wiley – Page 3 – Retraction Watch

Anatomy journal retracts 13 papers

The Anatomical Record is correcting itself in a big way, pulling 13 articles, including several linked to paper mills.

The papers, all by authors in China, were published between 2019 and 2021.

Some were flagged in a September 2021 report on research misconduct by the Chinese government. They join a slew of articles The Anatomical Record has retracted since 2020 for similar concerns.

Here’s an example of a retraction notice, this one for “Long noncoding RNA TUG1 facilitates cell ovarian cancer progression through targeting MiR-29b-3p/MDM2 axis,” which appeared in January 2020 from a group at the Department of Pharmacy at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University:

Abstracts flagged because conferences — including one in Wuhan in late 2019 — may not have happened

A journal has issued an expression of concern after learning that it may have published abstracts from meetings that appear not to have taken place.

As many journals do, Basic & Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology, a Wiley title, occasionally publishes meeting supplements. But according to the journal, it recently learned from several authors that a dozen of those supplements that it produced

between 2018 and 2020 might have contained suspect work. According to a statement we received from the journal:

A tale of three journals: Paper retracted when associate editor submits to the wrong title

What a difference a D makes.

Ask Kevin Pile. Pile edits the International Journal of Rheumatic Diseases (let’s call it the IJRD), a Wiley publication. Last year, he published a guest editorial by Vaidehi Chowdhary, a rheumatologist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., on a form of kidney disease.

But it turns out that Chowdhary, a member of Pile’s editorial team, had intended to submit her article, “When doing the right thing is wrong: Drug efflux pumps in steroid‐resistant nephrotic syndrome,” to a different journal, the Indian Journal of Rheumatology, or IJR. We think you can see how this all went down.

According to Pile, the episode was “a tail of consecutive mistakes”:

The bizarre anti-vaccine paper a Florida professor has been trying to have retracted to no avail

Fly, meet elephant’s back.

Robert Speth has spent the last 19 months trying to get two of the world’s largest medical publishers to retract an article he considers to be a “travesty” of pseudoscientific claims and overtly anti-vaccination bias. In the process, he has uncovered slipshod management of a journal’s editorial board that angered, among others, a former FDA commissioner.

The paper that triggered Speth, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., appeared in 2018 in Clinical and Translational Medicine. Titled (awkwardly) “Cancer; an induced disease of twentieth century! Induction of tolerance, increased entropy and ‘Dark Energy’: loss of biorhythms (Anabolism v. Catabolism),” it was written by Mahin Khatami, formerly a program director at the National Institutes of Health.

Although you might not be familiar with Khatami, who was born in Iran but trained in the United States, her bio speaks (loudly) for itself:

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:

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:

Entire board of law journal resigns in a ‘small act of resistance’

The defense resigns.

The entire editorial board of the European Law Journal, along with its two top editors, has quit over a dispute about contract terms and the behavior of its publisher, Wiley.

In a statement posted on the blog of the European Law Blog, editors-in-chief Joana Mendes, of the University of Luxembourg, and Harm Schepel, of the University of Kent, in England, wrote:

Paper used to support ban on Caster Semenya competing earns massive correction

The authors of a controversial paper on what constitutes “normal” hormone levels in men and women — and, by implication, “male” and “female” athletes — are set to issue a massive correction of the work, Retraction Watch has learned. But an outside, albeit not disinterested, researcher who prompted the correction says the correction itself is amiss.

The article, “Large divergence in testosterone concentrations between men and women: frame of reference for elite athletes in sex-specific competition in sports, a narrative review,” appeared earlier this year in Clinical Endocrinology, a Wiley title. The authors of the meta-analysis, led by Richard Clark, of the US Anti‐Doping Agency, argued that testosterone levels between the sexes do not overlap in the absence of chromosomal or genetic anomalies that blur the distinction between male and female.

That finding was cited recently by an architect of the International Association of Athletics Federations’ decision to bar the South African trackstar, Caster Semenya, and other “hyperandrogenic” women (Semenya’s hormonal status has not been made public) whose hormonal constitution is arguably more male than female.

Study of autism and vitamin D earns retraction after questions about reliability

A pediatrics journal has retracted a 2016 article purporting to be the first randomized controlled trial on the effects of vitamin D supplements on autism over concerns about the reliability of the findings.

The paper, “Randomized controlled trial of vitamin D supplementation in children with autism spectrum disorder,” appeared in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and has been cited 27 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “highly cited paper” designation compared to its counterparts of a similar age.

The authors came from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, Chile, the UK and Norway. According to the abstract, the researchers looked at the effects of vitamin D supplements on 109 boys and girls with autism:

Majority of journal’s editorial board resigns after publisher’s handling of letter about move to open access

A leading journal in ecology and evolution is going through an evolution of its own, following the resignation of its editor in chief and more than half of its editorial board.

The mass exodus at Diversity & Distributions came after Wiley, which publishes the journal, allegedly blocked it from running a letter protesting the company’s decision to make D & D open access (the company disputes the claim, as we’ll detail in a bit). A letter about the issue, signed by scores of researchers worldwide, decried Wiley’s move: Continue reading Majority of journal’s editorial board resigns after publisher’s handling of letter about move to open access

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