Ivan Oransky

Weekend reads: an editor wonders whether data exist, ‘how universities cover up scientific fraud,’ detecting paper mills

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

This is our 5,000th post — and we have a $5,000 matching pledge if you can help us for the next 5,000

In our early days, at our “office,” the former Market Diner

Nine and a half years ago, Adam Marcus and I had an idea: A blog about retractions. Apparently, we needed to convince ourselves that it was a good idea. Otherwise, why would our first post, on Aug. 3, 2010, be titled “Why write a blog about retractions?”

That was post #1. And this, dear reader, is post #5,000. Yes, 5,000.

Journal retracts hotly contested paper on vaping and heart attacks

The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) today retracted a paper it published last year claiming that vaping was linked to heart attacks.

The paper, by Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, has faced a barrage of criticism since its publication last June — and Glantz’s claims, in a blog post, that the study was “More evidence that e-cigs cause heart attacks.”

Brad Rodu, a professor at the University of Louisville who comments frequently on vaping, asked the journal to retract the study shortly after it was published. The study, he said, had failed to account for which happened first — heart attacks or vaping. The contretemps was the subject of a July 2019 story by USA Today:

Retractions could mean fewer submissions for journals, says new analysis

What affects the number of submissions a journal receives? A new study in Learned Publishing, led by staff at Wiley, aimed to find out — and the results, based in part on our database, suggest that retractions may correlate with submission numbers. We asked corresponding author Thomas Gaston to answer a few questions about the paper.

Tell us about your study — why and how you did it, and what you found.

Weekend reads: How to squander a $10 million grant; paid to publish; funding lotteries

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

the retraction of a Nature paper by Harvard researchers;
13 retractions and 61 expressions of concern for a controversial psychology researcher;
the temporary withdrawal of a paper on cats and female students;
a fourth retraction in the STAP stem cell scandal.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Journals retract 13 papers by Hans Eysenck, flag 61, some 60 years old

Two journals have retracted 13 papers co-authored by the late — and controversial — psychologist Hans Eysenck, following a university investigation that found dozens of his papers to be “unsafe.”

One of the journals, Perceptual and Motor Skills, subjected 36 of Eysenck’s papers to expressions of concern, while another — Psychological Reports — subjected 25 of them to the same flag. Both journals are published by SAGE.

A May 2019 report by King’s College London into the work of Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, apparently of the University Heidelberg, that more than two dozen papers be retracted. Among other issues, the report cited