by journal – Page 8 – Retraction Watch

NASA researchers retract Nature paper on climate change and evapotranspiration

The authors of a 2021 Nature paper on how climate change might affect the amount of evaporation from the earth’s land surface have retracted the article after learning of a crucial error in their analysis.

The crux of the paper, titled “A 10 per cent increase in global land evapotranspiration from 2003 to 2019,” was the finding that:

Variability in global land evapotranspiration is positively correlated with El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The main driver of the trend, however, is increasing land temperature. Our findings provide an observational constraint on global land evapotranspiration, and are consistent with the hypothesis that global evapotranspiration should increase in a warming climate.

In other words, according to the authors – from a pair of NASA labs in California and Maryland – the rate of evapotranspiration over that 17-year-period was twice as high as previous estimates. As the lead author, Madeleine Pascolini-Campbell, said in this press release (Wayback Machine link) from NASA:

Science issues expression of concern nine months after one of its reporters uncovers potential misconduct

Science has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on the harmful effects of ocean acidification on fish and coral after the first author of the article was accused of fabricating data in the study and other research.

The article, “Chemically mediated behavior of recruiting corals and fishes: A tipping point that may limit reef recovery,” was written by a group at Georgia Institute of Technology led by Danielle Dixson, then a post-doc at the university. Dixson has since moved to the University of Delaware, Lewes, where she runs her own lab studying corals.

The work – cited 171 times so far, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science – received immediate challenge from other researchers, who questioned the validity of the findings.

Paper overestimated risk of COVID-19 to endangered apes

Carine06 from UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2021 article with dire news for mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park about the prospects of extinction on the spikes of SARS-CoV-2 after finding a fatal error in their model of the outbreak.

The article, “Exploring the potential effect of COVID-19 on an endangered great ape,” appeared in October in Scientific Reports and was written by a group at the University of Southern Denmark and the the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, in Atlanta. The Fund has been concerned – for good reason – about the potential of respiratory illnesses to decimate populations of great apes, whose social nature can foster transmission of infections.

According to the abstract of the paper:

‘Amateur bullshit’ is the price to pay for democratizing scholarly publishing, says editor

A case of author’s remorse immediately after publication of her paper has the editor of the journal calling “bullshit” on the decision to retract the work.

The paper, “Stopping the Revolving Door: Reducing 30-Day Psychiatric Readmissions With Post-discharge Telephone Calls,” was written by a trio of authors from AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, in southern New Jersey and appeared in Cureus on January 12.

Shortly after publication, the named first author, Antonia Phillip, contacted the journal to repudiate the paper. According to the retraction notice, dated January 14:

PNAS retracts paper that contributed to lung cancer trial

National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center

A paper that was the subject of a four-page correction in 2018, and which helped inform a now-halted clinical trial of a drug for lung cancer, has been retracted following an institutional investigation concluded that one of the researchers had falsified the data in that article and at least four others.

And we have learned that Springer Nature should be acting on a different article by the researcher shortly, and has just begun an investigation of yet another.

The PNAS article, which appeared in 2015, was written by Takashi Nojiri, formerly of Osaka University and the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Research Institute, in Japan. As we reported in June, an August 2020 report from National University Corporation Osaka University and National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Hospital concluded that Nojiri committed:

Astronomer apologizes, withdraws preprint slated for PNAS about impact in the field after criticism

A prominent astronomer at the University of Texas in Austin has withdrawn a preprint and a published paper after critics accused him of perpetuating inequality in the field, saying he is more sorry “than words can say” about the matter and that he is taking a hiatus from his work to allow the controversy to subside. He is also putting publication of a book he wrote on the subject on hold.

At the heart of the controversy was an article by John Kormendy, a specialist in black holes, titled “Metrics of research impact in astronomy: Predicting later impact from metrics measured 10-15 years after the PhD.”

Kormendy published the work last week as a preprint on arXiv before it appeared in PNAS but after he’d received word from the journal that it had been accepted.

According to a summary of the article:

Lancet retracts 10-year-old case report

The Lancet has retracted a decade-old case report by a group from Japan after concluding that the authors misrepresented the originality of the work.

The paper was a case report, titled “Hidden Harm,” by a team at Nihon University School of Medicine in Tokyo. The authors described a 46-year-old woman with a history of self-harming behaviors they ultimately attributed to a previously undetected neuroendocrine tumor called a pheochromocytoma.

According to the retraction notice, however, the tumor wasn’t the only thing about the paper that was hidden. The authors also misled the Lancet when they said they hadn’t published about the case when they submitted their writeup about the case — a fact unknown to the journal until this summer:

Leading marine ecologist, now White House official, violated prominent journal’s policies in handling now-retracted paper

A marine ecologist at Oregon State University now helping lead the Biden White House’s climate and environmental initiatives violated the conflict of interest policy at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences when she edited a paper in the journal last year.

Jane Lubchenco, who served as administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 2009 to 2013 under President Obama, joined the White House in March of this year as Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Last year, while still at Oregon State, Lubchenco, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, was the handling editor for an article titled “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” by Reniel Cabral and Steven Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and colleagues. Such marine protected areas, aka MPAs, have come under scrutiny, as Yale’s E360 noted in 2019:

Criticism engulfs paper claiming an asteroid destroyed Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah

Scientific Reports is taking heat on social media and from data sleuths for publishing a paper implying that the Biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah might have been the retelling of the devastation wrought by an exploding asteroid in or around the year 1,650 BCE.

To the lay reader — and to peer reviewers and editors, evidently — the article, “A Tunguska sized airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam a Middle Bronze Age city in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea,” makes at least a superficially plausible and scientifically rigorous case.

According to the abstract:

Researcher leaves Wistar Institute as he retracts a Nature paper

A group of researchers at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia have retracted a paper in Nature for data discrepancies and inconsistencies — as well as missing data. And one of the corresponding authors has left the institution, Retraction Watch has learned.

The paper, “IspH inhibitors kill Gram-negative bacteria and mobilize immune clearance,” was published in December 2020 and has been cited 7 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Here’s the notice:

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