A four-year-old paper claiming conversion therapy reduced same-sex thoughts in gay men has been retracted after criticism from other researchers prompted further review of the work.
“Efficacy and risk of sexual orientation change efforts: a retrospective analysis of 125 exposed men,” published in F1000Research in March 2021, found conversion therapy (referred to in the paper as sexual orientation change efforts) was “effective and safe.”
F1000Research is an open publishing platform where peer review takes place after publication. The title is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science but does appear in Scopus, which reports the paper was cited seven times.
F1000Research retracted the article on February 4 after two independent external reviews, according to the notice. “The methodology, and subsequent statistical analysis, employed by the study cannot support the conclusions around efficacy and effectiveness,” the notice reads.
The study’s lead author is D. Paul Sullins, a sociology professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. We wrote about him in 2017 when his paper on same-sex parenting received an expression of concern after it was cited on posters distributed by a neo-Nazi group.
As conversion therapy has a controversial history, so do its papers. Many face scrutiny, and have been retracted for statistical problems and antiquated beliefs. They can even perpetuate stereotypes about the gay community. Despite some authors’ regrets about publishing, the papers can end up staying in the literature.
Conversion therapy has been discredited by many members of the scientific community and has been denounced by the American Medical Association, the American Counseling Association, and the American Psychological Association. Despite this, Sullins and his coauthors sought to “overcome ideological polarization in data acquisition and studies of this controversial topic,” he wrote online.
The paper was originally published in F1000Research in March 2021, but a second version appeared five months later that had been revised to include a missing citation and corrected two misreported numbers. The retraction applies to both versions.
In February 2024, a concerned researcher who asked Retraction Watch to stay anonymous raised concerns to F1000Research about the article in an email seen by Retraction Watch. The researcher alleged flaws in the research design, including a failure to establish common treatment methodology, duration of treatment, or accreditation of the people administering the therapy.
Sullins reposted an updated version of the paper in September 2024 on the platform Researchers.one after F1000Research did not allow the authors to make further revisions, he said. “Rather than permitting the journal F1000Research to suppress evidence and debate on this issue, we hope in this forum to instead enable more debate and consideration of the evidence, from any ideological point of view,” he wrote in the post’s comments.
Sullins told us in an email the authors are in the process of republishing the study at the Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, which claims to “share science, not control narratives,” according to one of its founders.
Also in the Researchers.one comments, Sullins posted his correspondence with F1000Research. The emails from F1000 revealed the paper was also retracted because it bore similarities to another article. An unnamed representative from F1000Research said “the underlying data presented in the above article is the same data used in the article: ‘’Effects of Therapy on Religious Men Who Have Unwanted Same-Sex Attraction.’”
That paper, which was retracted in 2020, shares a coauthor with the F1000Research paper: Paul Santero, a psychologist at Saint Joseph Psychological Clinic in San Diego.
Santero did not respond to our request for comment.
In the same comment thread, Sullins said the authors “do not agree that declining to cite a retracted study constitutes some sort of nondisclosure,” but decided to add the citation.
The study has come under scrutiny before. In 2021, shortly after the paper was published, a commenter on PubPeer using the pseudonym “Crotalaria dewildemaniana” pointed out ethical concerns with the work. The commenter noted the American Psychiatric Association opposes conversion therapy and many states ban the practice, a number that has since risen from 13 to 28, according to Northwestern University.
In a lengthy comment published on the article in 2023, Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington, questioned the use of language in the article like “forgiveness of sins,” which he said implied a religious perspective that could have influenced the study.
Mark Robinson, a media relations manager for Taylor & Francis, which owns F1000Research, told us more than one person contacted F1000Research regarding potential issues with the paper, which led to the investigations.
An external reviewer agreed with Lorenzo-Luaces, according to the correspondence posted on Researchers.one.The reviewer also pointed out that “discussing same sex behavior and/or orientation as something that goes into remission is also problematic.”
“Given the problem with the methods here, it is not possible that the statistics could be solid,” the reviewer wrote.
In the comments on the Researchers.one version of the paper, Sullins noted that version “corrects a coding error in the reported percentages in Tables 3, 5 and 6, which slightly strengthens the results.” This version also includes a disclosure of the retracted Santero study, Sullins said.
Sullins also affirms the religious perspective Lorenzo-Luaces criticized, stating the authors “made it obvious” that the men in the sample were “extremely religious,” which could have influenced their positive experience with conversion therapy. However, the authors removed the term “remission” from the new version.
The anonymous researcher who emailed Retraction Watch also noted the study authors did not disclose potential conflicts of interest, including Sullins’ ties to “anti-LGBT” organizations such as the Ruth Institute, for which he is a senior research associate. No competing interests were disclosed in the study.
Sullins told us his association with these groups is “personal, not contractual or financial.” He continued: “Not that these other affiliations are a secret. Many are disclosed on my c.v., which … can be discovered from a short web search,” he wrote.
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I suppose from the photo supplied he did not declare the priestly dog collar as a conflicting item in his preconceived ideation. I guess the bible wasn’t included in the citations ;-))