Author: Shannon Palus

Food article pulled when authors can’t serve up data

homeHeaderLogoImage_en_USAn article about a dietary plan to help people lose weight has been retracted after other researchers raised concerns, and the authors failed to provide the data that supported their findings.

The retraction is accompanied by a Letter to the Editor by a group of outside researchers — including David Allison at the University of Alabama at Birmingham — who noticed “several substantial issues with data and calculations.” For instance, before the experiment even started, the two groups had very different weights: The control group averaged 96.5 kg, and the test group 91 kg. According to the letter, that difference is striking: Continue reading Food article pulled when authors can’t serve up data

Heart researcher who faked patient data gets third retraction

Screen Shot 2015-11-06 at 6.38.09 PMA heart researcher has notched her third retraction, a small 2006 trial in Annals of Internal Medicine which seemed to show that a blood pressure drug could help people with artery disease walk further with less pain.

Earlier this year, Anna Ahimastos, formerly a researcher at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, lost a larger clinical trial in JAMA and a subanalysis in Circulation Research after it was discovered she’d fabricated patient records. As principle investigator Bronwyn Kingwell told us in September:

Specifically, records were fabricated for trial participants that did not exist.

Now, following an investigation by the institute, her co-authors are proactively retracting papers, with more to come. The Annals of Internal Medicine paper, “Ramipril Markedly Improves Walking Ability in Patients With Peripheral Arterial Disease,” is being pulled due to an “inability to adequately validate primary data sources.” According to the note, Ahimastos “maintains the integrity of the data and validity of reported results:”

Continue reading Heart researcher who faked patient data gets third retraction

Child psych studies halted for “unanticipated event,” sparking misconduct investigation

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Mani Pavuluri

We’ve just learned what sparked a University of Illinois at Chicago investigation that recently concluded a child psychiatrist had committed misconduct: An “unanticipated event during a study,” which halted three studies and resulted in a letter sent out to 350 research subjects.

Earlier this week, we reported that an investigation at the University of Illinois at Chicago found “a preponderance of evidence” that child psychiatrist Mani Pavuluri had committed misconduct. The university told the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about the investigation in 2013. The findings of the investigation led the university to request the retractions of three papers, one of which has been pulled so far, for not properly disclosing how much medication children had received outside the study.

Today, we found out what prompted the university to launch that investigation, courtesy of a statement from a spokesperson: Continue reading Child psych studies halted for “unanticipated event,” sparking misconduct investigation

Authors withdraw two papers from JBC — and that’s all we know

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Two sets of authors have withdrawn their papers from the Journal of Biological Chemistry. We’re telling you about the both together because, true to JBC form, there’s not too much to say.

The retraction notices for both papers — about the molecular underpinnings of cardiac fibroblasts and melanoma cells — are identical:

Continue reading Authors withdraw two papers from JBC — and that’s all we know

Author’s coordination of peer review flags 13 math papers

home_cover (3)Thirteen papers in Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids now have an expression of concern, after it came to light that an author on most of the papers coordinated the peer-review process.

David Y. Gao, a well-known and prolific mathematician at the Federation University Australia, is the author of 11 of the papers, and also the guest editor of the special issue in which they were set to appear. The papers were published online earlier this year.

A spokesperson for SAGE, which publishes the journal, confirmed that the publisher decided to re-review the papers after learning about Gao’s role in the peer-review process:

Continue reading Author’s coordination of peer review flags 13 math papers

More retractions, errata discovered for nursing researcher

Journal of Clinical Nursing

Since our recent coverage about a university investigation that led to multiple retractions for nursing researcher Moon-fai Chan, we’ve been alerted to a few more retractions and errata. His total is now at six retractions and four errata.

Some of our finds were published this year, and some are a few years old. Most are due to duplication; one is due to “use of a dataset without ethical approval.” Chan — now the Associate Master and Chief of Students at the University of Macau — is the first author on all but one of the papers.

We’ll start with the most recent errata. Three of Chan’s articles in the Journal of Clinical Nursing have errata notes published online in July of this year, all noting that the authors used elements of some of Chan’s other articles. Here’s the erratum note for “Exploring risk factors for depression among older men residing in Macau:” 

Continue reading More retractions, errata discovered for nursing researcher

University finds “preponderance of evidence” of misconduct by child psychiatrist

JPN39_2_CoverAn investigation at the University of Illinois at Chicago has found “a preponderance of evidence” that a psychiatrist who has received millions of dollars in federal funding has committed misconduct.

One paper co-authored by Mani Pavuluri, the director of the Pediatric Mood Disorders Program, has been officially retracted so far, from the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience. UIC has requested that two others be retracted as well. None of the child participants in the three papers received medication as part of the research, but the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience paper was pulled after the investigation found that Pavuluri had misrepresented how much medication some children had taken outside of the study.

On Tuesday, after we’d learned of the first retraction, Pavuluri told Retraction Watch that she didn’t “want mountains made out of molehills,” but admitted to “a bit of an [Institutional Review Board] infraction.”

The retraction note from the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience lays the blame squarely on Pavuluri’s shoulders:

Continue reading University finds “preponderance of evidence” of misconduct by child psychiatrist

Journal reviewing papers by researcher who sexually assaulted disabled author

Screen Shot 2015-11-03 at 12.10.00 PMA disability journal is “paying significant attention” to papers authored by Anna Stubblefield, a former Rutgers researcher recently convicted of sexually assaulting a disabled man who participated in her research.

Stubblefield was convicted of sexually assaulting “DJ,” a man in his thirties with cerebral palsy who was “declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler,” according to a lengthy piece in the New York Times. Stubblefield and DJ published papers in Disability Studies Quarterly; in one, Stubblefield describes a controversial technique which she claimed helped DJ communicate. But when she eventually used the technique to say DJ was in love with her, his family took her to court, and she was convicted of aggravated sexual assault.

Here is the note from Disability Studies Quarterly, which was published this morning:  Continue reading Journal reviewing papers by researcher who sexually assaulted disabled author

Sex addiction article retracted, republished

Screen Shot 2015-10-14 at 2.01.12 PMAn open-access journal with a speedy peer review process has been having some issues with a retracted article on the biology of sex addiction.

Here’s the simple timeline of events: “Hypersexuality Addiction and Withdrawal: Phenomenology, Neurogenetics and Epigenetics,” a review article, was published by Cureus in July, following a two-day peer review. In the weeks that followed, the paper received a number of criticisms. So the journal quietly corrected it, then issued a formal correction, then retracted the paper — and now, finally, has republished it. The editor of the journal, Stanford professor emeritus John Adler, admitted the “decision was dumb” to initially fix the article without an alert, but it was ultimately doomed by “political” issues — namely, a larger debate over whether or not “sex addiction” exists at all.

We’ll start with the retraction. According to the note, it stems from the mistaken characterization of how sex addition — “hypersexuality” — is described in the current “bible” of psychiatry:

Continue reading Sex addiction article retracted, republished

Authors retract highly cited Nature quantum dot letter after discovering error

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Authors have retracted a highly cited Nature letter that purported to discover a much sought-after, stable light source from quantum dots, after they realized the light was actually coming from another source: the glass the dots were affixed to.

When the paper “Non-blinking semiconductor nanocrystals” was published in 2009, it received some media coverage, such as in Chemistry World. That’s partly because very small sources of “non-blinking” light could have wide-ranging, big-picture applications, author Todd Krauss, a physical chemist at the University of Rochester, told us:

Off the top of my head, a quantum computer. Quantum cryptography is another one. People want a stable light source that obeys quantum physics, instead of classic physics.

The retraction note, published Wednesday, explains how the researchers found out the effect was coming from the glass, not quantum dots:

Continue reading Authors retract highly cited Nature quantum dot letter after discovering error