As Retraction Watch readers know, reporting on the same data more than once — without notifying editors and readers — is bad for the scientific record and can lead to a retraction. Apparently, in the rush to publish findings about the coronavirus pandemic, some researchers are doing just that.
According to an editorial in JAMA today by editor in chief Howard Bauchner and two deputy editors, Robert Golub and Jody Zylke:
Continue reading Keeping coronavirus numbers straight: JAMA sounds an alarm
A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move
a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.
The 2019 article, “Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale,” appeared in Scientific Reports and was written by a group of authors from the UK, Russia and Azerbaijan. The first author was Valentina Zharkova, a mathematician/astrophysicist at Northumbria University, whose group reported having received funding for the work from the U.S. Air Force and the Russian Science Foundation.
The paper purported to find that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field are making the earth hotter:
Continue reading Heavily criticized paper blaming the sun for global warming is retracted
Leonard Zelig, meet Zvi Herzig.
The journal Circulation has issued an expression of concern about a 2015 letter, putatively written by Herzig, in which the author poked holes in a review article about e-cigarettes.
According to the EoC, however, Herzig, like Zelig, may be a bit of a chameleon.
Continue reading Letter on vaping science paper earns expression of concern because author made up a degree
The authors of a 2019 Nature paper on hydrology have retracted it after commenters pointed out a slew of errors with the work.
The article, “Global analysis of streamflow response to forest management,” was written by Jaivime Evaristo, of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University, in The Netherlands, and Jeffrey McDonnell, of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada. In it, Evaristo and McDonnell produced an estimate of the effects of deforestation on the volume of the world’s rivers.
Their conclusion: “forest removal can lead to increases in streamflow that are around 3.4 times greater than the mean annual runoff of the Amazon River” — nearly enough to double the volume of all the world’s rivers in total.
Disturbing (for those of us not in the field) thought experiment aside, the estimate turns out to be off the mark.
The retraction notice states:
Continue reading Authors retract Nature paper on dramatic increases in streamflow from deforestation
Until yesterday, the New England Journal of Medicine had retracted only 24 papers. Now that tally is 25.
As our Ivan Oransky reports at Medscape:
Continue reading NEJM paper retracted for “inaccuracies in the analytic database and data analyses”
The authors of a 2018 paper on how much carbon soil can store have retracted the work after concluding that their analysis was fatally flawed.
The article, “Soil carbon stocks are underestimated in mountainous regions,” appeared in the journal Geoderma. Its authors are affiliated with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research.
According to the abstract of the paper:
Continue reading Digging deeper: Authors retract soil paper so “the error we made does not propagate”
A prominent researcher at Georgia State University who had two papers retracted and eight subjected to expressions of concern for problematic images last year is now up to nine retractions.
Ming-Hui Zou is the common author on all nine retracted papers, which were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry from 2003 and 2010. Of the eight papers originally subjected to expressions of concern, seven have been retracted, and one has been updated to a correction.
Here is a typical retraction notice, for “Nicotine-induced activation of AMP-activated protein kinase inhibits fatty acid synthase in 3T3L1 adipocytes: A role for oxidant stress,” referring to image duplication, and an offer by the authors to “publish an amended figure or to repeat the experiments,” which the journal declined:
Continue reading Georgia State researcher up to nine retractions disagrees with the journal
The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) has retracted nine papers in bulk by a group of cancer researchers in New York led by the prominent scientist Andrew Dannenberg.
The work of Dannenberg’s group at Weill Cornell — and the figures in particular — has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for more than two years.
The group also lost an article more than a decade ago in The Lancet, bringing their total so far to 10. Cancer Discovery subjected a paper to an expression of concern in August. Much of the tainted work was funded by grants from the U.S. government, as well as from funding authorities in other countries.
According to the notice for 2014’s “p53 protein regulates Hsp90 ATPase activity and thereby Wnt signaling by modulating Aha1 expression“:
Continue reading Prominent cancer researcher loses nine papers, making 10
A Caltech researcher who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has retracted a 2019 paper after being unable to replicate the results.
Frances Arnold, who won half of the 2018 prize for her work on the evolution of enzymes, tweeted the news earlier today:
A team of researchers in Saudi Arabia, led by an ex-pat from Johns Hopkins University, has lost three papers for problems with the images in their articles.
The three retractions pushed the journal — which has become a “major retraction engine” for reasons we explain here and here — over 100 for 2019.
In December, PLOS ONE retrcated three papers by the group, led by Michael DeNiro, of the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital in Riyadh. First, the journal retracted a 2011 article, “Inhibition of reactive gliosis prevents neovascular growth in the mouse model of oxygen-induced retinopathy,” the co-authors were Falah H Al-Mohanna and Futwan A Al-Mohanna. According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading PLOS ONE retracts a paper first flagged in 2015 — and breaks the 100 retraction barrier for 2019
