The New York Times isn’t the only outlet that has walked back a commentary this week amid reader outrage.
Following a flood of criticism on social media, a chemistry journal in Germany has disappeared an essay by Canadian researcher who argued that efforts to promote diversity in the field were hurting science. [See an update on this post.]
Continue reading Following outrage, chemistry journal makes a paper decrying diversity efforts disappear
Two days after issuing expressions of concern about controversial papers on Covid-19, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have retracted the articles because a number of the authors were not granted access to the underlying data.
The Lancet paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis,” which relied on data from a private company called Surgisphere and had concluded that hydroxychloroquine was linked to a higher risk of death among some COVID-19 patients, has been dogged by questions since its publication in late May. Some of those complaints led to a correction about aspects of the data, but at the time the authors stood by their conclusions — namely, that hydrochloroquine and chloroquine do not to appear to be effective against the viral infection.
That correction was followed earlier this week by the expression of concern, and now three of the four authors of the article have decided to pull it entirely. The abstaining author, Sapan Desai, is the founder of Surgisphere, whose mission statement declares that the goal of the company is to:
Continue reading Lancet, NEJM retract controversial COVID-19 studies based on Surgisphere data
Score one for responsiveness.
In mid-May, we reported on the retraction of three review articles by Joachim Boldt, whose papers continue to fall despite his having been exposed as a fraudster a decade ago. At the time, we wondered why another journal, Anesthesia & Analgesia, hadn’t also pulled reviews by Boldt that it had published over the years.
Now, it has.
Continue reading Slow but steady: Anesthesiology researcher with more than 100 retractions will earn two moreA group of researchers in Iran has retracted their case report on what they claimed was the first known case of a pregnant woman who died of Covid-19.
The reason: According to the corresponding author, another group of researchers in Iran, who had first seen the patient at their hospital, had beaten them to the submission punch without their knowledge. (This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a case like this.)
The paper appeared in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, an Elsevier title, on April 11. Sometime in early May, it seems (the dates are unclear on the journal website) the group, led by a team at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences, retracted the article.
Elsevier allows authors to withdraw papers without explanation if they have appeared online but not yet in print, which is the case here. So the retraction notice says, well, nothing:
Continue reading Race to be first to report first case of COVID-19 death during pregnancy leads to a retraction
Some words do more work in sentences than others. Take the example of the word “negligence,” which in the case of the following retraction notice is a veritable beast of burden.
The 2019 article, “Conservative management of subglottic stenosis with home based tracheostomy care: A retrospective review of 28 patients,” appeared in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, an Elsevier title. The authors, led by Andrew Pelser, have affiliations in the United Kingdom and South Africa — a fact that appears to be non-trivial.
Per the abstract:
Continue reading ‘Negligence’ — a lot of it — leads to a retraction
Richard Fleming, a felon convicted of health care fraud who has been debarred by the US Food and Drug Administration, would like to invite you to participate in a clinical trial.
Fleming has registered a study on ClinicalTrials.gov to evaluate what he calls the “Fleming Method for Tissue and Vascular Differentiation and Metabolism” — a method he claims can help physicians assess pneumonia resulting from Covid-19.
According to the notes for the study:
Continue reading A convicted felon wants people to enroll in a COVID-19 clinical trial. What could go wrong?
A group of researchers in China is teetering on the edge of losing a paper because they have apparently tried to publish it three times.
Our story starts in Turkey, home to Taner Kemal Erdag, the editor in chief of Turkish Archives of Otorhinolaryngology. In August 2018, Erdag received a submission titled “Increased maternal serum placental growth hormone variant in pregnancies complicated by otosclerosis.” The corresponding author on the work was Ruiying Chen, an ear, nose and throat specialist at The First Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University.
Three weeks later, Chen contacted Erdag and asked to withdraw their article. Request denied. Erdag told us:
Continue reading An attempt at a triple play seems likely to result in a retraction
A team of stem cell researchers at the University of Maryland has lost a 2020 paper after failing to correct an error that they’d caught prior to submission.
The paper, “Endothelial/mesenchymal stem cell crosstalk within bioprinted coculture,” appeared in Tissue Engineering Part A, a Mary Ann Liebert publication. The senior author of the article was John Fisher, who holds an endowed chair in bioengineering at Maryland and also is one of the journal’s co-editors.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading ‘[A] disappointing situation’: Stem cell group retracts with ‘rectitude’ after error
A group of OB/GYNs in the Middle East with a history of testing the patience of editors has lost a paper — and received in expression of concern for another — over concerns about the validity of their data.
The articles appeared in the BJOG, a Wiley publication. Both were led by Mohammad Maher, who is affiliated with Menoufia University in Egypt and the Armed Forces Hospital Southern Region, in Saudia Arabia.
Maher was first author of a 2017 paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology that the journal retracted earlier this year, after the editors were unable to resolve serious questions about the reliability of the data. As the retraction notice states, the journal made little headway with Menoufia University when it tried to follow up on concerns that the researchers’ results were almost certainly fabricated.
Continue reading ‘Patterns in the data have led to questions’: Ob-gyns lose another paper
A former graduate student at the University of Cincinnati falsified data in a published article, since retracted, and an unpublished manuscript, according to government investigators.
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said Logan Fulford doctored images while working at the university on experiments supported by two federally funded grants. Fulford, who is now a senior clinical research associate at IQVIA, a health care consulting company, entered into a voluntary settlement with the agency but neither denied nor admitted to the misconduct.
The published paper, titled “The transcription factor FOXF1 promotes prostate cancer by stimulating the mitogen-activated protein kinase ERK5,” appeared in Science Signaling in 2016. Fulford was first author on the article, which the journal retracted in 2018, after initially flagging it with an expression of concern.
Continue reading Former grad student faked cancer research data, says federal watchdog
