Adam Marcus

Antiviral: ‘TikTok Doc’ loses paper on faculty development over concerns about harassment suit

The now-infamous “TikTok Doc” who was embroiled in a recently settled sexual harassment suit has lost a 2020 paper on, wait for it, faculty development after his co-authors decided that the collaboration risked “reputational damage” to themselves and dismissal of the work.

Jason Campbell was an anesthesiology resident at Oregon Health & Science University, in Portland, when he became a social media darling. Clips of him dancing in the hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic went viral on TikTok — before Campell was accused of sexually harassing a social worker at the Portland VA hospital, where the anesthesiologist sometimes worked. (Campbell left the institution and reportedly now lives and works in Florida.)

According to The Oregonian, the suit against Cambell and OHSU alleges that:

Congratulations! Your already-published article has just been rejected

All rejection is hard to take. But, as one psychology researcher has found out, “having a paper rejected half a year after publication is something new …”

We’ll explain.

In January 2021, Eiko Fried, of the Department of Clinical Psychology at Leiden University, in The Netherlands, published an article in Psychological Inquiry titled “Lack of Theory Building and Testing Impedes Progress in The Factor and Network Literature.”

Since then, the paper has been viewed more than 2,400 times and cited a handful of times.

But on May 17, Fried received an email from the journal, which is published by Taylor & Francis, with unfortunate news: His article, according to the support administrator, was “unsuitable for publication.”

‘Regrettably it took too long to investigate and retract this paper.’

A journal has expressed regret over its sluggish response to image hijinx in a 2017 paper on the antimalarial properties of a kind of pea plant.

The article, “Antimalarial efficacy of Pongamia pinnata (L) Pierre against Plasmodium falciparum (3D7 strain) and Plasmodium berghei (ANKA),” was written by P. V. V. Satish and K. Sunita, of the Department of Zoology and Aquaculture at Acharya Nagarjuna University.

The paper drew scrutiny on PubPeer four years ago, where commenters noted issues with the figures.

Time passed, and the paper was cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. Now, according to the retraction notice:

Paper linking frequency of Google search terms to violence against women retracted

The findings were, to say the least, shocking: A researcher in New Zealand claimed that Google searches about violence against women soared during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic — raising the prospect that quarantines were leading to a surge in intimate partner violence and similar crimes.

Shocking, yes, but now retracted because the methodology of the study was “catastrophically wrong,” in words of some critics.

The paper, “COVID-19, suicide, and femicide: Rapid Research using Google search phrases,” was written by Katerina Standish, of the University of Otago’s National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and appeared online in January 2021 in the Journal of General Psychology.

As the author’s institution claimed in its headline for a press release about the article:

Oh, the gall(stones): A journal should retract a paper on reiki and pain, says a critic

Talk about missing the trees for the, ahem, forest plots. A researcher is accusing an Elsevier journal of refusing to retract a study that depends in large part on a flawed reference.

The paper, “The effect of Acupressure and Reiki application on Patient’s pain and comfort level after laparoscopic cholecystectomy: A randomized controlled trial,” appeared in early April in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice and was written by a pair of authors from universities in Turkey.

The article caught the attention of José María Morán García, of the Nursing and Occupational Therapy College at the University of Extremadura in Caceres, Spain. Morán noticed that what he considered a critical underpinning of the paper was a 2018 meta-analysis (also by authors from Turkey) with a major flaw: According to Morán and a group of his colleagues, the meta-analysis — also in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice — showed the opposite of what its author stated. Indeed, they’d made the case to the journal back in 2018, when the meta-analysis first appeared in a paper titled “Misinterpretation of the results from meta-analysis about the effects of reiki on pain.”

Paper likening human sperm to “playful otters” retracted

Everybody out of the pool.

The authors of a 2020 paper in Science Advances on how human sperm propel themselves in a corkscrew fashion like “playful otters” have retracted their article after concluding that their analysis didn’t support their conclusions.

The article, by Hermes Gadêlha, of the University of Bristol, in England, and several colleagues in Mexico, spawned significant coverage in the lay and science press — including this segment on NPR’s Science Friday and an article in Science (the work behind it was the subject of this YouTube video titled “The great sperm race”).

At the heart of the paper, “Human sperm uses asymmetric and anisotropic flagellar controls to regulate swimming symmetry and cell steering,” was the use of a technology called high-speed 3D microscopy to analyze sperm in motion. Per the abstract:

Researcher loses medical degree for using paper mill to write his dissertation

A university in China has revoked the medical degree of a researcher found guilty of having produced his dissertation with the help of a prodigious paper mill.

As Elisabeth Bik noted last year in a post on PubPeer, the thesis by Bin Chen, a lung specialist at Soochow University, was one of 121 articles produced by the paper mill that:

‘Preprints are works in progress’: The tale of a disappearing COVID-19 paper

When a Twitter user tipped us off last week to the mysterious disappearance of a preprint of a paper on a potential new therapy to treat Covid-19, we were curious. Was it a hidden retraction, or something else?

The article, titled “Effectiveness of ZYESAMI™ (Aviptadil) in Accelerating Recovery and Shortening Hospitalization in Critically-Ill Patients with COVID-19 Respiratory Failure: Interim Report from a Phase 2B/3 Multicenter Trial,” had popped up on SSRN on April 1.

The trial was funded by NeuroRX, the maker of Zyesami, which trumpeted the results in a series of press releases dating back to February 2021. NeuroRX has been partnering with Relief Therapeutics on the development of the drug, but that marriage seems to be rather rocky.

Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist in France, tweeted that by May 10 the paper had vanished with only a trace of meta-data. As another Twitter user noted, however, the article had reappeared on the preprint server with a different title. (We see the post date on SSRN as May 11.)

We took a look at the two articles and found some interesting differences.

Drug company withdraws court motion requesting retraction of papers critical of its painkiller

A drug maker has blinked in a lawsuit against the leading anesthesiology society in the United States, along with several anesthesiology researchers, who it claims libeled the company in a series of articles and other materials critical of its main product.

As we reported last month, Pacira Biosciences, which makes the local anesthetic agent Exparel, field the suit in federal court in April, alleging that the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), the editor of its flagship journal, Anesthesiology, and others, were unfairly targeting the drug.

The company asked the court for a preliminary injunction to retract two papers and an editorial about Exparel that Anesthesiology published in February. But on May 7, Pacira withdrew the motion, about a week after the ASA filed its own motion calling for a quick hearing on the merits of the company’s motion.

According to an unusually forceful statement (for a medical society) from the ASA:

“Yep, pretty slow”: Nutrition researchers lose six papers

Six months after we reported that journals had slapped expressions of concern on more than three dozen papers by a group of nutrition researchers in Iran, the retractions have started to trickle in.

But clock started nearly two years ago, after data sleuths presented journals with questions about the findings in roughly 170 papers by the authors. So far we’ve seen only six retractions, from two journals, of the suspect papers. As one of the sleuths said, “yep, pretty slow.”

Central to the case is Zatollah Asemi, of the Department of Nutrition at Kashan University of Medical Sciences. As we wrote last November:

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