Adam Marcus

“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:

‘Misconduct on a grand and terrible scale’: Dental scientist up to 26 retractions

A dentistry researcher in Spain with a history of reusing and manipulating images has notched two more retractions, giving him 26.

The new retractions move Jose´ Luis Calvo-Guirado, of Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, into a tie for 24th place on the Retraction Watch leaderboard.

Calvo-Guirado has in the past disputed the retractions of his research. And at least one of his co-authors, Georgios Romanos, of the State University of New York Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine, speculated that Calvo-Guirado was reusing images to limit the number of lab animals that would need to be sacrificed in his studies.

The latest retractions involve two papers in Annals of Anatomy, an Elsevier publication, including the 2018 article “A new procedure for processing extracted teeth for immediate grafting in post-extraction sockets. An experimental study in American Fox Hound dogs.” According to the notice, the paper contained manipulated images that were reused in subsequently retracted articles:

‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers

Earlier this month, we reported on how Susanne Stoll, a graduate student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University College London, discovered an error that toppled a highly-cited 2014 article — and which might affect hundreds of other papers in the field of perception.

We spoke with Stoll about the experience.

Retraction Watch (RW): What did it feel like to find such a significant error? Did you doubt yourself at first, and, if so when did you realize you’d found something both real and important?

After legal threats from Herbalife, Elsevier journal retracts — and then removes — a paper

Bowing to legal pressure from the supplement maker Herbalife, Elsevier earlier this year retracted — and then removed — a paper which claimed that a young woman in India died of liver failure after using the company’s products. The move has led to more legal threats.

In August 2018, a group of researchers in India published a report in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hepatology about the death, involving a 24-year-old woman who had taken a variety of supplements produced by Herbalife, a massive, and massively controversial, maker of nonprescription diet aids.

The group, led by Cyriac Abby Philips, of Cochin Gastroenterology, in Kerala, India, asserted that tests of Herbalife products similar to those the woman had been taking revealed the presence of heavy metals, bacteria and, in most samples, “undisclosed toxic compounds including traces of psychotropic recreational agent.”

The case report — titled “Slimming to the death: Herbalife®-associated fatal acute liver failure-heavy metals, toxic compounds, bacterial contaminants and psychotropic agents in products sold in India” — is far from the first time scientists have linked Herbalife products to liver damage. They’ve done so here, here and here, to cite just a few instances.

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