Category: oxford university press

Homeopathy for cancer paper extensively corrected after watchdog agency requested retraction

A paper that claimed to show a homeopathic intervention improved quality of life and survival for people with advanced lung cancer has received an extensive correction two years after a research integrity watchdog asked the journal to retract the article over concerns about manipulated data, Retraction Watch has learned. 

The two scientists who sounded the alarm on the paper are not satisfied with the correction, they told us. 

The article, “Homeopathic Treatment as an Add‐On Therapy May Improve Quality of Life and Prolong Survival in Patients with Non‐Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Prospective, Randomized, Placebo‐Controlled, Double‐Blind, Three‐Arm, Multicenter Study,” appeared in The Oncologist in November 2020. Michael Frass, the lead author of the paper, is a homeopathic practitioner who was working at the Medical University of Vienna, at the time the work was published. 

Continue reading Homeopathy for cancer paper extensively corrected after watchdog agency requested retraction

Editor who opined on author excuses has paper subjected to an expression of concern

A study co-authored by an editor who has previously opined on common excuses by authors about research misconduct has received an expression of concern.

The paper’s first author defended the work, explaining that the experiments in question were repeated multiple times, and that the results are “valid and reproducible.”

The study, titled, “CK1δ modulates the transcriptional activity of ERα via AIB1 in an estrogen-dependent manner and regulates ERα–AIB1 interactions,” was published in Nucleic Acids Research in April 2009. It has been cited 20 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Continue reading Editor who opined on author excuses has paper subjected to an expression of concern

Leech paper nets expression of concern

via Wikimedia

An article claiming to uproot the evolutionary tree of leeches has received an expression of concern after a reader notified the journal about potential problems with the data. 

The article, “Phylogenomic analysis of a putative missing link sparks reinterpretation of leech evolution,” appeared online in Genome Biology and Evolution, an Oxford University Press title, on June 19 of this year. According to the authors — an international team that includes researchers at the National Museum of Natural History, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Florida State University and University of Gothenburg in Sweden — their results: 

Continue reading Leech paper nets expression of concern

“Great dismay:” When a lack of originality is tough to swallow

Findings in dysphagia lusoria

Researchers in India have retracted their 2013 case report of a “novel” way to treat a swallowing disorder because, well, the way wasn’t novel at all.

The article, “A novel approach for the treatment of dysphagia lusoria,” was published in the European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery by a group from the Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research in Bangalore.

Per the abstract:

Continue reading “Great dismay:” When a lack of originality is tough to swallow

Journal temporarily withdraws eight papers after publisher mistake

Publishers love their embargoes, whether they’re of papers that aren’t open access yet, or are available to the media before they’re published. Apparently, however, they also break embargoes, just like the journalists they sometimes sanction for the same sin.

Take Oxford University Press, which publishes the journal Physical Therapy for the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). Late last month, the journal temporarily withdrew eight papers because, well, the publisher broke the journal’s embargo. Jan Reynolds, the APTA’s managing editor for the journal and director of scientific communications, explained to Retraction Watch that Continue reading Journal temporarily withdraws eight papers after publisher mistake

“We were very uncomfortable with this situation:” French group loses aging paper for “overlap”

The authors of a 2017 paper on how chronic inflammation might hasten aging have retracted the work because it turned out to be a collage of previously published articles.

The paper, “Chronic Inflammation: Accelerator of Biological Aging,” appeared in  The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, an Oxford University Press title. It has been cited 41 times, earning it a “Highly Cited Paper” designation from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, meaning it has earned more citations than 99% of papers published in its field that year. The first author is Bertrand Fougère, of Université de Toulouse III Paul Sabatier and Tours University Hospital.

Here’s the notice (which we’ve reformatted for readability): Continue reading “We were very uncomfortable with this situation:” French group loses aging paper for “overlap”

Data mishap forces retraction of paper on gun laws, domestic killings

The authors of a 2018 paper on the effects of gun laws on domestic violence have retracted the article after discovering errors in their analysis and replaced it with a clean version. The new study shows that some gun laws — particularly ones that keep firearms out of the hands of violent offenders, even if their offenses don’t involve domestic assaults — do seem to reduce the incidence of domestic killings.

The paper, which appeared last November in the American Journal of Epidemiology and received some press coverage, including this piece in the New York Times, looked specifically at whether laws that keep guns away from people convicted of violent crimes beyond domestic abuse reduce the number of intimate partner homicides. It also considered the effect of laws that covered dating partners and not simply spouses or former spouses. The first author is April Zeoli, of Michigan State University. Zeoli has published other papers on the topic and delivered a TEDMED talk on it as well.

According to the abstract of the article: Continue reading Data mishap forces retraction of paper on gun laws, domestic killings

Caught Our Notice: Climate change leads to more…neurosurgery for polar bears?

Title: Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy

What Caught Our Attention: There’s a lot going on here, so bear with us. (Ba-dum-bum.)

First, there was the paper itself, co-authored by, among others, Michael Mann and Stephan Lewandowsky. Both names may be familiar to Retraction Watch readers. Mann is a prominent climate scientist who has sued the National Review for defamation. A study by Lewandowsky and colleagues of “the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial” was the subject of several Retraction Watch posts when it was retracted and then republished in a different form. And the conclusion of the new paper, in Bioscience, seemed likely to draw the ire of many who objected to the earlier work: Continue reading Caught Our Notice: Climate change leads to more…neurosurgery for polar bears?

Should a journal retract a paper the authors didn’t know contained bad data?

A medical journal has retracted a 2016 paper over a series of errors, prompting it to lose faith in the paper overall. The authors have objected to the decision, arguing the errors weren’t their fault and could be revised with a correction — rather than retracting what they consider “an important contribution” to an ongoing debate in medicine.

The paper explored the so-called weekend effect—that patients admitted to the emergency department on the weekend are more likely to die than those admitted on a weekday. Whether the weekend effect is real is not clear. Some studies have supported the phenomenon in certain areas of medicine, but others (including the now-retracted paper) have failed to find an effect.

First author Mohammed A. Mohammed, based at the University of Bradford in the UK, told Retraction Watch that the errors were introduced by one of the hospitals that provided them the data:

Continue reading Should a journal retract a paper the authors didn’t know contained bad data?

Caught Our Notice: A retraction that is “useful for investigators”

Via Wikimedia

Title:  Yeast CAF-1 assembles histone (H3-H4) 2 tetramers prior to DNA deposition

What Caught Our Attention: Informative retraction notices can be infrequent, but rarer still are notices that fulfill an oft-ignored function: To be a source of learning for others in the field. Here, the authors offer a nearly 800-word “detailed description of the issues” with “some observations that may be useful for investigators conducting similar studies.” These authors embraced the retraction process, carefully explaining their findings or the lack thereof, for each figure from their now-retracted paper.     Continue reading Caught Our Notice: A retraction that is “useful for investigators”