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:
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.
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.
The 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.
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:
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.
Researchers compared Impaza with sildenafil (Viagra)
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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: