Category: harvard

Several sports physicians at Harvard have earned two retractions and await another after publishing work based on “unreliable” survey data that was misrepresented in the papers.  

The articles, “Running-related injuries in middle school cross-country runners: Prevalence and characteristics of common injuries” and “Prevalence and factors associated with bone stress injury in middle school runners,” were published in the journal of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, PM&R, in 2021. The papers have been cited a total of 17 times since publication, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Identical retraction notices issued in November this year state the decision followed “a joint review by the authors’ institutions which identified the dataset of this article to be unreliable and not accurately represented in the paper.” The institutions did not find the authors to be responsible for the problematic data, but recommended the papers be retracted, according to the notices. Several of the authors are affiliated with Harvard Medical School, which did not respond to a request for comment. 

Continue reading Third retraction imminent for Harvard-affiliated sports research group

A deluge of bizarre and malicious emails targeting a professor at Harvard Medical School has left him reeling, while raising questions about the smear campaign’s use of a popular online forum where scientists publicly critique research.

Joseph Loscalzo sent a letter to PubPeer, the online forum, in September describing an “aggressive cyberstalking and harassment campaign” that “has relentlessly targeted myself and my colleagues” for many months with “misleading and often inaccurate comments.” He called PubPeer “a vehicle” for the attacks, alleging anonymous comments raising concerns about at least 15 papers were posted “in bad faith” and then used to defame and badger him in emails to other researchers, journals, and universities.

Loscalzo, physician-in-chief emeritus and former chair of the department of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, asked PubPeer to remove the offending comments and impose a six-month moratorium on anonymous posts about his work. The letter was obtained by Retraction Watch.

Continue reading Cyberstalking pits Harvard professor against PubPeer

Two journals have dismissed allegations of research misconduct leveled against a  political scientist at Harvard in an anonymous memo that labeled his work “pseudoscience.” 

The 2018 memo signed by “Social Scientists for Research Integrity” – which does not have an internet presence that we could find –  makes claims of academic misconduct against Ryan Enos, who denies any wrongdoing. The journals that published two of Enos’ papers singled out in the memo decided to let the articles stand after investigating the charges. A committee at Harvard University, where Enos is a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies, also reviewed the claims and dismissed them. 

The allegations primarily concerned purported manipulation of data in Enos’ 2015 article, “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior,” published in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS). The paper has been cited 120 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Continue reading Journals dismiss claims that Harvard researcher’s work on race is ‘pseudoscience’

Citing an investigation by Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, two journals last week retracted five articles by Edward Whang, an associate professor of surgery at the school. 

The journals, Oncogene and Surgery, both refer to problems with images of Western blots that could not be resolved because “no underlying research data” were available, according to the investigation.

Questions have loomed over Whang’s research for a decade, and more than 20 of his studies have been flagged on PubPeer for possible image problems. As one commenter wrote in 2014 about one of the now-retracted papers, “It is perhaps fortunate that figure assembly and liver surgery require such unrelated skill sets.” 

It is not clear how many of Whang’s papers were affected by the investigation. We reached out to Harvard Medical School for more details, but it declined to share information about the investigation. 

Continue reading Harvard surgeon has five papers pulled following internal investigation

A group of cancer researchers once all based at Harvard have earned a retraction after acknowledging data duplication “errors” in an article published more than eight years ago. 

The paper, “Synthetic lethality of combined glutaminase and Hsp90 inhibition in mTORC1-driven tumor cells,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in December 2014. It has been cited 52 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The study informed a clinical trial from Infinity Pharmaceuticals on a drug for people with lung cancer, according to Dimensions, a scientific research database. 

Starting in November 2020, the paper drew scrutiny from commenters on PubPeer. The posts include claims of duplications in several of the paper’s figures; none of the authors has responded to the 10 comments on the site. 

Continue reading Former Harvard researchers lose PNAS paper for reusing data

The journal that published a hotly contested article by a professor at Harvard Law School arguing that Korean women forced into sexual slavery during World War II were willing prostitutes has reaffirmed a prior expression of concern over the paper, but stopped short of retracting the article.

However, the International Review of Law and Economics encourages readers of the article, by Mark Ramseyer, to “also consult the comments published in IRLE and in other venues for the broader historical perspective.”

Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut who has written extensively about Japan’s wartime system of military sexual slavery, called the statement “wishy-washy.”  

“For the denialists, this is a victory,” she told Retraction Watch. “The IRLE decision is rotten at the core.”

Continue reading Scholar calls journal decision on ‘comfort women’ paper ‘rotten at the core’

A group of eye researchers is up to eight retractions for problems with the ethics approval for their studies. 

The studies appeared in three journals, although one, Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science (IOVS), is pulling six studies. 

The senior author on all eight publications was Jorge G. Arroyo, a former faculty member at Harvard. Arroyo’s LinkedIn page now lists him as being with Boston Vision, a private medical practice. 

Here’s the notice for the six retractions in IOVS, which covers abstracts submitted to the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology between 2019 and 2021:

Continue reading Harvard eye researchers have eight papers retracted for lack of ethical approval

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review has retracted an article which claimed – or misclaimed, as the case may be – that an African American advocacy movement discouraged Blacks from voting for Democratic politicians and suppressed news about the Covid-19 pandemic.

The article, “Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news,” appeared in the Special Issue on Disinformation in the 2020 Elections published in January by the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

ADOS is short for American Descendants of Slavery, an online movement that calls for reparations for slavery in the United States. The movement – which uses the hashtag #ADOS on social media – was founded by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore.

The article was written by Mutale Nkonde, the founding CEO of AI For the People, and co-authors including several affiliated with MoveOn, a progressive  political organization. 

According to the abstract of the paper, which is no longer available online: 

Continue reading Harvard journal retracts paper on Black advocacy in elections

If you need a reminder of how slowly the wheels of justice grind, here’s one.

Earlier this month,  Sam W. Lee agreed to pay the U.S. government $215,000 to settle allegations that the former Harvard researcher had made false claims in a grant application.

It turns out that at least one skeptical researcher had notified journals and regulators about his concerns over the veracity of some of Lee’s other published findings back in 2011. 

In July of that year, David Vaux, an Australian scientist and research ethicist now at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, wrote to Nature about a new paper by Lee with what he believed were several critical flaws. According to Vaux, multiple colleagues of his had raised questions about the article, “Selective killing of cancer cells by a small molecule targeting the stress response to ROS,” which the journal had published earlier that month. 

Among the criticisms, wrote Vaux, a member of the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization, were: 

Continue reading The decade-long saga capped by a $215,000 settlement with the US government

A former Harvard researcher has agreed to pay $215,000 to settle allegations that he used bogus data in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health — and the teaching hospital where he worked has already repaid more than $900,000 in grant funds.

The settlement, of which we were just made aware, was announced on August 6,  six days before a lawyer for the researcher, Sam W. Lee, asked us to take down a post about his client’s problematic publications.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, Lee knowingly made false claims when in June 2014 he submitted the “allegedly inauthentic data” as part of NIH grant R01 CA195534-01, titled “p53 survival target DDR1 kinase in DNA damage response and carcinogenesis”:

Continue reading False claims allegations cost Mass General, former Harvard researcher more than $1 million