An anesthesia journal has retracted a 2020 paper by a group from China, Turkey and the United States after a post-publication review discovered issues with the analysis.
According to the notice, in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology:
Continue reading Leading anesthesiologist retracts paper after reader “noticed that the statistical approach was sub-optimal”
The researchers who earlier this week called for the retraction of their hotly debated paper on police shootings and race say the reasons for their decision to pull the article have been misinterpreted.
Crime researchers David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and Joe Cesario, of Michigan State University, initially referred in a retraction statement to citations to the work of Heather Mac Donald, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, who wrote about the PNAS article for the City Journal and the Wall Street Journal.
Those pieces, Cesario and Johnson said, had unfairly co-opted the paper, ““Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” to argue against the existence of racial bias in police shootings.
In an amended statement, the authors noticeably omit references to Mac Donald. On Wednesday, Cesario told Retraction Watch:
Continue reading Retraction of paper on police killings and race not due to “‘mob’ pressure” or “distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly,” say authors
Journals have issued expressions of concern for seven more papers by Hans Eysenck, including one for a paper the now-deceased psychologist published in the middle of World War II.
Suspicions about Eysenck, who died in 1997, surfaced in the early 1990s, if not before. At least 14 of his papers have been retracted so far — a total his biographer has said could well eclipse 60. And 71 have now been hit with expressions of concern.
The latest such moves come from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, which issued the following notice:
Continue reading 77-year-old paper by controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck earns an expression of concern
A Nature journal is retracting a 2018 research letter about the genetics of flower patterns over concerns about the reliability of the data.
The letter, “Two genetic changes in cis-regulatory elements caused evolution of petal spot position in Clarkia,” appeared in Nature Plants and was written by a team of researchers at Duke University, including Mark Rausher, a prominent plant geneticist and the John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Biology at the institution. The paper has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Per the retraction notice:
Continue reading Duke group retracts Nature journal paperThe authors of a controversial paper on race and police shootings say they are retracting the article, which became a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, and now amid protests following the murder of George Floyd.
[See an update on this post.]
The 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.” It has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “hot paper” designation.
Joseph Cesario, a researcher at Michigan State University, told Retraction Watch that he and David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author, have submitted a request for retraction to PNAS. In the request, they write:
Continue reading Authors of study on race and police killings ask for its retraction, citing “continued misuse” in the media
The cats are back.
As promised, Biological Conservation has replaced a controversial paper on feral cats in China whose cringeworthy title — “Where there are girls, there are cats” — prompted an outcry on social media that resulted in a temporary retraction.
The new article boasts a different, non-gendered title: “Understanding how free-ranging cats interact with humans: A case study in China with management implications.” But it makes more or less the same point: Where there are women, there are more cats:
Continue reading “Where there are girls, there are cats” returns, with a new title
Over the objection of all of the authors, a journal has retracted an article on a homeopathic approach to penis enlargement and virility after deciding that the putative remedy wasn’t potent enough for the task at hand.
The paper, “Effects of chronic treatment with the eNOS stimulator Impaza on penis length and sexual behaviors in rats with a high baseline of sexual activity,” appeared in the International Journal of Impotence Research — a Springer Nature title — in March 2013.
Among the authors of the article was Oleg Epstein, a Russian scientist whose company, OOO NPF Materia Medica Holding, of Moscow, makes homeopathic products. Epstein’s research has been the subject of multiple retractions, as we’ve reported, embarrassing reputable journals into whose pages he managed to publish papers on homeopathy.
Impaza, a name which sounds more like a Subaru than a sexual aid, purportedly:
Continue reading Coming up short: Journal retracts penis enlargement paper after realizing it was homeopathy
A Japanese anesthesiologist who just notched his sixth retraction apologized for his misconduct and said his institution is now investigating his entire body of work.
Hironobu Ueshima, of Showa University in Tokyo, who has roughly 170 publications, told Retraction Watch by email:
Continue reading “I want to apologize for my misconduct,” says anesthesiologist whose work is under investigation
Earlier this month, we reported on the retraction of two papers by a Japanese anesthesiologist for unreliable data. At the time, we noted that the case of Hironobu Ueshima bore watching, given his publication total runs to about 170.
[See an update on this story.]
The two retractions earlier this month came after an earlier one from the journal Medicine in April. Now, another anesthesia journal has retracted three more papers by Ueshima, citing misconduct, for a total of six.
The articles appeared in Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine in 2016 and 2019. According to the notice:
Continue reading And then there were six: three more retractions for Japanese anesthesiologist
The authors of a paper that some critics have labeled white supremacy in academic robes say they will be retracting the article because some of the data they’d used for their analysis were “highly questionable.”
The January 2020 article, from a group led by Cory Clark, of Heterodox Academy and New York University, was titled “Declines in religiosity predict increases in violent crime—but not among countries with relatively high average IQ.”
Appearing in Psychological Science, the flagship publication of the Association for Psychological Science, the paper argued that:
Continue reading Authors of article on IQ, religiosity and crime retract it to do “a level of vetting we should have done before submitting”