by journal – Page 16 – Retraction Watch

‘Science by tweet’ prompts expression of concern, irking authors

The leader of an international team of genetics researchers is seething after a journal responded to critical tweets about their paper by issuing an expression of concern.

The article, “Exome sequencing in multiple sclerosis families identifies 12 candidate genes and nominates biological pathways for the genesis of disease,” was published in PLOS Genetics in early June 2019 by a group led by Carles Vilariño-Güell, of the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Less than a week after publication, according to Vilariño-Güell, the journal notified him that:

Authors retract paper claiming religious upbringing is linked to less generosity

Over at Psychology Today, Tyler VanderWeele reports on the case of a paper that earned significant headlines — and has now been retracted:

In 2015, a paper by Jean Decety and co-authors reported that children who were brought up religiously were less generous. The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American. As it turned out, however, the paper by Decety was wrong.

VanderWeele notes that Azim Shariff, of the University of California, Irvine, asked Decety for the data, and

Geology paper has a rocky road, is now retracted

The authors of a 2019 paper in PLOS One on rocks in China have retracted the article for “misrepresentation of the results and data.”

The article, “Impacts of rock properties on Danxia landform formation based on lithological experiments at Kongtongshan National Geopark, northwest China,” was written by a group from Sun Yat-sen University and Hainan University. The researchers declared that:

Did the IPCC’s new oceans report mean to cite a now-retracted paper?

A major new report about the dramatic warming of the oceans cites a 2018 Nature paper on the topic that was retracted earlier this week — the same day, in fact, that the report dropped.

But one of the authors of that paper tells Retraction Watch that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, released September 25, must have meant to cite a different paper by the same authors.

The report concluded that:

It is virtually certain that the global ocean has warmed unabated since 1970 and has taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system (high confidence). Since 1993, the rate of ocean warming has more than doubled (likely).

In a section on global carbon burden, the document states that:

PLOS ONE retracts perfume study when data don’t pass the sniff test

A pair of perfume researchers in England have lost a 2019 paper on what makes a scent appealing because, ahem, something about the data didn’t smell quite right.

The article was titled “Social success of perfumes,” and it appeared in July in PLOS ONE. There was a press release and a university writeup about the paper — but not, we should note, about the retraction.

The authors were Vaiva Vasiliauskaite and Tim S. Evans, of the Theoretical Physics Group and Centre for Complexity Science at Imperial College London.

The abstract of the study stated that:

Nature paper on ocean warming retracted

Nature is retracting a 2018 paper which found that the oceans are warming much faster than predicted by previous models of climate change.

The article, “Quantification of ocean heat uptake from changes in atmospheric O2 and CO2 composition,” appeared at last October but quickly drew the attention of an influential critic who said the analysis was flawed.

The authors agreed, and within three weeks the paper received the following update:

Nature walks back mentorship prize for Spanish scientist with nine retractions

Nature is rescinding an award to a Spanish researcher whose group has at least nine retractions for problems with their published images.

The journal in 2017 gave Carlos López-Otín, of the University of Oviedo, its mid-career achievement mentoring prize for Spanish scientists — along with a physicist from Barcelona — citing:

the ability of these scientists to instil confidence in self-doubting trainees, and of their motivational skills.

But two years – and a slew of retractions — later, it seems Nature’s own doubts about López-Otín’s skills as a mentor were too great to ignore.

“Based on the literature, we have no reason not to believe to the authors.”

If you’re a fan of the post hoc fallacy, this post is for you. If not, we hope you’ll bear with us anyway.

In June, we reported on an expression of concern in the Journal of Cell Science for a 2006 paper “several bands…in Fig. 5 look very similar.” At the time, we noted that while the expression of concern claimed that the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, the authors’ institution, “does not have a suitable body to investigate this matter,” it in fact does.

After hearing that from us, Sharon Ahmad, the journal’s managing editor, approached Carlos Petrini, the director of bioethics at the ISS, who proceeded to investigate the work. Petrini has now sent us the summary of that investigation, which we’ve made available here.

‘Text neck’ — aka ‘horns’ — paper earns corrections

A highly controversial 2018 paper suggesting that too much bent-neck staring at your cell phone could sprout, in the words of one of the authors, a “horn” on the back of your head is — perhaps unsurprisingly — getting corrected.

The article, “Prominent exostosis projecting from the occipital squama more substantial and prevalent in young adult than older age groups,” which appeared in Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports in February 2018, received scads of media coverage earlier this year. The stories initially were alarmist but grew increasingly skeptical as journalists and experts began poking holes in the authors’ claims.

The corrected paper doesn’t completely walk back the association, but it definitely mutes the assertions significantly. For example, the original discussion section included this passage:

Northwestern researcher has four more papers retracted, making five

A pathologist in Chicago has lost five papers for image manipulation and other problems.

The first retraction for Yashpal Kanwar, of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, appeared in 2013, for a review article published earlier that year in the American Journal of Physiology Renal Physiology. According to the notice:

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