by publisher – Page 9 – Retraction Watch

That paper with the ‘T’ error bars was just retracted

Remember the paper that made the rounds on Twitter after readers discovered that the error bars in one of its figures were really just capital Ts?

Well, it’s now been retracted, with the notice citing “concerns about the article’s scientific reliability.”

Error bars are supposed to express the statistical uncertainty of a measurement depicted in a graph, but the ones in this paper appeared to be capital letter Ts pasted on for looks.

As we mentioned in a previous post, the error bars were just the most obvious strange thing about the paper, “Monitoring of Sports Health Indicators Based on Wearable Nanobiosensors,” which was published earlier this year in a special issue of the Hindawi journal Advances in Materials Science and Engineering.

Contempt judgment in penile implant spat leads to retraction

The authors of a 2021 paper on a method of male enhancement have been forced to retract the paper after losing a legal battle over the technology.

At the heart (er, groin?) of the matter is a dispute over the ownership of a penile implant. According to court documents, James Elist, a urologist in Beverly Hills, Calif., developed the device, which he commercialized as Penuma for men who want a bit more than nature provided.

Penuma received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2004, becoming the first such product to reach the market. (As Elist told GQ in 2016, the surgically-implanted devices come only in large sizes because “nobody wants a small.”)

Elist alleges in a lawsuit that in 2018, a urologist in Texas named Robert Cornell contacted him with questions about how to use the Penuma in practice – questions the California physician claims were really efforts at corporate espionage:

Article on sexual orientation and psych disorders retracted – without the author’s knowledge, he says

A paper about the potential influence of neurotransmitters on the development of sexual orientation and psychiatric disorders that caught flack on social media a year ago has now been retracted – so recently that the corresponding author said he didn’t know about the retraction until we asked him about it.

Late last year, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, an Elsevier journal, published an expression of concern for the article “Sexual orientation, neuropsychiatric disorders and the neurotransmitters involved.” It was published online in September 2021 and has not been cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notice said only that “some readers have raised concerns” about the article, which the journal was discussing the the authors, a group led by Dick Swaab of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam.

Publisher retracts 400 papers at once for violations of ‘peer-review process policies’

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has retracted more than 400 papers “due to violations of IEEE’s peer-review process policies” after “a comprehensive internal investigation.”

The papers formed the proceedings of the International Conference on Smart Cities and Systems Engineering from 2016 through 2018. All of the meetings were reported as being held in cities in China.

The retraction notices read:

Psychologists want to retract old papers about conversion therapy. Elsevier says no.

Over the past year, a professional society for cognitive therapists has been pondering what to do with dozens of decades-old articles about conversion therapy – the practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – in the archives of the journals it publishes.

The society, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), was considering a variety of options, including retraction.

But in a statement the group published earlier this month, ABCT said Elsevier, the journals’ publisher, would not allow retraction of the articles.

Exclusive: Elsevier retracting 500 papers for shoddy peer review

Elsevier is retracting 500 papers from a journal dedicated to conference proceedings because “the peer-review process was confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected,” Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported a month ago, “data thug” James Heathers “found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing ‘tortured phrases’ that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.”

Shortly thereafter, Elsevier told us they were beginning an investigation of the title, Materials Today: Proceedings. Yesterday, they said the retractions were beginning.

Former medical school dean earns sixth retraction

A kidney researcher and former dean of a medical school has now had six papers retracted and one marked with an expression of concern in a little more than a year.

The latest retraction for Joseph I. Shapiro, of a 2015 paper in Science Advances, comes two years after PubPeer commenters began posting about potentially duplicated images in the article, and one year after the authors corrected two of its figures.

Shapiro, the corresponding author on the article, stepped down as dean of the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University in Huntington, W. Va., on June 30th of this year, but remains a tenured professor at the institution. Neither he nor Komal Sodhi, the first author on the article and also of Marshall, have responded to our request for comment.

Retractions of work Shapiro led began last September, according to our database, following critical comments on PubPeer.

When failure to correct a flawed paper could put patients’ lives at risk

On April 15, 2021, as COVID-19 was waning several months prior to the surge in deaths associated with arrival of the Delta variant, the journal Cell published an eye-catching paper.

Titled “Soluble ACE2-mediated cell entry of SARS-CoV-2 via interaction with proteins related to the renin-angiotensin system,” the article stood in stark contrast to the contemporary understanding of the mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which until then held that ACE2 on the membranes of susceptible cells served as the “receptor” for the virus.

The paper was notable because it claimed that vasopressin, also known as antidiuretic hormone, worsened COVID-19 infections. Vasopressin is known for its ability to promote water retention in the kidneys as well as to constrict blood vessels, but had not previously been associated with COVID-19 infections.

Upon reading the paper, one of us (MB) noted a large number of inaccuracies. The authors had used the wrong reagent: a high molecular weight precursor of vasopressin rather than vasopressin itself. They also incorrectly portrayed ACE2, the V_1B vasopressin receptor, and the AT₁ angiotensin II receptor – the primary mediators of their hypothetical mechanism of COVID-19 infection. (PubPeer commenters also pointed out problems in the paper, including a failure of the authors to post their original data.)

Physics publisher retracting nearly 500 likely paper mill papers

A physics publisher is retracting 494 papers after an investigation “indicated that some papers may have been created, manipulated, and/or sold by a commercial entity” – aka a paper mill.

The vast majority – 463 articles – are from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, while 21 are from IOP Conference Series: Materials Science & Engineering, and 10 are from IOP Conference Series: Earth & Environmental Science. A bit less than a third – 142 – are appearing today.

In a statement, Kim Eggleton, Head of Peer Review and Research Integrity at IOP Publishing, tells Retraction Watch:

Publisher says it will investigate allegations despite editor’s refusal

A journal whose editor who has refused to investigate strong claims of misconduct by an anonymous whistleblower appears to be investigating anyway following our coverage of the case. Meanwhile, the editor has found other ways to express his lack of concern for nonsense that may appear in the journal’s pages.

As we reported late last month, Guido Schmitz, the editor in chief of the International Journal of Materials Research has been rock-ribbed in his refusal to investigate claims of misconduct brought by the data sleuth Artemisia Stricta. The reason: Artemisia refused to divulge their identity – which, to Schmitz, evidently appears to be a more grievous sin than research misconduct itself.

Schmitz even went as far in emails to us to state that researchers are free to publish “bullshit and fiction.”

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