2023 – Page 27 – Retraction Watch

‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention.

A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the treatment’s efficacy in people with moderate to severe depression. That meant the drug worked better than electric shock therapy, an option when antidepressants fail. It was a breakthrough.

“I thought, you know, wow, this is something that I’m comfortable prescribing that could make a huge difference for my patients,” said Ross, who at the time was doing his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

But when he looked up the study, he discovered several oddities. For instance, the number of patients who experienced an adverse event differed by exactly one for 17 out of 18 single events like fatigue or bloating. That seemed unlikely to have occurred by chance. And all of the scores of statistical tests the authors had done turned out just the way they would have wanted, a dream that rarely comes true in biomedical sciences.

The Whack-a-Mole problem: Hijacked journal still being indexed in Scopus even after discovery

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

Hijacked journal: Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies

What happened: The journal became a perfect target for hijackers when it expanded its title from “Linguistica Antverpiensia” and changed its web domain.

Fraudulent publishers hijacked the journal in 2021, re-registering the old, expired domain under the original, shorter name Linguistica Antverpiensia.

How fishy email addresses tipped off a sleuth to a paper mill

Anna Abalkina noticed something odd about a psychology paper on the “modern problems of youth extremism”: The corresponding author was affiliated with a university in Russia, but his email address had a domain name from India.

The unusual domain name was part of a pattern Abalkina, of the Freie Universität Berlin, noticed in hundreds of papers that seemed to have been produced by paper mills.

Six of those papers, including the one on youth extremism, had been published in the Journal of Community Psychology, a Wiley title. Dorothy Bishop, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, conducted a detailed review of the six articles, along with the published referee reports and editorial correspondence on Publons, to see if anything else about them was amiss.

Weekend reads: Autism researcher up to 24 retractions; former prof sues Penn State; vice chancellor under criminal probe for plagiarism

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 289. There are more than 38,000 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):

Prominent Korean heart doctor earns two retractions in a month

Two Korean journals last month pulled papers by a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University, Professor Hui-Nam Pak, with one retraction notice citing “issues related to scientific misconduct.”

Commenters on PubPeer had raised several concerns about data integrity, “mixed-up” data and “statistical nonsense” in “eNOS3 Genetic Polymorphism Is Related to Post-Ablation Early Recurrence of Atrial Fibrillation,” which was published in 2015 in Yonsei Medical Journal. The journal retracted the paper on January 19, noting that “we have recently become aware of a number of issues related to scientific misconduct.”

The article was coauthored by Patrick Ellinor, acting chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Did David Hume retract 2 essays on immorality to avoid religious controversy?

We may never identify the earliest retracted paper. For the time being, this 1756 article about Benjamin Franklin is the earliest one in our database. And here might be a runner-up, of a sort, from a friend of Franklin’s the following year.

David Hume is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of his or any age. His writings on causality, reason, and empiricism, as well as his history of England, were considered masterpieces when they appeared in the 18th century.

In 1757, Hume published a collection of previously released works under the title “Four Dissertations,” which helped – if that’s the right word – cement his reputation as one of the age’s leading skeptics about religion.

Former Harvard researchers lose PNAS paper for reusing data

A group of cancer researchers once all based at Harvard have earned a retraction after acknowledging data duplication “errors” in an article published more than eight years ago.

The paper, “Synthetic lethality of combined glutaminase and Hsp90 inhibition in mTORC1-driven tumor cells,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in December 2014. It has been cited 52 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study informed a clinical trial from Infinity Pharmaceuticals on a drug for people with lung cancer, according to Dimensions, a scientific research database.

Starting in November 2020, the paper drew scrutiny from commenters on PubPeer. The posts include claims of duplications in several of the paper’s figures; none of the authors has responded to the 10 comments on the site.

Scholar calls journal decision on ‘comfort women’ paper ‘rotten at the core’

The journal that published a hotly contested article by a professor at Harvard Law School arguing that Korean women forced into sexual slavery during World War II were willing prostitutes has reaffirmed a prior expression of concern over the paper, but stopped short of retracting the article.

However, the International Review of Law and Economics encourages readers of the article, by Mark Ramseyer, to “also consult the comments published in IRLE and in other venues for the broader historical perspective.”

Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut who has written extensively about Japan’s wartime system of military sexual slavery, called the statement “wishy-washy.”

“For the denialists, this is a victory,” she told Retraction Watch. “The IRLE decision is rotten at the core.”

Exclusive: Deepfake pioneer to lose two papers after misconduct finding of faked data

Two papers coauthored by a computer scientist whose work on visual effects has been credited in big-name Hollywood movies will soon be retracted after a publisher’s investigation found falsification of data in the articles.

Retraction Watch has also learned that the University of Southern California (USC) found that Hao Li “falsely presented his research” in the two publications while he was a professor there. The articles, both published in journals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), describe a system to create a 3D digital avatar head from a person’s photo using artificial intelligence.

Li co-founded and is CEO of Pinscreen, a startup which is commercializing that technology. On its website, Pinscreen touts its products as “the most advanced AI-driven versatile avatars.” Besides personalized avatars for use in virtual or augmented reality systems, Pinscreen offers the ability to replace a person’s face in videos, creating what’s known as “deepfakes.”

Weekend reads: ‘Against Reviewer 2;’ forced to grant guest authorships; problems in oversight of bat virus research in China

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

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

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