Less than a month after the withdrawal of a widely touted preprint claiming that ivermectin could treat COVID-19, the authors of a meta-analysis that relied heavily on the preprint say they will retract their paper.
According to an expression of concern posted yesterday and announced by Paul Sax, the editor of the journal that published the paper:
Continue reading Ivermectin meta-analysis to be retracted, revised, say authors
More than three and a half years after being alerted to concerns about the data in a 2015 article, an obstetrics journal has finally retracted the paper, citing a lack of ethics approval for the work. Meanwhile, the co-author of a meta-analysis that relies heavily on the paper has suggested that some critics of the underlying work risk legal action for their efforts.
The study, “Vaginal progesterone for prevention of preterm labor in asymptomatic twin pregnancies with sonographic short cervix: a randomized clinical trial of efficacy and safety,” appeared in Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics (AGO) and was conducted by Waleed El-refaie, Mohamed S. Abdelhafez and Ahmed Badawy, of the University of Mansoura in Egypt. The article has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
As we reported last October, data sleuths have accused Badawy and some of his colleagues at Mansoura of having fabricated data and other misconduct in some 250 clinical trials — charges which were (and may still be) apparently convincing enough to warrant a university inquiry.
Continue reading Critics face legal threats as journal takes more than three years to act
Nine months after Retraction Watch notified a pair of journals about fraudulent letters they’d published by a researcher in Singapore, the publications are now being retracted.
As we reported last October following earlier news reports, Shunjie Chua, fabricated the names and affiliations of co-authors in at least four articles, two of which were being retracted. At the time, we found two letters to the editor by Chua and his “colleagues” and brought them to the attention of the journals in which those articles had appeared. Editors told us they had been unaware of the fabrications.
Late last month, one of the journals, Obstetrics & Gynecology, issued the following retraction notice:
Continue reading Researcher who faked co-authors earns two more retractions, publication ban following Retraction Watch coverage
Should a journal retract a paper when they learn that one of its authors has earned a year-long prison sentence for downloading child pornography?
For Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics the answer was no. And experts in publication ethics say that was the right call.
The researcher in question is Jan Joosten, who held the prestigious Regius professorship of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, was convicted of downloading 28,000 child abuse images and videos and placed on the register for sex offenders in France, according to the Guardian.
Continue reading Should journals retract when an author is sent to prison for a crime unrelated to their work?
Just months after Nature retracted a paper on the “Majorana” particle because other researchers found issues in the work, Science has placed an expression of concern on a different paper that suggested “a relatively easy route to creating and controlling [Majorana zero modes] MZMs in hybrid materials.”
If such particles exist, they could allow Microsoft — which employs some of the researchers involved in the work — to build a quantum computer. But scientists have suggested that the findings of various studies do not suggest the presence of Majorana particles.
The Science paper has been cited 29 times since it was published in 2020, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The EoC reads:
Continue reading Science Majorana paper earns an expression of concern
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 17-year-old paper by one of the world’s most prominent behavioral psychologists after it partly failed a statistical stress test conducted by a group that has been trying to reproduce findings in the field.
The 2004 article, by Dan Ariely, of Duke University but then at MIT, and James Heyman, then a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, was published in Psychological Science. Titled “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets,” the article looked the relationship between labor and payment for that work:
Continue reading Prominent behavioral scientist’s paper earns an expression of concern
A group of surgeons in Germany have retracted a 2020 paper for several errors and because a senior researcher says he should have been included as a co-author.
The article, “Assessment of Intraoperative Flow Measurement as a Quality Control During Carotid Endarterectomy: A Single-Center Analysis,” appeared on the website of the Scandanavian Journal of Surgery in early November. The authors, led by Anna Cyrek, were affiliated with the Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at University Hospital Essen.
According to the retraction notice:
Continue reading Should a researcher who was no longer at an institution when a study began be a co-author?
Two journals have retracted three papers by a former researcher at the University of Colorado Denver six weeks after Retraction Watch first revealed that the university had recommended correcting the research record in 2016. Another journal has issued an expression of concern for a paper flagged in the investigation.
Despite a recommendation that nine different papers be corrected and retracted, journals had, by last month, retracted just two papers by the researcher, Hari Koul, now at Louisiana State University, and corrected one. Koul, as we reported, had apparently failed to inform multiple journal editors of the need for corrections and retractions.
At the time, Jennifer Regala, the executive editor of the Journal of Urology, which just retracted two of Koul’s papers, told Retraction Watch: “We were not aware of these allegations, so of course these are of grave concern to us.” She said that the American Urological Association, which publishes the journal, planned to conduct its own investigation.
Continue reading Journals retract papers following publication of university investigation by Retraction Watch
A “systematic error” in a mental health database has led to the retraction of a 2017 paper on how people with psychosis process facial expressions.
Joana Grave, a PhD student at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, and her colleagues published their article, “The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders,” in Psychiatry Research, an Elsevier title.
According to the abstract of the paper:
Continue reading ‘Please don’t be afraid to talk about your errors and to correct them.’
File this under “doing the right thing:” A group of stroke researchers in Germany have retracted a paper they published earlier this year after finding an error in their work shortly after publication that doomed the findings.
Julian Klingbeil, of the Department of Neurology at the University of Leipzig Medical Center, and his colleagues had been looking at how the location of lesions in the brain left behind by cerebral strokes were associated with the onset of depression after the attacks. According to the study, “Association of Lesion Location and Depressive Symptoms Poststroke”:
Continue reading ‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke