by journal – Page 10 – Retraction Watch

Authors yank ketamine study, hoping it will go away without attention, and journal obliges

The authors of a paper on the antidepressant effects of ketamine have retracted their article for a lack of reproducibility — but readers have no way of knowing that because the journal declined to say as much in the retraction notice.

If that sounds like a tale from the pages of the Journal of Neuroscience, that’s because it is. We’ve taken the journal to task over the years for its pitiful retraction notices, which seem to take the default position of saying absolutely nothing — even in cases where readers have good cause to be skeptical of the findings.

This time, however, the top editor told us that the notice should have said more but it “slipped through the cracks.”

Two retractions spotlight the ethical challenges of consent for case reports

Cureus has retracted a pair of case studies after the authors revealed that the informed consent they’d received from the patients had been revoked.

The fate of articles — both by authors in the United Kingdom — highlight the precariousness of papers that rely on consent from patients or, in one instance, their proxies.

One paper, “Failure of an Ancient Breast Implant Can Lead to Significant Morbidity,” described the case of a 90-year-old woman who ruptured a 60-year-old breast implant. (The first silicone breast implants arrived in 1962, so the 60-year-old prosthesis would have been among the earliest to be inserted.)

According to the retraction notice:

An author asked for multiple corrections to a paper. PLOS ONE decided to retract it.

After an author requested a slew of changes to a published paper, journal editors reviewed the study and spotted “additional concerns” that led to its retraction.

The study, titled “Pressure regulated basis for gene transcription by delta-cell micro-compliance modeled in silico: Biphenyl, bisphenol and small molecule ligand models of cell contraction-expansion,” was published in PLOS ONE on Oct. 6th, 2020. Its sole author was Hemant Sarin, a “freelance investigator in translational science and medicine” from Charleston, W.Va.

The study was pulled on March 25th with the following notice:

Paper about calculating ocean currents runs aground

A paper arguing that conventional methods of calculating ocean currents are flawed has been retracted because its own calculations ran aground.

The article, “A Complete Formula of Ocean Surface Absolute Geostrophic Current,” was written by Peter Chu, of the Naval Ocean Analysis and Prediction Laboratory, part of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Chu is a distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Oceanography at the NPS, whose mission is to:

Provide defense-focused graduate education, including classified studies and interdisciplinary research, to advance the operational effectiveness, technological leadership and warfighting advantage of the Naval service.

Chu’s paper, which appeared in Scientific Reports in January 2020, argued that:

Meet the medical resident who had his wife peer review five of his papers

The pantheon of husband-wife teams in science includes Marie and Pierre Curie, Gerty and Carl Cori, even Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, the founders of BioNTech, which collaborated with Pfizer on a Covid-19 vaccine.

To that list we hesitatingly add Ahmed Elkhouly and his spouse.

Elkhouly, a medical resident at St. Francis Medical Center, in Trenton, N.J., has lost five papers from the journal Cureus over a rather curious (ahem) domestic arrangement. According to the journal, Elkhouly used his unnamed wife as a peer reviewer on the articles, whose topics ranged from a case study on appendicitis to the neurological manifestations of COVID-19 infection.

Here’s the retraction notice for the COVID paper — which, by the way, raises our tally of retracted papers on the pandemic to 89:

Authors retract Nature Majorana paper, apologize for “insufficient scientific rigour”

Leo Kouwenhoven, credit De Sebastiaan ter Burg

The authors of a Nature paper that could have meant a great leap forward for Microsoft’s computing power are retracting it today after other researchers flagged serious problems in the work.

The researchers, led by Leo Kouwenhoven, a physicist at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who is also employed by Microsoft, published “Quantized Majorana conductance” on March 28, 2018. Along with work at other labs, the paper, which claimed to have found evidence for a long-elusive particle known as a Majorana fermion, prompted this quotation in a BBC story:

JAMA journal retracts, replaces paper linking nonionizing radiation to ADHD

A JAMA journal is retracting and replacing a 2020 paper which linked exposure to nonionizing radiation — think cellphones, Bluetooth devices and microwave ovens — during pregnancy to the risk for attention deficit disorder later in childhood after a reader pointed out a critical error in the study.

The paper, “Association Between Maternal Exposure to Magnetic Field Nonionizing Radiation During Pregnancy and Risk of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Offspring in a Longitudinal Birth Cohort,” appeared in JAMA Network Open and prompted a significant amount of media coverage, as well as activity on social media.

According to the authors:

Exclusive: Ohio State researcher kept six-figure job for more than a year after a misconduct finding

In 2016, Mingjun Zhang, a biomedical engineering researcher at The Ohio State University, along with collaborators, published a paper that explored the mechanism behind ivy’s impressive adhesive strength. In it, the authors claimed to report the genetic sequences of the proteins making up the adhesive.

The paper, entitled “Nanospherical arabinogalactan proteins are a key component of the high-strength adhesive secreted by English ivy” appeared in PNAS on June 7 and attracted some media attention.

But shortly after publication, an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter to OSU and PNAS simultaneously: “The authors have knowlingly [sic], intentionally, repeatedly, and substantially misrepresented data in order to publish the manuscript.”

The one that got away: Researchers retract fish genome paper after species mix-up

A group of researchers in Canada has retracted their 2018 paper on the gene sequence of the Arctic charr — a particularly hearty member of the Salmonidae family that includes salmon and trout — after discovering that the sample they’d used for their analysis was from a different kind of fish.

The paper, “The Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus) genome and transcriptome assembly,” appeared in PLOS ONE, and has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. Per the abstract:

On COVID-19 PCR testing paper, “the criteria for a retraction of the article have not been fulfilled”

Two months after announcing it would review an early 2020 paper on a way to detect the virus that causes COVID-19, a journal says that “the criteria for a retraction of the article have not been fulfilled.”

The review of the paper, “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR, by the journal, Eurosurveillance, was prompted by critiques including a petition by some 20 people around the world for what they called “scientific and methodological blemishes.” The senior author of the Eurosurveillance paper, Christian Drosten, of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, has been a leader in the fight against the pandemic, but has also predictably drawn criticism from those who oppose lockdowns.

On December 3, the journal issued a statement saying they were reviewing the allegations, which, as editors note in their statement dated yesterday:

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