Category: MDPI

A preliminary study which found that using cold treatment worked to combat a Mediterranean species of fruit flies in blueberries has been retracted.

The study, “Cold Responses of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly Ceratitis capitata Wiedemann (Diptera: Tephritidae) in Blueberry” was published in Insects, an MDPI journal on May 1, 2020.

The retraction appears to be due to some kind of ethics breach, not the findings of the paper itself. It is unclear, however, what kind of ethics breach took place, and none of the authors has responded to requests for comment. The article’s URL in the journal doesn’t even show the abstract but at the time of this writing the full text is available (labeled as retracted) on PubMed. 

The retraction notice, dated June 9, 2020 reads:

Is too much irony even a thing? Let’s test the principle. 

The guest editor of a special issue on failures in public health and related projects has quit the effort because she and her colleagues couldn’t convince the journal to include more researchers from developing countries in the initiative.

In a blog post about the ill-fated venture, the “WASH Failures Team” — Dani Barrington, Esther Shaylor and Rebecca Sindall — describe their initial excitement, and subsequent dismay, as the International Journal of Environmental Research and Health, an MDPI title, first agreed to publish the special issue but then informed the team that it wanted to focus on first-world problems. 

Initially, all three women believed they would be responsible for the project, but the journal approved only Barrington for the guest editor post: 

The journal Magnetochemistry has retracted a 2019 article by a controversial researcher in New Zealand who argued that scientists are suppressing evidence that microwave radiation from smartphones and other devices cause harm to people. 

The paper was titled “Conflicts of interest and misleading statements in official reports about the health consequences of radiofrequency radiation and some new measurements of exposure levels.” In it, author Susan Pockett, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, argued that: 

A former emeritus professor who has been called “one of the most unapologetic and raw ‘scientific’ racists operating today” has had one of his papers subjected to an expression of concern.

Richard Lynn, who was stripped of his emeritus status at Ulster University last year after students there protested his views, published “Reflections on Sixty-Eight Years of Research on Race and Intelligence” in the MDPI journal Psych on April 24 of this year, after originally submitting it on April 1.

However, just four months later, the journal published an expression of concern about the paper. It begins with a seemingly innocuous premise, that the article is misclassified:

Same tea, different mug. Biomolecules, an MDPI journal, has retracted a 2018 paper by on the salubrious effects of tea because the authors had previously published the same article in a Chinese-language journal.

The paper, “Evaluation of anti-obesity activity, acute toxicity, and subacute toxicity of probiotic dark tea,” came from researchers in China and one from Harvard University (oddly, a post-doc in applied physics).

The case highlights a plagiarism problem that may may be difficult to spot, it turns out. According to the retraction notice, the authors were using the same tea leaves in a different cup: Continue reading When a paper duplicates one in another language, how can editors spot it?

They is MDPI Proceedings, which has pulled a 2017 paper, “Role of Happiness as a Habitual Process.” The reason: Continue reading It’s official: They’ve retracted happiness.

Dismissing concerns of the Committee on Publication Ethics and extensive allegations of misconduct, a journal has corrected, but is refusing to retract, a 2016 paper linking online pornography to sexual dysfunction in men.
The article, “Is internet pornography causing sexual dysfunctions? A review with clinical reports,” appeared last year in Behavioral Sciences, which is published by MDPI.
After publication, critics asked COPE to look at the paper, and in particular whether the authors had obtained adequate informed consent for two patients described in the work. COPE, which has no enforcement authority, said in an email to the publisher that it would have recommended retraction of the article.

Continue reading Journal corrects, but will not retract, controversial paper on internet porn