An Elsevier journal has retracted more than two dozen Covid-19 papers by a researcher in Malta with a fondness for Star Trek after determining that the articles did not meet its standards for publication.
The move comes several months after we reported that Hampton Gaddy, a student at the University of Oxford, had raised questions about more than 100 articles written by a pediatric cardiologist named Victor Grech. The papers appeared in Early Human Development (EHD), which Grech managed to turn into something of a vanity press — including for papers about how the lessons of Star Trek shed light on everything from the evolving role of nurses to the horrors of Nazi doctors.
As Gaddy pointed out to Elsevier last December, Grech has written at least 113 papers in EHD, 57 as sole author:
Researchers in Iran have lost their 2019 paper on nanofluids after the journal learned that their list of authors included an engineer at the University of Texas who had nothing to do with the work.
Batting cleanup was David Ross, whose affiliation is given as the University of Texas at Austin. A David Ross — no, not the Cubs manager and former Major League Baseball catcher — was on the faculty of UT from 1966 until his retirement in 2003.
An Elsevier journal has retracted a 2020 paper on the heritability of temperament that a prominent critic derided as “transparently ridiculous,” after concluding that the peer review process — which it initially defended — was not up to snuff.
The journal, Meta Gene, says it has changed that way it considers manuscripts to “ensure that this” — read, accept bullshit papers — won’t happen again. And, in a further and rather endearing admission of culpability, it apologized to the authors for accepting their manuscript despite a complete lack of “scientific data.”
Meanwhile, one of the authors of the paper tells Retraction Watch that he “would like to thank you and also Elsevier that all these discussions” have helped popularize the work.
The article, “Temperament gene inheritance,” by the husband-wife team of Azer Israfil, of Mikhwa General Hospital, in Saudi Arabia, and Natiga Israfil, of OsmanGazi University, in Turkey, appeared in September.
At the risk of breaking the Fourth Wall, here’s a story about peer reviews that weren’t — and shouldn’t have been.
Since mid-February, four different Elsevier journals have invited me to review papers about COVID-19. Now, it is true that we will occasionally review — often with our researcher, Alison Abritis — papers on retractions and closely related issues. And at the risk of creating more work for ourselves, we often wonder who exactly reviewed some of the papers we see published, given how badly they mangle retraction data.
These manuscripts, however, had nothing whatsoever to do with retractions. In case you need evidence, here it is:
A year and a half after its publication, the paper is the subject of two critical blog posts, one by Nick Brown and one by Ethan and Sarah Ludwin-Peery. In the days since we first shared embargoed drafts of those posts with Hall, he and the sleuths engaged in a back and forth, and Brown and the Ludwin-Peerys now say they are satisfied that many of the major issues appear to have been resolved. They have also made changes to their posts, including adding responses from Hall.
In short, it seems like a great example of public post-publication peer review in action. For example, the Ludwin-Peerys write:
When we took a close look at these data, we originally found a number of patterns that we were unable to explain. Having communicated with the authors, we now think that while there are some strange choices in their analysis, most of these patterns can be explained…
In a draft of their post shared with us early last week — see “a note to readers” below — the Ludwin-Peerys said that some of the data in the study “really bothered” them. In particular, they write, the two groups of people studied — 20 received ultra-processed foods, while 20 were given an unprocessed diet — “report the same amount of change in body weight, the only difference being that one group gained weight and the other group lost it.” They were also surprised by the “pretty huge” correlation between weight changes and energy intake.
Brown’s draft post, which digs into the data, concludes:
An investigation into the work of a researcher at Western University “resulted in a clear determination of research misconduct,” according to a retraction notice, but details are scant.
Researchers who lost a paper derided by critics as anti-vaccine have republished their article in a different journal … owned by the same publisher (hint: rhymes with “smells of beer”).
As we reported in April 2019, the original article version of “Cognition and behavior in sheep repetitively inoculated with aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines or aluminum adjuvant only” appeared in November 2018 in Pharmacological Research.
Antivaccine advocates such as Celeste McGovern seized on the study, which also drew harsh criticism from Skeptical Raptor and Orac, who called it
The co-authors of a paper that claimed jade amulets might prevent COVID-19 have tried to distance themselves from the work, in a letter to the co-editor of the journal that published it.
In fact, the first author, Moses Bility of the University of Pittsburgh, says of his co-authors:
Researchers who’d submitted a paper to Social Science & Medicine on smoking in public places briefly lost their article after the journal had some confusion about an embargo they’d requested.
The editors of a journal that published a highly controversial paper on intelligent design say retraction is off the table, at least for the moment.
The drama involves an article in the September issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, an Elsevier title, titled “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems.” The authors, Steinar Thorvaldsen, of the University of Tromsø, Norway, and Ola Hössjer, a mathematician at Stockholm University in Sweden, tried to make the case that they saw evidence of a Master Builder in biological systems:
