The Cochrane Library has withdrawn a 2013 systematic review on zinc’s ability to fight the common cold.
Cochrane often marks reviews “withdrawn” once new evidence emerges that renders them out of date — but in this case, the review was flagged while the editors investigate issues “regarding the calculation and analysis of data.”
Here’s the notice.
Continue reading Cochrane withdraws review on zinc for colds for data concerns
It’s not often that an article is retracted only to be later proven correct. But that may have happened this past summer in the chemistry literature.
In July, a group of researchers recapitulated an experiment largely similar to one that Nobelist Georg Wittig had performed – and subsequently retracted — decades earlier. Their findings suggest Wittig may actually have gotten it right the first time.
On July 27, Peter Chen of ETH Zurich and colleagues published an article online in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition that describes a new method for appending a carbon atom to an unsaturated hydrocarbon to create a three-membered ring – a useful chemical transformation known as cyclopropanation. Yet, it was not the first time researchers had reported such a process. As Chen and his colleagues note in the Israel Journal of Chemistry, Georg Wittig of the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (who would go on to win the chemistry Nobel Prize in 1979) and Volker Franzen reported a similar reaction in 1960 in Angewandte Chemie, a German-language publication. Continue reading 50 years later, is it time to retract a retraction by a Nobel prize-winning author?
The Journal of Clinical Nursing is retracting a paper “due to major overlap with a previously published article” from the same journal, following an investigation by the National University of Singapore.
By our count, this is the third retraction for first author, Moon-fai Chan, all for “overlap” with other papers.
As we reported in May, the Journal of Advanced Nursing retracted a paper co-authored by Chan for “major overlap” with a paper in JCN, that too the result of the investigation. We’ve also learned that the journal Nursing & Health Sciences issued a similar notice last year for another pair of overlapped papers.
Chan said in a statement to Retraction Watch Continue reading Investigation ups nursing researcher’s retraction count to 3
A 2012 paper that analyzed injuries to aquatic mammals in China has been retracted “due to the usage of restricted data from the Ministry of Agriculture of China.”
The authors — from Shandong University in China, The University of Hong Kong and the Peruvian Centre for Cetacean Research — “organized the collection of official documents related to strandings, bycatches and injuries of aquatic mammals in the waters of mainland China from provincial fishery administrations for the years 2000 to 2006,” according to the abstract. However, they may not have been supposed to do that.
Here’s the retraction notice from Integrative Zoology (which is paywalled, tsk, tsk):
Continue reading Marine mammal injury study retracted for using restricted gov’t data
A study on the trendy and grueling workout regimen known as CrossFit has a correction concerning the number of participants hurt during 10 weeks of training. The paper has been the center of multiple lawsuits — one by CrossFit, and one by a CrossFit gym owner — for allegedly over-inflating the risks associated with the regimen.
The original paper claimed that 9 of 54 participants dropped out of the study due to “overuse or injury.” The correction note says that just two left for those reasons.
The paper, published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research actually concludes that CrossFit has some benefits. According to the abstract: Continue reading Journal corrects CrossFit injury data in paper at center of lawsuit
A paper that raised alarms by suggesting lizards were warming even faster than the planet has been retracted after the authors employed the wrong method to measure temperatures.
Some scientists thought that, because of the way lizards retain heat to regulate their cold-blooded bodies, they might be more sensitive to temperature changes. Well, not in this case. The paper has been retracted from Ecography because the scientists erred in calculating the “radiative conductance of the animal” — basically, how much heat it can get rid of — such that the “broad-scale” conclusions of the study are invalid.
The notice for the aptly named paper “Lizards could be warming faster than climate” reads: Continue reading Lizards aren’t getting hotter faster than the planet after all, says retraction
Another retraction makes 32.5 for former accounting professor James E. Hunton, and earns him the #10 slot on our leaderboard.
Though he resigned from his position at Bentley University in 2012, the story didn’t end there: In 2014, a university investigation found he’d committed misconduct in two papers. The, in June 2015, he notched 25 retractions all at once.
The newly retracted paper, “Effects of Anonymous Whistle- Blowing and Perceived Reputation Threats on Investigations of Whistle-Blowing Allegations by Audit Committee Members,” published in the Journal of Management Studies, suggests that, for public corporations, an anonymous whistleblower might not be as effective as an alert from a known source. The publisher Wiley put out a press release for the paper in 2010, and it succeeded in garnering some coverage.
Whether its conclusion remains valid is unclear, as Hunton didn’t provide evidence to support the validity of the data. The note explains:
Continue reading Former accounting prof adds his 32nd retraction
A trio of papers on health issues in elderly patients, all sharing an author, have been retracted from Geriatrics & Gerontology International.
The reasons for the retractions range from expired kits, an “unattributed overlap” with another paper, “authorship issues,” and issues over sample sizes.
Tomader Taha Abdel Rahman, a researcher at Ain Shams University in Cairo, is the first author on two of the papers, and second author on the third.
Here’s the retraction note for a paper that showed elderly adults with chronic hepatitis C are at risk of having cognitive issues:
Continue reading Three retractions for geriatric medicine researcher
The Cochrane Library has withdrawn two reviews evaluating the effectiveness of diabetes treatments because some of the papers’ authors work with pharmaceutical companies.
Bianca Hemmingsen, first author on both reviews, told us the Cochrane Library asked the authors to remove the researchers with ties to pharma, but after one “refused to withdraw,” both papers were pulled entirely.
However, Hemmingsen insists that their employment had no impact on either paper.
This breaks the typical mold for Cochrane withdrawals, which are usually only pulled to indicate updates and show that older reviews no longer represent the best evidence.
Continue reading Authors’ pharma ties cause Cochrane to withdraw two diabetes reviews
Talk about a popular patient: A woman who developed a case of internal bleeding while taking the anticoagulant Xarelto (rivaroxaban) was written up in not one — but two — case reports. The trouble was, both groups didn’t realize what the other was doing, so the more recent article is now being retracted from the Journal of Clinical Pharmacy and Therapeutics.
The authors, a trio of doctors at Sakarya University in Turkey, described the case of a 75 year-old woman who came to the emergency room for fatigue and stomach pain after taking rivaroxaban for three days. A scan revealed a rectus sheath hematoma.
However, the case had already been published a few months earlier in the Indian Journal of Pharmacology by a separate group of doctors from Sakarya, along with authors from Yenikent State Hospital and Vakfikebir State Hospital.
Continue reading Two groups mistakenly publish case reports on the same patient