Category: elsevier

Covid-19 and sex? Rapid-fire acceptance leads to hasty withdrawal of paper

The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has taken down a letter on whether people should abstain from sex during the coronavirus pandemic, but the editor says the article is not being retracted. 

Meanwhile, researchers in France have retracted a paper in which they’d claimed to have found  replication of the virus that causes Covid-19 in the dialysis fluid of a patient with kidney disease. Again, hasty publication appears to be involved. We’ve been tracking retractions of Covid-19 articles on our website, and, let’s just say, the list is almost certainly a trailing indicator of the robustness of the science here — as it is with retractions during any period.

Back to the letter. “COVID-19: Should sexual practices be discouraged during the pandemic?” was written by ZhiQiang Yin, of the Department of Dermatology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, in China. Yin submitted the article on April 14. The journal accepted it on the 16th and published it on April 30th. 

According to the notice: 

Continue reading Covid-19 and sex? Rapid-fire acceptance leads to hasty withdrawal of paper

A year after a university asked two Elsevier journals to retract papers, they haven’t

How long should a retraction take?

As Retraction Watch readers may recall, that’s a question we ask often. In 2018, for example, we wrote a post noting that nearly two years after the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had requested retractions, the journals had done nothing. Some of the papers have since been retracted.

We have occasion to ask the question again, about a different case at the University of Maryland. 

Continue reading A year after a university asked two Elsevier journals to retract papers, they haven’t

Elsevier investigating hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 paper

Didier Raoult

Elsevier has weighed in on the handling of a controversial paper about the utility of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 infection, defending the rigor of the peer review process for the article in the face of concerns that the authors included the top editor of the journal that published the work. 

On April 3, as we reported, the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy issued an expression of concern (without quite calling it that) about the paper, which had appeared in March in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, which the ISAC publishes, along with Elsevier. According to the society, the article, by the controversial French scientist  Didier Raoult, of the University of Marseille, and colleagues:

Continue reading Elsevier investigating hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 paper

“We thank Dr. Elisabeth Bik for drawing the irregularities to the authors’ attention.” A sleuth earns recognition.

Elisabeth Bik

A trio of researchers in Argentina is up to three retractions, and may well lose even more papers, for doctoring their images. And, in an unusual move, one of the leading data sleuths is getting credit for her work helping to out the problematic figures. 

One article, “Apocynin-induced nitric oxide production confers antioxidant protection in maize leaves,” appeared in 2009 in the Journal of Plant Physiology, published by Elsevier. The authors were affiliated with the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. 

As the retraction notice states: 

Continue reading “We thank Dr. Elisabeth Bik for drawing the irregularities to the authors’ attention.” A sleuth earns recognition.

A mystery: “none of the authors listed had any involvement with or knowledge of the article”

Photo by Bilal Kamoon via flickr

Even after close to 10 years of writing about retractions every day, some days we read retraction notices that make us say, “huh?”

Today is one of those days.

Take this retraction notice for “High-resolution ultrasound images in gouty arthritis to evaluate relationship between tophi and bone erosion,” a paper first published in Future Generation Computer Systems last year:

Continue reading A mystery: “none of the authors listed had any involvement with or knowledge of the article”

‘I shot at my own foot with my own gun’: Journal rebuffs attempt at un-retraction

via Flickr

An Elsevier journal has denied the efforts of a group of researchers — well, most of them, anyway — to reverse a retraction after having agreed to the move in the first place.

The dispute centers on a 2018 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports titled  “Association between low-testosterone and kidney stones in US men: The national health and nutrition examination survey 2011–2012” — which, as the title implies, found that:

Continue reading ‘I shot at my own foot with my own gun’: Journal rebuffs attempt at un-retraction

Software error grounds pigeon-smarts paper

Source

Pigeons definitely get a bad rap. Some might consider them mere rats with wings, purveyors of pestilence, distributors of dung, but rock doves aren’t, well, as dumb as their name might suggest. Pigeons are perhaps the world’s most accurate homers, they seem to have an innate knack for game theory and they can detect breast cancer in mammograms better than many doctors. 

So when researchers in Germany reported in 2017 that pigeons were as adept, if not better, than people in multitasking, the findings seemed plausible. The study, which appeared in Current Biology, garnered a bit of media attention, including this piece in The Scientist, and has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics Web of Science.

Turns out, that was a flight of fancy.

Continue reading Software error grounds pigeon-smarts paper

Author protests as Elsevier retracts nine papers for fake peer review

Christos Damalas

An agriculture researcher has lost nine papers from Elsevier journals for “illegitimate reviewer reports.”

The researcher, Christos Damalas, is, well, irked.

The journals included Chemosphere, Crop Protection, Land Use Policy, and Science of the Total Environment, and the papers were all published in 2017 and 2018, with Damalas as corresponding author and co-authors from Iran and Pakistan. Together, the nine papers have been cited about 75 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Knowledge.

Here’s a typical notice, this one from Crop Protection:

Continue reading Author protests as Elsevier retracts nine papers for fake peer review

‘The problem is that there is no IL-26 gene in the mouse’ — an exasperated letter leads to a retraction

via Flickr

A group of ophthalmology researchers in China got caught trying to pull the wool over the eyes of readers by falsely claiming to have used a therapy that doesn’t exist. 

As its title would indicate, the article, “Anti-angiogenic effect of Interleukin-26 in oxygen-induced retinopathy mice via inhibiting NFATc1-VEGF pathway,” by a team from Jinhua Municipal Central Hospital in Zhejiang, purported to show that IL-26 could prevent the growth of new blood vessels in mice with damaged retinas. 

Per the abstract of the paper, which appeared in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC): 

Continue reading ‘The problem is that there is no IL-26 gene in the mouse’ — an exasperated letter leads to a retraction

Doing the right thing: Psychology researchers retract paper three days after learning of coding error

Gesine Dreisbach

We always hesitate to call retraction statements “models” of anything, but this one comes pretty close to being a paragon. 

Psychology researchers in Germany and Scotland have retracted their 2018 paper in Acta Psychologica after learning of a coding error in their work that proved fatal to the results. That much is routine. Remarkable in this case is how the authors lay out what happened next.

The study, “Auditory (dis-)fluency triggers sequential processing adjustments:”

Continue reading Doing the right thing: Psychology researchers retract paper three days after learning of coding error