The study prompted a significant amount of interest on social media and in the global press, according to Altmetric, with articles in Scientific American, Yahoo! News, PBS, El Pais and many other publications worldwide. As Scientific American put it, Whitehouse’s group found that the advent of moralizing gods did not lead to the formation of complex societies. Rather: 

Continue reading Critique topples Nature paper on belief in gods

University terminates affiliation with researcher who had paper on COVID-19 vaccines retracted as mask study comes under scrutiny

Harald Walach

A researcher who co-authored a now-retracted paper claiming that two vaccinated people died of COVID-19 for every three deaths prevented has had an affiliation with a Polish university terminated.

Yesterday, Poznan University tweeted about the researcher, Harald Walach:

Today, it confirmed the move in a statement:

Continue reading University terminates affiliation with researcher who had paper on COVID-19 vaccines retracted as mask study comes under scrutiny

Nature corrects a correction on conflicts of interest in fish farming paper

Tim Schwab

Nature seems to be having a bit of trouble sorting out its policies regarding conflict of interest statements.

In late April, as we reported, the journal corrected a paper on fish farming after a journalist pointed out that the first author had undisclosed ties to the agribusiness giant Cargill. (The New York Times, which had covered the paper, also corrected a story.) At the time, the reporter, Tim Schwab, noted that several of the other authors also appeared to have undeclared conflicts of interest, but the journal had not taken steps to illuminate those.

Continue reading Nature corrects a correction on conflicts of interest in fish farming paper

Publisher won’t retract most papers by chemist editor-in-chief who left university post under a cloud

The retractions appear to be trickling in for Thomas Webster, a once-prominent chemistry researcher who left his post at Northeastern University after nearly 70 of his papers were flagged on PubPeer for concerns about the data in the studies. 

But while the publisher of a journal he co-founded — and left earlier this year — has retracted one paper, it said it would correct, not retract, nine of the papers he co-authored.

So far, we have seen two recent retractions for Webster, one involving a previously corrected 2015 paper in the journal Nanomedicine titled “Antibacterial and osteogenic stem cell differentiation properties of photoinduced TiO2 nanoparticle-decorated TiO2 nanotubes,” which has been cited 37 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The retraction notice for that article states: 

Continue reading Publisher won’t retract most papers by chemist editor-in-chief who left university post under a cloud