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The week at Retraction Watch featured:
- Authors retract second Majorana paper from Nature
- Dermatology journal calls for investigation into Bordeaux-INSERM work
- Nanotech group up to nine retractions
- Chemistry paper retracted from Science
- Journal issues 55 expressions of concern at once
Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 221. There are more than 33,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?
Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):
- “Surgeon on trial in Sweden over experimental windpipe transplants.”
- Didier Raoult: “Maverick French Covid doctor reprimanded over ‘breaches’ in clinical trials.”
- “Players who retired from concussion excluded from landmark AFL study.”
- “Princeton University investigating Sam Wang for research misconduct, toxic workplace issues.”
- “NYU administrators defend David Sabatini, challenge sexual harassment findings.”
- “Increasing confidence and trust in research: cracking down on misconduct.”
- “Regulators turn a blind-eye to conflicts of interest.”
- “Publish in English or perish.”
- “China focuses on ethics to deter another ‘CRISPR babies’ scandal.”
- “Although respondents generally disapproved of plagiarism, approximately half of the respondents indicated that sometimes plagiarism is unavoidable, and self-plagiarism should not be punished in the same way as plagiarism of others’ work.”
- “Could [large language models] LLMs be used to make realistic but fake papers?”
- “Ensuring that public feedback on preprints is focused, appropriate, specific and transparent (or FAST) will help to develop a thriving culture for reviewing and commenting on preprints.”
- “Share of researchers valuing preprints leaps during pandemic.”
- A journal retracts a paper on plant beauty that mysteriously cited a study of autism.
- “The star historian Laurent Turcot was pinned for plagiarism and called to order by his university last fall, but escaped sanctions.
- Cureus “concedes ‘Wall of Shame’ could cause ‘unjust’ harm.” What did RW readers think?
- “Economists want to see changes to their peer review system. Let’s do something about it.”
- The BJSM is reviewing other allegations involving its former editor, including these.
- The U.S. human subjects protection agency closes its books on a case.
- “Former nuclear scientist at Sandia National Labs sues after being fired in ‘retaliation.'”
- “800 crystallography-related papers appear to stem from one paper mill.”
- “Cornell University Press has withdrawn this book from its catalog after substantiated accusations of plagiarism and source fabrication. The Library decided to retain its copy but to alert its patrons to the issue. Details about the case can be found on Retraction Watch (https://retractionwatch.com/).”
- A study of risks that unvaccinated people pose to the COVID-19 vaccinated population has drawn fire.
- A survey of researchers found “99 percent avoiding plagiarism in their work but less than 50 percent pre-registering a research protocol.”
- Hey EndNote users: Thanks to our partnership with Clarivate, retracted references will now also be flagged by EndNote when inserting or formatting references in MS Word. Take a look!
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The criticism that the OCLA provides to the Fisman paper (about the risk posed to the vaccinated by the unvaccinated) is not particularly compelling, in my opinion.
Much more compelling criticism is that what the model *actually shows* (if you download it from Figshare and play with it) is the following:
1) Infections peak earlier among the unvaccinated than among the vaccinated, so early in a pandemic, a vaccinated person is disproportionately likely to be infected by an unvaccinated person
2) After infections have spiked, however, a vaccinated person is more likely to be infected by another vaccinated person
3) Neither of the two measures we can use to protect people (increasing the vaccination rate and decreasing the mixing rate between vaccinated and unvaccinated people) substantially affect the total number of individuals who contract the disease by the end of the pandemic. Increasing the vaccination rate from 80% to 95% in his model changes the proportion of vaccinated who are infected by the end of the pandemic from 94% to 90%. Decreasing mixing among vaccinated & unvaccinated from 0.5 to 0.1 decreases the proportion of vaccinated who are infected from 94% to 90%. And those are calculated using pre-omicron parameters. If you plug in the higher R0 for omicron (~10), then it really doesn’t matter what you do.
In other words, what that model actually shows is that almost everyone is expected to get Omicron, no matter what.
So why are we adding social problems by villainizing the unvaccinated? Shouldn’t public health policy be based on trust instead of divisive demonization?
Public health policy should be based on improving public health. Vaccination for all is the best way to do that, and once easy compliance is done, then incentives or disincentives become useful. The unvaccinated are not being villainized or demonized; they are being recognized as the primary population for hospitalizations, deaths, and adverse health events, also affecting health care for those who need health care for other reasons (e.g., acute medical events, cancers, etc.)
There’s no question that they are disproportionately likely to be hospitalized, die, etc. That’s *NOT* what the paper is about. The paper is saying that you are more likely to get COVID because of unvaccinated people. Whereas the model actually shows that you’re probably going to get COVID no matter what.
When you say that a particular group of people is going to infect you (when in reality, the data shows you’re probably going to get infected regardless), that’s demonization.
Get vaccinated to protect yourself. (It also helps to protect the medical system.) End of story. Leave people alone and let them make their own damn choices.
>”(when in reality, the data shows you’re probably going to get infected regardless)”
Which data are you referring too, Bongobongo?
Sorry, rather than “data”, I meant “model”.
If you question whether or not everyone will actually get COVID, take it up with their model, because that’s what their model predicts.
“The unvaccinated are not being villainized or demonized . . . ”
Really? Do you not remember the calls to forcibly involuntarily imprison the unvaccinated in special “colonies” away from the vaccinated? Do not remember the calls to deny the unvaccinated their rights to travel? Do you not remember the calls from the public to increase the taxes on the unvaccinated to allegedly compensate for their increased medical costs? Do you not remember all the hate directed towards the unvaccinated? DO YOU REMEMBER PRES. BIDEN TELLING THE UNVACCINATED THEY WOULD BE ENJOYING A “WINTER OF DEATH” FROM OMICRON? And on and on. Do you remember those? Do you?
So please tell me again how those that made the decision to forego an experimental vaccine weren’t demonized by the public, by the media, and by the President of the United States. Go ahead. Please tell me that again.
“Public health policy should be based on improving public health.”
Pushing a leaky, experimental vaccine that neither prevents an individual from being infected nor stops the transmission of the disease from an infected individual to another is NOT the way to improve public health.
Public health policy should be based upon sound, open, and clear scientific data. It should not be driven by political considerations or the potential profit margins of the pharmaceutical companies.
Seems like a less divisive way for NYU to vet David Sabatini would be to review the concerns about his research expressed on PubPeer:
https://pubpeer.com/search?q=authors%3A%22David+M.+Sabatini%22
Re https://www.chemistryworld.com/careers/publish-in-english-or-perish/4014820.article
“When faced with a topic that is difficult to explain in current isiZulu vocabulary, Biyela takes the opportunity to create new words. For example, Biyela needed a word for ‘dinosaur’ in isiZulu. He came up with Isilwane sasemandulo, which literally translates to ancient animal. This is more accurate than dinosaur, which comes from the Greek sauros and deinos for terrifying and lizard respectively. ‘When I was describing [Isilwane sasemandulo] in isiZulu it sounds fantastical and crazy … but when [the readers] realise that it’s a dinosaur it suddenly makes sense,’ says Biyela. ‘They walk away knowing more about dinosaurs than someone who speaks English, who takes it for granted that they know what a dinosaur is.’”
What a bizarre and puritanical stance to take. English doesn’t have a word for “dinosaur”, which is why the Greek roots were put together. Putting together a new isiZulu word is completely unnecessary, when they could have just used “dinosaur” (the same way English speakers call a pizza by its Italian name instead of a “sauce and cheese circle”). Virtually no English speakers are deconstructing the Greek roots to know what a dinosaur is; sure, they think it’s a lizard, but that is caused by pop culture sources every kid sees before they learn Greek (if they ever learn Greek). And I don’t think “ancient animal” is any more informative. Woolly mammoths and trilobites are ancient animals–are they dinosaurs?
I see nothing shocking about 50% of researchers pre-registering a research protocol! In my field of experimental biochemistry, pre-registering a protocol would make no sense at all and would lead lead to people trying to bung the round pegs of surprising data into the square holes of an initial set of hypotheses.
Please be more critical of the manufactured outrage you highlight – there is enough real outrage for all!
NB. Since one of the sources is the New Jersey Globe writing on a highly charged political issue, it may be useful to bear in mind that it was founded in 2018 by convicted felon David Wildstein, as I learn from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wildstein#New_Jersey_Globe
*Ghostbusters theme*
Do the hoax dance!
Da-na-da-na nanana da-na-na-na nanana
Do the hoax dance!
I ain’t fraid of no cove. I ain’t fraid of no cove.
*Sounds of record skip*