by publisher – Page 34 – Retraction Watch

A Wiley journal makes another article disappear

In journalism, we have a running joke: Once something happens three times, it is a trend.

Well, one publisher’s propensity for making articles disappear from journal websites seems to be a trend. Twice this month, we have reported on Wiley’s disappearing act. Angewandte Chemie, a top chemistry journal, made an editorial decrying diversity efforts disappear. And Nursing Forum did the same thing with two letters that they said would only appear in print — but were briefly online.

Angewandte Chemie has done it again. This time the journal waved their magic wand on “What’s Hot, What’s Not: The Trends of the Past 20 Years in the Chemistry of Odorants,” published online last month. Its abstract:

Figure “anomalies” prompt Harvard group to retract Nature paper

A group of researchers based at Harvard Medical School have retracted their 2019 paper in Nature after a data sleuth detected evidence of suspect images in the article.

The move comes ten months after the journal first heard from the sleuth, Elisabeth Bik.

The paper, “Fatty acids and cancer-amplified ZDHHC19 promote STAT3 activation through S-palmitoylation,” came from the lab of Xu Wu, of the Cutaneous Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues. It appeared last August — and immediately caught the attention of Rune Linding, who flagged it for Bik, who in turn noticed several regions of concerning duplications in a few of the Western blots that appeared in the paper.

On August 29 of last year, Bik tweeted:

Elsevier journal to retract 2012 paper widely derided as racist

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:

Meet Bo Liu, international man or woman of scientific mystery

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.

Failure fails as publisher privileges the privileged

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:

‘How I got fooled’: The story behind the retraction of a study of gamers

In April of this year, Corneel Vandelanotte realized something had gone wrong with a paper he had recently published.

First, there was a post about his paper by Nick Brown, a scientific sleuth, questioning the results, ethics, and authors behind the work. That was followed by a comment on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik, another scientific sleuth.

“People started alerting me,” Vandelanotte, a public health researcher at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, told Retraction Watch. “Hey, have you seen this blog by Nick Brown? And, and then yeah, okay, that was a bad day. Let me put it that way.”

Criminology researcher to lose sixth paper

A criminologist whose work has been under scrutiny for a year is set to have a sixth paper retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

Last July, Justin Pickett, of the University of Albany at the State University of New York, posted a 27-page explanation of why he was asking for one of his papers to be retracted. The paper in question had been co-authored by Eric A. Stewart, a professor at Florida State University, whose work had been questioned by an anonymous correspondent.

Following pickup of the story by The Chronicle of Higher Education, that paper was eventually retracted, along with four others Stewart co-authored. But that was not the end of the tale.

Nature retracts study touted as step toward treatments for bone diseases

A Nature study that could have provided a “potential therapeutic target for osteoporosis and bone metastases of cancer” has been retracted.

Since being published in 2014 by researchers at UT Southwestern, MD Anderson and elsewhere, “miR-34a blocks osteoporosis and bone metastasis by inhibiting osteoclastogenesis and Tgif2” has been cited more than 200 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

A year ago — on May 24, 2019 — Nature published a correction to the paper:

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

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:

A journal publishes a critical letter — then says it was a mistake

On Sept. 17, 2019, virologist David Sanders — who recently won a lawsuit brought against him for efforts as a scientific sleuth — wrote a letter to the Journal of Cellular Physiology about a 2004 paper whose images raised his eyebrows.

The response a day later from an editorial assistant was a hint of what was to come:

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