by reason for retraction – Page 35

Science Majorana paper earns an expression of concern

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:

Prominent behavioral scientist’s 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:

Should a researcher who was no longer at an institution when a study began be a co-author?

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:

Journals retract papers following publication of university investigation by Retraction Watch

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.

‘Please don’t be afraid to talk about your errors and to correct them.’

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:

‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke

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”:

Elsevier says “integrity and rigor” of peer review for 400 papers fell “beneath the high standards expected”

Elsevier says it is reassessing its procedures for special issues after one of its journals issued expressions of concern for six such publications, involving as many as 400 articles, over worries that the peer review process was compromised.

The journal, Microprocessors & Microsystems, published the special issues using guest editors.

The EoCs vary slightly, but the journal has issued the following blanket statement for these six issues:

‘They seem to mean business’: Cardiology journal flags papers cited hundreds of times

A European cardiology journal has issued expressions of concern for seven widely-cited papers dating back to 2009 after a reader flagged suspicious images in the articles.

Although the cast of characters changes, the senior author on all seven papers is Chao-Ke Tang, of the First Affiliated Hospital of the University of South China, in Hengyang, Hunan. To date, at least 15 of Tang’s papers have come under scrutiny on PubPeer. Two months ago, for example, Elisabeth Bik posted about “unexpected similarities” in multiple figures in a 2013 paper by Tang and colleagues that appeared in PLoS ONE.

But Sander Kersten, the chair of Nutrition, Metabolism and Genomics and Division of Human Nutrition and Health at Wageningen University in The Netherlands, said he believes that the researcher’s output for roughly the past decade is unreliable.

Kersten said his concerns about Tang date back to 2014, when he reviewed — negatively — a manuscript for Atherosclerosis, an Elsevier title, from the researcher:

Nature corrects a correction on conflicts of interest in fish farming paper

Nature seems to be having a bit of trouble sorting out its policies regarding conflict of interest statements.

In late April, as we reported, the journal corrected a paper on fish farming after a journalist pointed out that the first author had undisclosed ties to the agribusiness giant Cargill. (The New York Times, which had covered the paper, also corrected a story.) At the time, the reporter, Tim Schwab, noted that several of the other authors also appeared to have undeclared conflicts of interest, but the journal had not taken steps to illuminate those.

How well do databases and journals indicate retractions? Hint: Inconsistently.

Retraction Watch readers may recall the work of Elizabeth Suelzer, a librarian at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Two years ago, she and colleagues published a study on why the infamous — and fraudulent — 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield alleging a link between vaccine and autism had been cited more than 1,000 times. As Suelzer notes in the Q&A below, that work led to more questions about how well bibliographic databases and journal publishers display retraction status, when appropriate. The answer, they report in JAMA Network Open this week: They were inconsistent.

Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to do this study?

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