The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.”
An Elsevier journal has issued just over 100 expressions of concern for papers published by a group of researchers led by the French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who also notched a new retraction – his tenth – in a separate publication.
As we and others have reported, Raoult’s work during the COVID-19 pandemic drew intense scrutiny from data sleuths, most notably Elisabeth Bik – whose critiques, which extended beyond his COVID studies, were met with vicious online trolling and a legal complaint filed by Raoult himself.
The allegations prompted an ethics investigation by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products into Raoult’s research during his tenure at the IHU Méditerranée Infection, in Marseille, which he led between 2011 and his retirement as director in 2022. That inquiry found “serious shortcomings and non-compliances with the regulations for research involving the human person.”
A Springer Nature journal has issued an expression of concern for a 16-year-old paper by Carlo Croce, the cancer researcher – and noted art collector – at The Ohio State University three years after the publication had received a correction for problematic images and roughly 20 months after the news division at Nature reported on a pair of institutional investigations into problems with Croce’s work.
As we and others have reported, those investigations concluded Croce had not committed misconduct but had overlooked the misdeeds of others in his lab.
Here’s the notice for the paper, “MicroRNA signatures of TRAIL resistance in human non-small cell lung cancer,” which Oncogene published in 2008:
A paper that led to hopes that Microsoft might one day build a quantum computer has “shortcomings” that do not rise to the level of misconduct, according to an expert panel convened by the University of Copenhagen.
The paper, originally published in March 2020 in Science, earned an expression of concern in 2021 following critiques of the work from two researchers, Sergey Frolov and Vincent Mourik. This week, Science editor in chief Holden Thorp replaced the expression of concern with an editor’s note referring to a new report from a panel of experts at the University of Copenhagen, saying “we are alerting readers to this report while we await a formal decision on the matter from the Danish Committee on Research Misconduct.”
The panel’s report, dated Feb. 15, 2024, describes several of what it calls “shortcomings” but says “the excluded data did not undermine the paper’s main conclusions.” They also conclude the authors did not engage in “gross negligence” or scientific misconduct.
The last author of the Science paper, Charles Marcus, of the University of Washington, in Seattle, and the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, told Retraction Watch he and his colleagues followed the recommendations by posting:
Science has rescinded an expression of concern it issued one month ago after the authors provided data that “addressed concerns about the integrity of the paper.”
The article has been cited 43 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The journal is publishing the newly submitted data as a correction, as well as an editor’s note explaining the removal of the expression of concern. The new notice states:
A paper published in Science two years ago has been flagged with an expression of concern while the editors give the authors a chance to correct a data issue identified by two different readers.
The publisher PLOS is marking nearly 50 articles by Didier Raoult, the French scientist who became controversial for promoting hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, with expressions of concern while it investigates potential research ethics violations in the work.
PLOS has been looking into more than 100 articles by Raoult, but determined that the issues in 49 of the papers, including reuse of ethics approval reference numbers, warrant expressions of concern while the publisher continues its inquiry.
Mere days after tweets went viral pointing out that the purported error bars in one figure of a paper were really just the capital letter T, the publisher has marked it with an expression of concern. [12/22/22: The paper has now been retracted; see an update on this post.]
And that’s not all that’s strange about the paper.
An early and influential paper on long COVID that appeared in The Lancet has been flagged with an expression of concern while the journal investigates “data errors” brought to light by a reader.
An editorial that accompanied the paper when it was published in January of last year described it as “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19. The article has received plenty of attention since then.
Priscilla K. Coleman testifying before U.S. Congress in 2007
The author of an article on unwanted pregnancies that has received an expression of concern for reasons that remain unclear says she has hired lawyers to defend herself against “defamation.”
Priscilla K. Coleman, a professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio – whose controversial work on the link between abortion and mental health problems has come under scrutiny – told us that she plans “to actively pursue all options available including legal avenues to rectify the situation” after Frontiers in Social Health Psychology slapped the EoC on her 2022 article.
The paper in question was titled “The Turnaway Study: A case of self-correction in science upended by political motivation and unvetted findings.” The Turnaway Study is an ongoing look by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco at the effects on women – including the physical, emotional, and economic toll – of carrying unwanted pregnancies. The main finding, according to its site, “is that receiving an abortion does not harm the health and wellbeing of women, but in fact, being denied an abortion results in worse financial, health and family outcomes.”
