by journal – Page 9 – Retraction Watch

Authors of a case report on COVID-19 in a prisoner say they ‘are unsatisfied with the quality of [their] work’

The authors of a 2020 case study of COVID-19 have retracted the work because they were “unsatisfied with the quality” of the work. Nor, judging from the retraction notice, should they — or the journal that published the report — be.

The article was titled “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Infection Mimicking as Pulmonary Tuberculosis in an Inmate” and was written by a group led by Hina Akbar, of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, in Memphis. According to the abstract:

Here, we describe a case of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a low prevalence area which was initially diagnosed and managed as pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) in a high-risk inmate population. These ambiguous presentations can lead to mismanagement of such patients resulting in potentially fatal outcomes and public health crises in confined facilities. This also highlights the significance of a high index of clinical suspicion for SARS-CoV-2 especially in high risk and vulnerable populations.

That might be true, but evidently the article did a poor job of making the argument. The nostra culpa retraction notice states:

Highly criticized paper on dishonesty retracted

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has retracted a highly influential 2012 paper by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University whose work has been called into question over concerns about the data in some of his publications.

The retraction wasn’t unexpected. Ariely and his colleagues said last month that they would be pulling the article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end,” in the wake of revelations that some of the data in the study appear to have been fabricated.

As Stephanie Lee of BuzzFeed reported in August:

Authors — except one — retract 2014 Nature paper on genetics

This post was updated at 1145 UTC on August 13, 2021. In the original post, we noted that Joseph Powell and Gibran Hemani had not responded to our request for comment, which we sent shortly after learning under embargo from Nature that this retraction would be published. However, Powell did respond, copying Hemani, as Powell noted in a Twitter thread, and the email never reached us. We have added Powell’s comments, and updated the first sentence of the post to reflect them. We are also investigating why Powell’s email never arrived. We apologize for the errors regardless of the cause, and appreciate the opportunity to update.

The authors of a 2014 research letter in Nature have retracted their article, with near but not entire unanimity, after “new work led to interpretation of the original results being no longer fully valid,” according to the senior author.

Titled “Detection and replication of epistasis influencing transcription in humans,” the letter was written by a group from Australia, Europe and the United States led by Gibran Hemani, then of the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, and now of the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the paper was Joseph Powell, also then of Queensland but now at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, in Darlinghurst, Australia. The paper has been cited 114 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the abstract of the article:

Neuroscientist’s work earns three expressions of concern

A journal has issued expressions of concern for three papers from 2014 and 2015 by a group at Stony Brook University in New York whose work has come under scrutiny on PubPeer for suspect images.

The articles, which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, were written by Adan Aguirre, a pharmacological scientist at Stony Brook, and his colleagues. Several other papers by Aguirre’s group — in various iterations of co-authors — have been flagged on PubPeer over the years.

The articles, “TACE/ADAM17 is Essential for Oligodendrocyte Development and CNS Myelination,” “TGFβ Signaling Regulates the Timing of CNS Myelination by Modulating Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cell Cycle Exit through SMAD3/4/FoxO1/Sp1,” and “Oligodendrocyte Regeneration and CNS Remyelination Require TACE/ADAM17,” carry similar notices about the reliability of data in select figures, and note that the journal:

Two years: That’s how long it took a PLOS journal to flag a paper after a sleuth raised concerns

Two years after being alerted to a questionable figure in a 2016 paper by a group with a questionable publication history, a PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern about the article.

The paper, “Deprivation of L-Arginine Induces Oxidative Stress Mediated Apoptosis in Leishmania donovani Promastigotes: Contribution of the Polyamine Pathway,” was published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and was written by a team based at the Rajendra Memorial Research Institute of Medical Sciences in Patna, India, along with a few other institutions in that country.

The penultimate author of the paper is Chitra Mandal, of the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. Mandal’s name appears dozens of times on PubPeer, where posters have flagged the figures in her papers. In a 2019 article in The Hindu, Mandal hinted that an institutional investigation into her work was underway but she dismissed the problems as “unintentional minor mistakes”:

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:

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