by reason for retraction – Page 32

Court injunction forces gastro journal to slap expressions of concern on 40 articles about probiotics

A gastroenterology journal has issued expressions of concern for forty articles about a probiotic formulation that has been at the center of a long-running legal saga in the United States and Europe.

The articles appeared in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis, the official journal of the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation (ECCO) and date back to 2007. All mention a proprietary formulation of probiotics – and therein lies the tale.

Expressions of concern mount for heart researchers over data provenance

A group of heart researchers in China now have four expressions of concern, along with a retraction, for questions about the reliability of their data.

The latest expressions of concern for the team, led by Bu Lang Gao, of Shijiazhuang First Hospital of Hebei Medical University, involves a 2019 paper in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports titled “Asymmetrical middle cerebral artery bifurcations are more vulnerable to aneurysm formation.”

Here’s the notice for the article, which has been cited 4 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:

Wiley snafu costs an early-stage researcher his first paper

Through no fault of his own, Martin Bordewieck is oh-for-one in his publishing career.

The psychology researcher at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany, published his very first paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology in August 2020 – only to lose the article to retraction because of a screw-up by the journal.

Malte Elson, Bordewieck’s co-author – whose name might be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch for his work as a data sleuth – called the situation “a weird one”:

Courage and correction: how editors handle – and mishandle – errors in their journals

Last year, our group noticed an improper analysis of a purported cluster randomized trial (cRCT) in eClinicalMedicine, a Lancet journal, and requested deidentified raw data from the authors to conduct a proper analysis for the study design.

Things were off to a good start. The authors shared their data immediately – which is commendable and, in our experience, rare. We reanalyzed the data using valid statistical procedures, which overturned the published conclusions. We subsequently submitted a manuscript describing our findings to the journal where the original paper was published.

That’s when things stopped going well.

How an ivermectin study that didn’t mention COVID-19 fell under scrutiny

A PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2018 paper which claimed that ivermectin could be useful as a way to control dengue fever.

In fact, the reason the journal re-examined the article was because the hype about the use of ivermectin for Covid-19 led at least one skeptic to take a closer look at the study – and he didn’t like what he saw.

The article, “Antivirus effectiveness of ivermectin on dengue virus type 2 in Aedes albopictus,” was written by a group in China led by Tie-Long Xu, of the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the study, which appeared on PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases:

Authors admit to stealing parts of a paper from a thesis on an unrelated subject

“Nailed” doctoral theses on a wall in Biomedicum, Campus Solna, in spring 2021. Photo: Katarina Sternudd

The authors of a paper in a cancer journal have retracted it after acknowledging they lifted parts of it from a thesis about an unrelated topic.

Here’s the retraction notice for “Regulation of RUNX3 Expression by DNA Methylation in Prostate Cancer,” originally published in July 2020 in Cancer Management and Research, a Dove title:

COVID-19 spike protein paper earns an expression of concern

A virology journal has issued an expression of concern about a paper claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can damage DNA after one member of the research team raised reservations about the reported findings.

The article, “SARS-CoV-2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro,” was written by a pair of scientists at institutions in Sweden and published in MDPI’s Viruses (as Vincent Racaniello of TWiV would say, the kind that make you sick).

The paper has received a fair amount of attention – particularly among vaccine skeptics who, as critics noted, used the article to buttress their claims that Covid vaccines are unsafe – generating enough buzz on social media and in the news to make it into the top 5% of all articles tracked by Altmetric. TWiV even devoted part of an episode of the show to the findings.

According to the journal:

Paper on ‘language reclamation’ and decolonization plagiarized from eight papers, journal acknowledges

Talk about cultural misappropriation.

A cultural studies journal has retracted a 2021 article on storytelling among the Quandamooka people in Australia for widespread plagiarism.

The article, “Reconceptualising a Quandamooka Storyweave of language reclamation,” appeared in the International Journal of Cultural Studies in July and was written by a group led by Sandra Delaney, a scholar of indigenous languages in Australia.

As the journal, a Sage title, makes clear, the article went through the typical course of peer review and, presumably, some editing – which somehow managed to miss plagiarised text from not one but at least eight sources. Three of those involved rip-offs from unpublished university theses, while the rest were from published articles.

According to the retraction notice:

Authors unhappy as “battlefield acupuncture” paper earns an expression of concern

A journal has slapped an expression of concern on a 2021 paper reporting on the utility of self-administered “battlefield” acupuncture in soldiers, citing readers who said the FDA has not approved the devices for that use – a point the authors, who object to the move, dismissed as irrelevant and misleading.

The study, which appeared in Medical Acupuncture, looked at the experiences of a dozen veterans at an Ohio VA hospital who’d purportedly self-administered acupuncture to treat chronic pain. According to this 2010 article from the U.S. military:

‘A clusterf**K’: Authors plagiarize material from NIH and elsewhere, make legal threats — then see their paper retracted

“clusterfuck,” by J E Theriot, via CC BY 2.0 license

Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style.

Last May, the journal Cureus published a paper titled “Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia Due to Homozygous Loss of the CD4 Start Codon.” The paper caught the notice of Andrea Lisco, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, who earlier this month was looking for his own article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on the same topic. Lisco told us:

I did accidentally run in the Cureus paper while I was looking for my original publication on JID and I did report it immediately to Cureus and JID editorial offices.

The journal acted with what we’d consider to be remarkable haste. Within a few weeks came the following retraction notice:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: