Adam Marcus

Journal expresses concern over study of potential treatment for autism

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on a study of a potential treatment for autism.

The article, by a group in Slovakia, purported to show for the first time that the drug ubiquinol — a form of the compound coenzyme Q₁₀ — could improve the ability of children with autism to communicate with their parents, communicate verbally, play games with other children and help with other behaviors.

The paper was published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, a Hindawi journal. The first author was Anna Gvozdjáková, of Comenius University in Bratislava, and the last author was Fred Crane, a former biologist at Purdue University in Indiana. Crane, who died in 2016, is credited with being the discoverer of coenzyme Q10 in mitochondria in 1957. The 2014 article — which has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was among the last of his 400-plus papers to appear in print.

Per the EoC:

‘Deeply unfair’: First author of newly retracted paper on weight and honesty speaks out

The first author of a highly controversial — and now retracted — paper linking body weight to integrity calls the journal’s decision to pull the article “a bitter surprise” and its handling of the article after publication “deeply unfair.”

Eugenia Polizzi di Sorrentino

The article, “Dishonesty is more affected by BMI status than by short-term changes in glucose,” was published in Scientific Reports in July and retracted this week. Eugenia Polizzi di Sorrentino, of the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies at the National Research Center, in Rome, who along with her colleagues disagreed with the retraction, told us:

Springer Nature journal retracts BMI, honesty paper

More than five months after outraged readers demanded that a Springer Nature journal retract a paper linking body mass index to honesty, the publication has been pulled.

The journal now says that a post-publication review of the article found that the data don’t support the authors’ conclusions — which is another way of saying that the pre-publication peer review missed that fact.

Publication by Scientific Reports of the article, “Dishonesty is more affected by BMI status than by short-term changes in glucose,” last July caused consternation on social media, as readers wondered what they were reading and why the journal had agreed to publish the study, as well as on the journal’s website.

“Confrontation is an important element of physics progress:” Paper on black holes retracted

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2019 article by a Slovenian physicist who claims that both Creationism and Big Bang theory are wrong, and that black holes are the engines driving the universe.

The paper, in Scientific Reports, was titled “Mass-energy equivalence extension onto a superfluid quantum vacuum,” and was written by Amrit Srečko Šorli. It has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and four posts by Šorli’s institute that refer to it have been removed by Medium because the institute’s “account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules.”

In 2010, Šorli founded the Bijective Physics Institute, whose proponents — we’re not sure how many there are beyond him and a few others named on the site — believe:

Holy cow: “The article as written contains misleading information and omits important details.”

An agriculture journal has put the “retraction” brand on a 2020 study about calving cattle after the editors learned that the researchers had misrepresented aspects of their work.

“Changes in rumen fermentation, bacterial community, and predicted functional pathway in Holstein cows with and without subacute ruminal acidosis during the periparturient period,” appeared in March in the Journal of Dairy Science. The senior author of the article was Shigeru Sato, of the Graduate School of Veterinary Sciences at Iwate University in Japan.

According to the retraction notice (which is only mentioned at the very bottom of the original article’s page, as a “linked article”):

JAMA journal retracts its first paper, on exercise and heart disease

The authors of a 2019 meta-analysis in a JAMA journal on exercise and heart disease have retracted the paper after discovering that a quarter of the studies they’d used in the analysis did not belong.

The retraction is the first for the journal, which had published some 2,800 articles before having to pull one, Frederick P. Rivara, the editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. One in 2,800, we should note, is quite close to the 4 in 10,000 rate of retraction in the overall literature.

The study, from a group at the Universities of Manchester and Brighton, in the United Kingdom, was titled “Accelerometer- and pedometer-based physical activity interventions among adults with cardiometabolic conditions: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” and appeared in JAMA Network Open.

The authors, led by Alexander Hodkinson, looked at 36 randomized clinical trials and found that:

PLOS ONE retracts paper purporting to be about lung ultrasound for COVID-19 but that had suspicious overlap with pre-pandemic article

PLOS ONE has retracted a paper on pneumonia in people with Covid-19 after the authors could not allay concerns about the integrity of their data.

The article, “Lung ultrasound score in establishing the timing of intubation in COVID-19 interstitial pneumonia: A preliminary retrospective observational study,” appeared in September and was written by a group from Zhejiang University School of Medicine, in Hangzhou, China.

About three months after publication, PLOS ONE issued an expression of concern about the article, citing suspicious overlap with a 2018 paper in a different journal. It concluded:

Psychology journal retracts two articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

A psychology journal has retracted a pair of decades-old articles by a now-deceased psychologist with noxious views about race and intelligence after the editors concluded that his work was “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda.”

The author, J. Philippe Rushton, was affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, where he was notorious for publishing highly questionable studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that

Psychology paper retracted after creators of tool allege “serious breach of copyright”

A researcher in Ecuador has lost a 2019 paper on the application of a widely-used psychological research instrument after the owner of the tool flexed their copyright muscle.

The episode — like another one, recently — echoes the case of Donald Morisky, a UCLA researcher who developed an instrument for assessing medication adherence — and then began charging other scientists small fortunes (and, in some cases, large ones) for use of the tool, or forcing retractions when they failed to comply. (For more on the Morisky case, see our 2017 piece in Science and this recent warning by journal editors.)

Written by Paúl Arias-Medina, of the University of Cuenca, the article, “Psychometric properties of the self-report version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire in the Ecuadorian context: an evaluation of four models,” appeared in BMC Psychology.

Per the paper’s abstract:

Medical writer loses COVID-19-cancer paper for plagiarism

An oncology journal has retracted a review article on the hypothetical link between Covid-19 and cancer after determining that the medical writer who authored the work hadn’t done all the writing herself.

The paper, “Clinical sequelae of the novel coronavirus: does COVID-19 infection predispose patients to cancer?” appeared in Future Oncology in May and was written by Priya Hays, who at the time was a technical writer with Talis Biomedical Corp., in Menlo Park, Calif. Hays is currently with Abbott, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also has a company called Hays Documentation Specialists, which offers a variety of manuscript services, including academic writing and something called “unstructured authoring assistance.”

As the retraction notice indicates, Hays appears to have had some authoring assistance of her own:

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