Category: elsevier

An article claiming that skin pigmentation is related to aggression and sexuality in humans will be retracted, Elsevier announced today.

The study, “Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?” was published online in Personality and Individual Differences, an Elsevier journal, on March 15, 2012.

The study’s authors, John Rushton and Donald Templer, both deceased, hypothesized that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans. It has been cited just nine times in eight years, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Part of the abstract says:

Continue reading Elsevier journal to retract 2012 paper widely derided as racist

An Elsevier journal is wearing an omelet on its face after accepting a paper by a group of authors who have completely disavowed the work. 

Oh, and no one seems to know who one of the authors is, which makes the second time inside of a month that we’ve reported on a case like this.

The article’s title also misspelled “neuroprogenitor.” But we digress.

Continue reading Meet Bo Liu, international man or woman of scientific mystery

Some words do more work in sentences than others. Take the example of the word  “negligence,” which in the case of the following retraction notice is a veritable beast of burden.

The 2019 article, “Conservative management of subglottic stenosis with home based tracheostomy care: A retrospective review of 28 patients,” appeared in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, an Elsevier title. The authors, led by Andrew Pelser, have affiliations in the United Kingdom and South Africa — a fact that appears to be non-trivial. 

Per the abstract: 

Continue reading ‘Negligence’ — a lot of it — leads to a retraction

How long should a retraction take?

As Retraction Watch readers may recall, that’s a question we ask often. In 2018, for example, we wrote a post noting that nearly two years after the University of Maryland, Baltimore, had requested retractions, the journals had done nothing. Some of the papers have since been retracted.

We have occasion to ask the question again, about a different case at the University of Maryland. 

Continue reading A year after a university asked two Elsevier journals to retract papers, they haven’t

A trio of researchers in Argentina is up to three retractions, and may well lose even more papers, for doctoring their images. And, in an unusual move, one of the leading data sleuths is getting credit for her work helping to out the problematic figures. 

One article, “Apocynin-induced nitric oxide production confers antioxidant protection in maize leaves,” appeared in 2009 in the Journal of Plant Physiology, published by Elsevier. The authors were affiliated with the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. 

As the retraction notice states: 

Continue reading “We thank Dr. Elisabeth Bik for drawing the irregularities to the authors’ attention.” A sleuth earns recognition.

Even after close to 10 years of writing about retractions every day, some days we read retraction notices that make us say, “huh?”

Today is one of those days.

Take this retraction notice for “High-resolution ultrasound images in gouty arthritis to evaluate relationship between tophi and bone erosion,” a paper first published in Future Generation Computer Systems last year:

Continue reading A mystery: “none of the authors listed had any involvement with or knowledge of the article”

An Elsevier journal has denied the efforts of a group of researchers — well, most of them, anyway — to reverse a retraction after having agreed to the move in the first place.

The dispute centers on a 2018 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports titled  “Association between low-testosterone and kidney stones in US men: The national health and nutrition examination survey 2011–2012” — which, as the title implies, found that:

Continue reading ‘I shot at my own foot with my own gun’: Journal rebuffs attempt at un-retraction