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”
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
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
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
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
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
The authors of a 2019 paper on the properties of an aluminum alloy have retracted the work because, well, it was pretty much wrong.
The article, “Effect of ultrasonic temperature and output power on microstructure and mechanical properties of as-cast 6063 aluminum alloy,” appeared in the March issue of the Journal of Alloys and Compounds, an Elsevier title. The authors are affiliated with Taiyuan University of Science and Technology in China.
According to the abstract:
Continue reading Aluminum paper foiled by slew of errors
A materials scientist in Australia, by way of Iran, has recently had five papers retracted for duplicating his prior work, and the reader who brought the issue to publishers’ attention says it could affect some 100 articles.
Ali Nazari, now of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, was at Islamic Azad University in Iran when he published the five papers in Energy and Buildings, an Elsevier title, in 2010 and 2011. The retractions came sometime after January of this year, when an anonymous reader contacted Elsevier about dozens of Nazari’s papers.
A typical notice, for “Physical, mechanical and thermal properties of concrete in different curing media containing ZnO2 nanoparticles,” reads:
Continue reading Materials scientist up to five retractions as publishers investigate dozens of his papers
The ancients had a thing for hybrids (think animals, not cars): half goat-half humans, horses with human torsos, winged horses and lions, you get the picture. But a chicken-cow mix wasn’t on that list … until now.
A group of researchers in Brazil has lost a paper in a veterinary journal for trying to reuse data from a poultry study in their paper on herpesvirus infections in cattle.
The article, “Bovine Herpesvirus 5 promotes mitochondrial dysfunction in cultured bovine monocyte-derived macrophages and not affect virus replication,” appeared in February in the journal Veterinary Microbiology.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Cock and bull story leads to retraction of bovine herpesvirus paper
A spectroscopy journal has issued an expression of concern over a 2014 paper by researchers in Iran on the amount of the sleep hormone melatonin in pistachios after German authorities — prompted by a journalist’s questions — concluded that the analysis was in error.
The article, “Expression of concern to spectrofluorimetric determination of melatonin in kernels of four different pistacia varieties after ultrasound-assisted solid-liquid extraction,” was published in Spectrochimica Acta A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy, an Elsevier journal.
The authors, from the University of Kerman, reported: Continue reading Journalist’s questions lead to expression of concern for paper on melatonin and pistachios
