Adam Marcus

Study on reducing parents’ anxiety about children’s circumcision retracted

A pair of researchers in Turkey have lost a 2021 paper on a randomized controlled trial in pediatric surgery after a reader raised concerns about the methodology reported in the article.

However, the retraction notice – detailed though it might be – reveals that the problems could, and likely should, have been caught during peer review.

The paper, “Effect of care programme based on Comfort Theory on reducing parental anxiety in the paediatric day surgery: Randomised controlled trial,” appeared last July in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, a Wiley title. The authors, Fahriye Pazarcikci and Emine Efe, were affiliated with Isparta University of Applied Sciences and Akdeniz University, respectively.

“Paediatric day surgery” turns out to be male circumcision in boys ages 4 to 7 years, as the trial registration information on ClinicalTrials.gov indicates. Circumcision is mentioned in the full text of the paper, but not the abstract.

Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper

The authors of a case report involving a patient who died of a rare disorder of the bone marrow have removed an image from the article after the person’s mother objected to the use of the photograph.

The paper, “Dyskeratosis congenita,” appeared in Autopsy Case Reports in 2020 and was written by a group from Upstate Medical University, part of the State University of New York system, in Syracuse.

We saw the notice in November and were curious if we could learn more. So we filed a public records request for documents related to the article – and received a response last week disclosing correspondence between Robert Stoppacher, a co-author of the report, and the editor-in-chief of the journal.

In a letter to the journal on Sept. 12, 2021, Stoppacher stated that:

8 years after three papers are flagged — and after losing original correspondence — PLOS ONE retracts

A group of nutrition researchers in Canada led by the prominent diabetes scientist Emile Levy has lost three papers in PLOS ONE over concerns about the integrity of the data.

The concerns were raised nearly eight years ago by Elisabeth Bik, early in her career as a data sleuth.

In May 2014, Bik told us, she contacted the journal to point out problems with images in the articles, as well as a fourth paper that has received an expression of concern:

Researchers in China send a hospital “declaration” clearing them of fraud. A journal doesn’t buy it.

If the writers of “Welcome Back, Kotter” wanted to issue a retraction statement, it might look something like this one from Mary Ann Liebert. We’ll call this one a hat tip to Juan Luis Pedro Felipo de Huevos Epstein, a Sweathog whose permission slips “from his mother” became a meme.

The paper in question appeared in 2016 in Cancer Biotherapy and Radiopharmaceuticals and written by a group in China led by Liqun Yang, of the Third Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical Center and the State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology at Southwest University in Chongqing.

In November 2021, Yang emailed the journal asking to swap out the original figure in the article with a corrected version. What Yang didn’t know was that a week earlier, the journal had received word of a post on PubPeer raising questions about the figures in the paper.

The post received the following response from someone writing as co-author Hongjuan Cui:

Journals acknowledge that a critical “reader” has a name: Elisabeth Bik

Followers of this blog know that “a reader” seems to be the force behind a huge number of retractions – and that, despite the apparent unwillingness of journals to name them, they are real people. One of the more prolific “readers” is Elisabeth Bik, the data sleuth whose efforts to identify problematic images has led to the removal of hundreds of dodgy papers.

Journals now seem more willing to give credit where it’s due, by identifying Bik – who has faced threats for her efforts – in their notices.

A few recent examples: Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, an Elsevier title, has name-checked Bik in a dozen retractions of papers dating back to 2017.

The author of a retracted paper learns to be careful what he wishes for

Sometimes leaving well-enough alone is the best policy. Ask Teja Santosh Dandibhotla.

Upset that a paper of his had been retracted from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, Santosh, a computer scientist at the CVR College of Engineering in Hyderabad, India, contacted us to plead his case. (We of course do not make decisions about retractions, we reminded him.)

Santosh’s article, “Intelligent defaulter Prediction using Data Science Process,” had been pulled along with some 350 other papers in two conference proceedings because IOP Publishing had “uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

Doing the right thing: Neuroscientist announces retractions in ‘the most difficult tweet ever’

A group of neuroscientists in Germany and Hungary is calling for the retraction of two of their recent papers after discovering a fatal error in the research.

Myriam Sander, a memory researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, took to social media on Wednesday to alert her followers to the decision. In what Sander called the “most difficult tweet ever,” she wrote:

Five studies linked to Cassava Sciences retracted

A researcher at the center of questions about a biotech’s controversial experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease has lost five papers in PLOS One.

The journal says it is retracting the articles, by Hoau-Yan Wang and colleagues, over concerns about the integrity of the data and the images in the papers. Wang does not agree with any of the retractions.

As we’ve reported, Wang, of the CIty University of New York, helped conduct the studies that formed the backbone of the regulatory filing for the drug simufilam, which Cassava Sciences — formerly Pain Therapeutics — has been trying to bring to market. Cassava, according to a citizen’s petition to the FDA, has funded Wang’s lab for more than 15 years, and two of the now-retracted papers feature Lindsay Burns, a Cassava employee, as a co-author. (The citizen’s petition, which called on the FDA to halt Cassava’s trials, was filed by a law firm representing Cassava short sellers but eventually denied by the FDA because it was not an appropriate venue.)

Firing, publishing ban, 15 retractions for author who ‘defrauded’ co-authors in pay-to-publish scheme

Cureus has retracted 15 papers, including three on Covid-19, after concluding that the articles were produced in a scheme by a researcher in Pakistan who charged his co-authors to join the manuscripts, lied about the ethics approval for the studies and may have fabricated data.

The journal says Rahil Barkat~~, who already had lost a pair of articles in Cureus,~~ charged researchers – some in Pakistan, others elsewhere – “editing fees” of as much as $300 to proofread and sign on to his manuscripts.

Barkat’s name appears on a few of the now-retracted articles but not all. However, the journal has linked him to the 15 papers.

Fake sex researcher loses zoophilia paper over ethical concerns

An alleged sex researcher with a history of making things up has lost a 2019 paper on the habits of people who have sex with animals over concerns about the ethics approval for the research.

The paper, “Digital Ethnography of Zoophilia — A Multinational Mixed-Methods Study,” was written by Damian Jacob Sendler and a co-author, Michal Lew-Starowicz and appeared in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy.

Despite an impressive-looking webpage, Sendler, in the words of Gizmodo reporter Jennings Brown, is a:

serial fabulist. The accomplished doctor character Sendler has created has appeared in numerous media outlets—Vice, Playboy, Savage Lovecast, Huffington Post, Insider, Bustle, Thrive Global, Women’s Health, and Forbes, among others. Many of these platforms have published Sendler’s lies and publicized his bizarre and irresponsible studies on necrophilia, zoophilia, lethal erotic asphyxiation, and sexual assault. And until recently, he was soliciting patients through his website where he offered online psychotherapy and sex therapy.

Sendler, whose affiliation is listed as the Felnett Health Research Foundation, in Staten Island, N.Y., claims to have earned an MD and a PhD from Harvard:

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