A year ago, PLOS ONE published a study claiming that there was strong evidence that a person wrapped in the Shroud of Turin — according to lore, the burial shroud of Jesus Christ — had suffered “strong polytrauma.”
Today, they retracted it.
According to the retraction notice for “Atomic resolution studies detect new biologic evidences on the Turin Shroud,” Continue reading Over authors’ objections, PLOS ONE retracts paper claiming Shroud of Turin showed evidence of trauma
A journal has temporarily removed a study by a researcher who has long championed a highly controversial “abortion reversal” method over concerns about its ethical approval.
The study, “A Case Series Detailing the Successful Reversal of the Effects of Mifepristone Using Progesterone,” appeared in Issues In Law And Medicine in April. Its first author, George Delgado, is the medical director of Culture of Life Family Services, which operates a ‘‘crisis pregnancy center,’ according to a 2017 New York Times Magazine article about “abortion-pill reversal.”
Medical abortion consists of two pills, mifepristone and misoprostol, taken some time apart. In order to see if its effects could be undone, here’s what the authors of the withdrawn study say they did: Continue reading Study claiming “abortion reversal” is safe and effective temporarily withdrawn for ethical issues
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The week at Retraction Watch featured the retraction of a Nature paper over the objections of the first author — who hired a lawyer; a call for a new research misconduct body in the UK; and a look at why retractions take so long. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Kim Kardashian loses an authorship; legal threats follow misconduct allegations; faked job offer leads to prosecution
How long should a retraction take?
That’s a complex question, of course, depending on how long the alleged issues with a paper take to be investigated, whether authors — and their lawyers — fight tooth-and-nail against a retraction, and other factors. But once a university officially requests a retraction, how long should one take?
The answer, for two journals who published work by cancer researcher Anil Jaiswal, is 22 months — and counting. Continue reading Nearly two years after a university asked for retractions, two journals have done nothing
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In April 2015, two high-profile chemistry bloggers — and their commenters — raised questions about a paper that had been published in PLOS ONE some 18 months earlier. More than three years later, the journal has now retracted the paper, with a notice that echoes the 2015 blog posts.
So what took so long? PLOS tells Retraction Watch: Continue reading Three years after questions surfaced, PLOS ONE retracts paper about potential antibiotic
A group of editors of journals focused on the history of economics has gone public to urge Clarivate Analytics, which publishes a highly influential ranking of journals, to reconsider its decision to drop the titles from this year’s index.
Clarivate said it suppressed the titles because of apparent “citation stacking,” in which various editors agree to cite one another to boost their journals’ Impact Factors (JIFs). The metric is based on average rates of citation over a given period. As we noted in a June 26 post about the suppressions, suppressing titles Continue reading Journals punished by high-profile indexing service cry foul, demand a recount
Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.
The week at Retraction Watch featured a collection of reports of scientific misconduct investigations, the story of a researcher who thought his work was important enough to be published three times, and a look at what happened when Elsevier tried open peer review. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: “Ethics dumping;” getting scientists to admit mistakes; the problem with conference dinner chatter
The Lancet chapter of the Paolo Macchiarini saga appears to finally be over.
In an editorial titled “The final verdict on Paolo Macchiarini: guilty of misconduct,” the editors of the journal announce that they are retracting two papers by the now-disgraced surgeon and colleagues “after receiving requests to do so from the new President of the Karolinska Institute (KI), Ole Petter Ottersen.” Late last month, Ottersen declared Macchiarini and six other researchers — including one of the whistleblowers in the case — guilty of misconduct.
The long story took many twists and turns — for instance, in September 2015, Lancet editors wrote an editorial with close to the opposite title: “Paolo Macchiarini is not guilty of scientific misconduct,” published after KI released the results of a previous investigation: Continue reading “The final verdict:” Lancet retracts two papers by Macchiarini
Barislav Momčilović thinks that iodine status is — after iron deficiency — the “main public health” issue in the world today. So when he figured out what he believed was the best way to test levels of the mineral, he was determined to get the message out.
A little too determined, perhaps: He published the same information three times. And one journal caught on. Last week, Thyroid retracted “Hair Iodine for Human Iodine Status Assessment,” a 2014 paper that they say overlapped with two earlier works.
While publishing duplicate work is considered by some to be just a violation of restrictive publisher copyright agreements, the presence of such duplicates in the literature can bias systematic reviews and other attempts to describe the state of the evidence in a given field. In a retraction notice, Thyroid noted that this was a case of Continue reading An author says his work should be “widely heralded and promoted.” So he published it 3 times.