Two years after a journal told sleuths it wouldn’t retract flawed papers, it changed course and pulled them.
Mark Bolland, a researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who is no stranger to unearthing academic wrongdoing, first sent complaints about one of the papers to The International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics (IJGO) in March 2021. He said the data on bone mineral density in “Isosorbide mononitrate versus alendronate for postmenopausal osteoporosis,” which has been cited 26 times according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, were “impossible.”
Bolland said the data the researchers reported were not consistent with the reference values provided by the maker of the device used to measure bone density in the study. The normal ranges are 0.96 +/- 0.12 g/cm2, whereas the experiment reported much lower values of 0.21-0.24 g/cm2.
In an email to Retraction Watch, Bolland’s colleague Andrew Grey called the data “laughable, frankly.”
Continue reading Wiley journal retracts two papers it said were fine following criticism years ago