Category: elsevier

The cats are back. 

As promised, Biological Conservation has replaced a controversial paper on feral cats in China whose cringeworthy title — “Where there are girls, there are cats” — prompted an outcry on social media that resulted in a temporary retraction. 

The new article boasts a different, non-gendered title: “Understanding how free-ranging cats interact with humans: A case study in China with management implications.” But it makes more or less the same point: Where there are women, there are more cats: 

Alison Avenell first came across The Yamaguchi Osteoporosis Study (YOPS) when she was working on a 2014 Cochrane Review on bone fractures.

She cited the study but felt something was off about it. “I suppose, together with my collaborators over the years, we developed sort of antennae for rather suspicious looking studies,” Avenell, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told Retraction Watch. “And when you see a relatively large trial with just two authors, you think to yourself, that’s not possible.”

Avenell and her colleagues, whose work we’ve written about before, were critical to the retraction of fraudulent research by the late Yoshihiro Sato and his collaborator Jun Iwamoto, who rank third and fourth, respectively, on our retraction leaderboard.

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:

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.

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: 

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.