Adam Marcus

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which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the other way around — has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions.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

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

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.

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:

‘We apologize again for the inadvertent mistakes during the assembly of data due to our carelessness’

Baodi Clinical College of Tianjin Medical University

Last December, Elisabeth Bik notified journals about 45 articles by a researcher in China which struck her as suspicious. Within weeks, one of those journals — DNA and Cell Biology — had retracted the paper she’d flagged.

That reassuringly brisk response appears to have been an anomaly in the case of Hua Tang, of Tianjin Medical University in China. Only two other retractions have followed, by our count (Tang had a retraction in 2020, bringing his total so far to four). However, FEBS Letters, which published three articles by Tang that Bik had identified as problematic, has now issued expressions of concern for the papers.

The notices for the articles, which appeared between 2011 and 2014, raise questions about the “data integrity” in the work. Here’s the one for “Downregulation of PPP2R5E expression by miR-23a suppresses apoptosis to facilitate the growth of gastric cancer cells,” from 2014:

An exercise in frustration: A researcher is impersonated

The other day, Jamie Burr, an exercise physiologist in Canada, received a curious email from an overseas colleague. The researcher wanted to know if Burr, of the University of Guelph, had written a particular article.

Burr wondered:

Why are they questioning if I wrote something?

Turns out, something was real shady with the slim article.

Most of problematic articles flagged in Japanese university’s investigation remain unflagged nearly a year later

Ten months after a misconduct investigation into the work of a researcher in Japan four of his papers found to have serious issues have yet to be retracted.

According to an August 2020 report from National University Corporation Osaka University and National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Hospital about its investigation of Takashi Nojiri:

Pulp fiction: Japanese university revokes two dentistry PhDs in case involving two dozen retractions

The misconduct case of an endodontics researcher in Japan who already has lost at least 24 papers for data problems has claimed two more casualties: the PhD theses of a pair of scientists he once helped train.

As we reported last year, Nobuaki Ozeki, who retired from Aichi Gakuin University in 2018, was found to have misused images, fabricated data and recycled text in 22 papers, 21 of which by our count have now been retracted. Ozeki’s total retraction count is 24, as three papers not identified in the investigation have also been retracted.

Now, we’ve learned that the university has revoked the doctoral degrees of two of Ozeki’s co-authors, Hideyuki Yamaguchi and Rie (Satoe) Kawai. Both researchers received their degrees in March 2016.

Elsevier glitch prompts temporary removal of critique of review on race and heart disease

A timing glitch prompted the temporary removal of a letter to the editor calling out a previously published study for “perpetuating historical harms” through its framing of race and ethnicity.

The letter, “Race is not a risk factor: Reframing discourse on racial health inequities in CVD prevention,” appeared online in April in the American Journal of Preventive Cardiology, an Elseiver property. It came in response to a review article, published the month before, titled “Ten things to know about ten cardiovascular disease risk factors.”

As the abstract of the review stated:

Paper by former NIH researcher alleging ‘Ponzi schemes’ by government, pharma retracted

Mahin Khatami, a former researcher with the U.S. National Institutes of Health who has argued in print that cancer results from ‘dark energy’ and that the government and the pharmaceutical industry are collaborating in ‘scientific/medical Ponzi schemes’ to keep people sick, has lost a paper to retraction.

As we reported last fall, Robert Speth, a pharmacy science researcher at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., has been urging Clinical & Translational Medicine (CTM) to retract Khatami’s articles — and one in particular — for what is now more than two years.

In mid-October a spokesperson for Wiley, which publishes the journal, told us that she was trying to get more information from the editors about why Khatami’s bizarre paper was acceptable material.

Widely covered paper on ranitidine-cancer link retracted

A paper linking the use of a wildly popular drug for heartburn to cancer has been retracted after the authors concluded that their widely touted finding appears to have resulted from a hiccup in the way they conducted their testing.

The 2016 article, in Carcinogenesis, has played a minor role in an ongoing class action lawsuit against the makers of ranitidine (sold as Zantac, among other brand names) claiming that use of the medication has caused cancer in more than 100,000 plaintiffs. And it was a key citation in a 2019 petition to the FDA urging that such drugs be recalled.

The FDA has been investigating contamination of ranitidine and a related drug with NDMA, a known human carcinogen at high doses. On April 1, 2020, the agency announced that, although its tests did not find concerning levels of NDMA in “many” of the samples it tested, it was recalling all products that contain ranitidine:

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