by journal – Page 8 – Retraction Watch

Researchers forfeit $10,000 award when paper’s findings can’t be replicated

The authors of a prizewinning paper on how large financial institutions hedge risk have retracted their article and have returned the award after another researcher could not replicate the findings.

The paper, “Risk Management in Financial Institutions,” was published in 2019 in the Journal of Finance by a group from Duke University, in Durham, N.C., and HEC Paris, in France. In January 2021, the article received a 2020 Brattle Prize Distinguished Paper in Corporate Finance for the work, which has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The prize carries a $10,000 award.

But when Paul Guest, a finance scholar at King’s College London, in the United Kingdom, tried to replicate the study, he found he could not. In an article published earlier this month in the Journal of Finance, Guest detailed his approach, which revealed: “six discrepancies in [the article’s] reporting, coding, and data.”

According to the retraction notice, the authors say they are returning the Brattle Prize:

Paper likening human sperm to “playful otters” retracted

Everybody out of the pool.

The authors of a 2020 paper in Science Advances on how human sperm propel themselves in a corkscrew fashion like “playful otters” have retracted their article after concluding that their analysis didn’t support their conclusions.

The article, by Hermes Gadêlha, of the University of Bristol, in England, and several colleagues in Mexico, spawned significant coverage in the lay and science press — including this segment on NPR’s Science Friday and an article in Science (the work behind it was the subject of this YouTube video titled “The great sperm race”).

At the heart of the paper, “Human sperm uses asymmetric and anisotropic flagellar controls to regulate swimming symmetry and cell steering,” was the use of a technology called high-speed 3D microscopy to analyze sperm in motion. Per the abstract:

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.”

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