Adam Marcus

Covid-19 and sex? Rapid-fire acceptance leads to hasty withdrawal of paper

The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has taken down a letter on whether people should abstain from sex during the coronavirus pandemic, but the editor says the article is not being retracted.

Meanwhile, researchers in France have retracted a paper in which they’d claimed to have found replication of the virus that causes Covid-19 in the dialysis fluid of a patient with kidney disease. Again, hasty publication appears to be involved. We’ve been tracking retractions of Covid-19 articles on our website, and, let’s just say, the list is almost certainly a trailing indicator of the robustness of the science here — as it is with retractions during any period.

Back to the letter. “COVID-19: Should sexual practices be discouraged during the pandemic?” was written by ZhiQiang Yin, of the Department of Dermatology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, in China. Yin submitted the article on April 14. The journal accepted it on the 16th and published it on April 30th.

According to the notice:

Two retractions as yeast researcher risks losing her PhD

*Saccharomyces cerevisiae* cells in DIC microscopy via Wikimedia

A team of researchers in France has lost two papers on their studies of yeast because the work was “a complete work of fiction,” in the words of one colleague.

The papers came from the lab of Jean-Luc Parrou, of the University of Toulouse, and involved work by a former PhD student of his named Marjorie Petitjean. According to Parrou, institutional investigators are now in the process of revoking her degree, but have been delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic. We could not find contact information for Petitjean.

One of the articles, “Yeast tolerance to various stresses relies on the trehalose-6P synthase (Tps1) protein, not on trehalose,” appeared last year in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It has been cited 54 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The other, “A new function for the yeast Trehalose-6P Synthase (Tps1) Protein, as key pro-survival factor during growth, chronological ageing, and apoptotic stress,” was published in Mechanisms of Ageing and Development in 2017. It has been cited 11 times.

The retraction notice from JBC reads:

‘Aggressive’ COVID-19 strains: What it takes to correct a flawed paper

A group of researchers in Scotland have taken aim at a study published in early March which reported surprising findings on the genetics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the story of what it took to correct the record about the paper is likely to be all too familiar to those who attempt such feats. It involved a blog post and a new paper — neither of which appeared on the site of the original journal that published the work, and neither of which is seeing the kind of attention paid to the original article.

The paper, “On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” appeared in National Science Review, published by Oxford Academic. According to the abstract:

Materials scientist up to nine retractions

An itinerant materials scientist whose former lab head has accused publicly of misconduct is up to nine retractions for manipulating his data.

We last wrote about Hossein Hosseinkhani in 2016, after he’d lost seven papers stemming from his time as a researcher in the lab of Yasuhiko Tabata, of the Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences at Kyoto University in Japan.

Since then, the researcher has lost two more articles, including, most recently, a 2001 article he wrote with Tabata that appeared in the Proceedings of the Japanese Academy of Sciences. According to the retraction notice for the paper, titled “In vitro transfection of plasmid DNA by different cationized gelatin with or without ultrasound irradiation.”

The notice reads:

“[I]t took a long time for the scientific community to realize that he was simply making things up”

In a world increasingly haunted by fake news, email scams and trolls on the internet deliberately emotionalizing debate and making unfounded attacks, trust is perhaps more endangered than ever.

That sounds like the breathless text of a movie trailer, but it’s how the editors of Ethnologia Europaea announce the retractions of seven more papers by Mart Bax, the Dutch anthropologist whose misconduct includes not only making up data but making up papers — at least 61 of them — as well. Bax is now up to nine retractions.

The journal, which has published an article titled “On scholarly misconduct and fraud, and what we can learn from it,” by Peter Jan Margry about Bax’s checkered career at Amsterdam Free University (Margry helped to out the misconduct), notes the sweep and success of the fraud:

Doing the right thing: Researchers retract clinician burnout study after realizing their error

A journal is retracting and replacing a 2016 study which found that nearly two-thirds of clinicians who focus on end-of-life care experienced burnout, after the authors found an error that had dramatically inflated the findings.

The article, “Prevalence and predictors of burnout among hospice and palliative care clinicians in the U.S.,” appeared in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, and has been cited 72 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The authors, led by Arif Kamal, of Duke University, included researchers at Mayo Clinic, the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, the University of Pittsburgh and other institutions.

But while working on a subsequent paper, the authors realized that something was amiss with their first article. The two studies revealed strikingly different rates of burnout in the surveys the researchers had conducted, 62% vs. 39%, an unusual finding given that a relatively short time had elapsed between the surveys, they said. A closer look revealed a critical error.

A study finding no evidence of racial bias in police shootings earns a correction that critics call an “opaque half measure”

A group of researchers who published a controversial study that found no evidence of racial bias in deadly police shootings have corrected their paper but are standing by their findings — to the displeasure of some scholars who say the article is too flawed to stand.

The 2019 study, “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” was written by David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and several co-authors from Michigan State University. According to the abstract:

Journal retracts paper on gender dysphoria after 900 critics petition

A journal has retracted a controversial paper that questioned what it called the “existing dogma” about gender.

The article, “A new theory of gender dysphoria incorporating the distress, social behavioral, and body-ownership networks,” was written by Stephen Gliske, a physicist-turned-neuroscientist at the University of Michigan.

Gliske’s paper, which received a modest amount of media attention, argued for what he calls a “multisense theory” of gender identity. As he told Newsweek last December:

Peer review bandits purloin again, this time in chemistry

A pair of researchers in India have lost a 2017 paper published by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry after an inquiry found that they’d stolen the guts of the work from an unpublished manuscript one of them had reviewed for another journal.

The article in question, “Tri-s-triazine (s-heptazine), a novel electron-deficient core for soft self-assembled supramolecular structures,” appeared in Chemical Communications was submitted on August 4, 2017 and published on September 25, 2017, and was written by Irla Kumar and Sandeep Kumar, of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore.

Sandeep Kumar, who is now retired, was a leading figure in the field of liquid crystals. The Royal Society of Chemistry feted him as one of the “most cited” researchers in Chemical Communications and another of its journals in 2006 and 2007. He also served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Liquid Crystals — a post that is particularly relevant in light of what follows.

According to the retraction notice:

Too hot to handle: Authors retract Science paper on electromagnetics

Sometimes scientific findings can be too hot to handle. Literally.

A team of researchers in India and Japan who reported breakthrough results in two papers about electromagnetics, including an article in Science, are retracting the articles because the exciting data resulted from experimental error. To be precise: unbeknownst to them, inadvertent heating of their samples had contaminated their data.

The first author of both articles is Chanchal Sow, of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. The last author on both is Yoshiteru Maeno, a professor of physics at Kyoto University.

Here’s the notice:

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