Ellie Kincaid

Publisher investigating “serious concerns” about article on ivermectin, COVID, and the microbiome

The publisher Frontiers has published an expression of concern for an article that proposed “ivermectin protects against COVID-19” via effects on the microbiome.

The article, “Microbiome-Based Hypothesis on Ivermectin’s Mechanism in COVID-19: Ivermectin Feeds Bifidobacteria to Boost Immunity,” was published in July 2022 in Frontiers in Microbiology. The sole author, Sabine Hazan, is affiliated with ProgenaBiome, a company based in Ventura, Calif. that “spearheads the movement of validating, verifying, and clinically applying its sequencing data, to better understand the microbiome.”

The abstract of the article stated:

J&J subsidiary alleges fraud in paper that linked cosmetic talc with mesothelioma

A key paper linking use of talc-based baby powder to cancer contains fraudulent information, according to a new complaint against an author of the article who has testified on behalf of plaintiffs.

A judge had previously allowed the release of a document confirming the identity of one of the patients in the article, who had claimed exposure to asbestos besides in baby powder, contrary to the authors’ claim that the cases in the series had no other exposures.

The paper, “Mesothelioma Associated With the Use of Cosmetic Talc,” was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in January 2020. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Corresponding author Jacqueline Moline of Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y., has also referenced the article in expert testimony for plaintiffs in talc litigation, as well as in remarks before Congress.

Reddit post prompts retraction of article that called Trump ‘the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter’

In October 2021, a Reddit user on the r/badscience subforum posted a long critique of an article published in PLOS ONE earlier that year that had analyzed the “anti-vaccination infodemic” on Twitter and concluded that former U.S. president Donald Trump was “the main driver of vaccine misinformation” on the platform before his account was suspended.

The critique, titled “Terrible PlosOne Paper Dissected,” listed concerns about the sample size (50 pro-vaccine and 50 anti-vaccine accounts), method of selecting the sample and control groups, and data analysis. The Redditor also looked at the reviews of the article which PLOS ONE made available, and concluded that “clearly neither reviewer actually read it in any detail.”

The day after the comment was posted, an account for PLOS Communications responded, thanking the user “for your post publication peer review” and saying that PLOS ONE was looking into the article.

Russian publishing watchdog decries ‘retraction misuse’ following ban on ‘LGBT propaganda’

In the wake of a new law that bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and (or) preferences” in Russia, some journals have retracted articles they fear could attract state attention, a move a publishing watchdog in the country has called “self-censorship.”

As we reported in December, the Russian philosophy journal Logos retracted an article about lesbian fashion magazines for being “in violation of standards,” citing the new ban.

More journals have followed suit, according to the Russian Council on Publication Ethics, which issued a statement decrying “retraction misuse” by journals in response to the law, though it also expressed concern for the safety of journal staff and authors if they ignored it. The statement began:

Judge orders OSU cancer researcher to pay $1 million to lawyers from failed libel suit

Lawyers who represented Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus, in failed libel and defamation suits – and who later sued him for not paying his tab – have won a judgment for $1 million against the scientist.

The judgment, dated Dec. 8, 2022, orders Croce to pay just shy of $1.1 million plus interest to Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, one of the firms that represented him in his libel lawsuit against the New York Times and his defamation case against David Sanders, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., both of which he lost.

The firm sued Croce in 2020, seeking more than $920,000 in unpaid fees. After the case went to trial, a jury awarded the full amount to the firm in damages, and the judge ruled that the lawyers were entitled to prejudgment interest at a rate of 4%, totaling an additional $175,000. The judgment amount can continue accruing interest, and Croce is responsible for the court costs.

In his post-trial decision, judge Richard A. Frye wrote:

Elsevier journal temporarily removes article by prolific psychologist – with a typo at “frist”

An Elsevier psychology journal took down an article in early December with a notice that appeared to be an internal memo, including a typo.

The article, a letter titled “First COVID-19 suicide case in Bangladesh due to fear of COVID-19 and xenophobia: Possible suicide prevention strategies,” was published in June of 2020 in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry by Mark D. Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University in the UK and Mohammed A. Mamun of Jahangirnagar University and the Undergraduate Research Organization in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It has been cited more than 300 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Griffiths’ high publishing rate – according to his university’s index he published nearly 200 journal articles in 2022 – came under scrutiny from Oxford University psychologist Dorothy Bishop in 2020, including his many collaborations with Mamun. Griffiths told the Times Higher Education that he “made an intellectual contribution to every refereed paper I’ve published.”

University to investigate adjunct professor after allegations of plagiarism – and legal threats

The University of Zurich in Switzerland has announced that it will open an investigation into an adjunct professor alleged to have taken images and other material from a popular blog on medieval manuscripts and published them in her book without attribution.

The news, first reported by kath.ch, follows an eyebrow-raising exchange between the researcher who discovered his work had been used without citation and someone claiming to be the professor’s secretary, who told him, “nobody cares about your blog!”

The professor, Carla Rossi, is also director of the Research Centre for European Philological Tradition, abbreviated as RECEPTIO. The center operates an academic press that published Rossi’s 2022 work, The Book of Hours of Louis de Roucy: a.k.a. The Courtanvaux-Elmhirst Hours, Digitally Restored Through the Wayback Recovery Method.

The book describes a manuscript that Rossi purported to have digitally reconstructed.

Article that critiqued high-profile abortion study retracted

An article that critiqued a study on what happened after women did not get abortions that they sought has been retracted after observers raised concerns that the peer review process had not been objective.

The article, “The Turnaway Study: A Case of Self-Correction in Science Upended by Political Motivation and Unvetted Findings,” was originally published in Frontiers in Psychology in June of 2022.

The Turnaway Study itself was an effort of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed women who had received abortions and women who sought abortions but did not get them because they were too far along in their pregnancies “to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term,” according to its website.

Researchers lost five papers soon after scientists critiqued another of their papers in Retraction Watch

A microbiology research group at the University of Hong Kong lost five papers for image duplication in late October, weeks after other scientists published a critique in Retraction Watch of one of the group’s COVID-19 articles.

The paper on COVID-19 was published in Cell in 2021 and was led by Patrick Chiu Yat Woo and Kwok-Yung Yuen, chair of infectious diseases in the university’s Department of Microbiology.

Writing in Retraction Watch in early October, Robert Speth of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Michael Bader of the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, described their experience notifying Cell of numerous errors in the paper, and the journal’s editor refusing to publish a correction.

Weeks later, five of Yuen and Woo’s papers were retracted from two journals published by the American Society for Microbiology:

Russian philosophy journal cites law banning “LGBT propaganda” in retraction

A Russian philosophy journal has retracted a paper about lesbian fashion magazines, citing a newly passed law that bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and (or) preferences.”

The journal Logos, which describes itself as “the leading Russian-language journal in the fields of philosophy, social sciences, humanities and cultural studies” and counts the philosopher Slavoj Žižek as a member of its editorial council, earlier this month retracted a paper titled “Looking good: The lesbian gaze and fashion imagery.”

The paper, by Reina Lewis of the London College of Fashion, still appears online, but an entry on the Russian database eLIBRARY indicates it was retracted for being “in violation of standards.” The notice continued:

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