by reason for retraction – Page 45

“I don’t think I slept for a day and a half:” Bad news for study about bad news

A journal has retracted a 2018 paper that linked negative news coverage to physical and mental health problems.

The article, “When Words Hurt: Affective Word Use in Daily News Coverage Impacts Mental Health,” was published in Frontiers in Psychology in August 2018. The study has been cited six times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. In March 2020, an article in The Conversation used the study’s findings to argue that kids should reduce their television intake during the coronavirus pandemic to ward off anxiety.

First author Jolie Wormwood, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, said she decided to pull the study after revisiting the dataset. She found that some of the study participants—95 people in the Boston area—who completed a questionnaire three different times during a nine month period, gave inconsistent answers about their memory of an event. That normally might not be too worrying, since memories “shift over time”, according to Wormwood, but a bit more sleuthing revealed that the researchers had inadvertently mixed up the IDs that were assigned to study participants.

Wormwood explained the error in an email:

Journal expresses concern over study of potential treatment for autism

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on a study of a potential treatment for autism.

The article, by a group in Slovakia, purported to show for the first time that the drug ubiquinol — a form of the compound coenzyme Q₁₀ — could improve the ability of children with autism to communicate with their parents, communicate verbally, play games with other children and help with other behaviors.

The paper was published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, a Hindawi journal. The first author was Anna Gvozdjáková, of Comenius University in Bratislava, and the last author was Fred Crane, a former biologist at Purdue University in Indiana. Crane, who died in 2016, is credited with being the discoverer of coenzyme Q10 in mitochondria in 1957. The 2014 article — which has been cited 29 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science — was among the last of his 400-plus papers to appear in print.

Per the EoC:

Journal becomes “victim of an organized rogue editor network”

We’re not accustomed to seeing journal article titles that end in exclamation points. But that’s what a title did earlier this month: “The Journal of Nanoparticle Research victim of an organized rogue editor network!”

The journal, a Springer Nature title, wrote the editors, “has been attacked in a new way by a sophisticated and organized network.” (It turns out not to be entirely new, but more on that in a moment.) As the editors explain:

‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers

Earlier this month, we reported on how Susanne Stoll, a graduate student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University College London, discovered an error that toppled a highly-cited 2014 article — and which might affect hundreds of other papers in the field of perception.

We spoke with Stoll about the experience.

Retraction Watch (RW): What did it feel like to find such a significant error? Did you doubt yourself at first, and, if so when did you realize you’d found something both real and important?

After legal threats from Herbalife, Elsevier journal retracts — and then removes — a paper

Bowing to legal pressure from the supplement maker Herbalife, Elsevier earlier this year retracted — and then removed — a paper which claimed that a young woman in India died of liver failure after using the company’s products. The move has led to more legal threats.

In August 2018, a group of researchers in India published a report in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hepatology about the death, involving a 24-year-old woman who had taken a variety of supplements produced by Herbalife, a massive, and massively controversial, maker of nonprescription diet aids.

The group, led by Cyriac Abby Philips, of Cochin Gastroenterology, in Kerala, India, asserted that tests of Herbalife products similar to those the woman had been taking revealed the presence of heavy metals, bacteria and, in most samples, “undisclosed toxic compounds including traces of psychotropic recreational agent.”

The case report — titled “Slimming to the death: Herbalife®-associated fatal acute liver failure-heavy metals, toxic compounds, bacterial contaminants and psychotropic agents in products sold in India” — is far from the first time scientists have linked Herbalife products to liver damage. They’ve done so here, here and here, to cite just a few instances.

Texas bone researcher faked data in Nature paper, says federal watchdog, as university rescinds professorships

A pharmacologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who lost a highly cited 2014 paper in Nature for questions about the integrity of her data has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — and UT Southwestern has rescinded two professorships she previously held.

According to ORI, Yihong Wan, an associate professor of pharmacology at UT Southwestern:

‘I dropped the ball’: Magic bullet falls short of target

A sports medicine journal has retracted a widely circulated 2019 meta-analysis which purported to find that interval training was the “magic bullet” for weight loss, after the analysis proved to be riddled with holes.

The paper, “Is interval training the magic bullet for fat loss? A systematic review and meta-analysis comparing moderate-intensity continuous training with high-intensity interval training (HIIT),” was a collaboration by researchers in Brazil and James Steele, an exercise scientist at the Solent University School of Sport, Health and Social Sciences, in Southampton, England.

Steele has some cred when it comes to research integrity, and part of that cred comes from another retraction. He was part of a team of data sleuths who have called for the retraction of seven papers by Matheus Barbalho, a Brazilian exercise scientist.

Journal expresses concern — we think — about papers by Surgisphere founder

More than six months after two of the world’s leading medical journals retracted papers on COVID-19 based on suspect data from a questionable company, a journal says it has cleared a raft of articles by the controversial founder of the firm. Or, has it?

Vascular, a SAGE title, says it has investigated all papers in the journal by Sapan Desai that relied on “a significant amount of data,” whatever that means. Desai, you’ll recall, founded Surgisphere, which is now famous for refusing to share its data in articles published in The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

We counted 18 11 papers in Vascular on which Desai was a co-author. The journal says — in a rather oblique way — that all but two of the articles it examined either checked out or didn’t include enough data to raise alarms.

The expression of concern reads:

The grad student who found a fatal error that may affect lots of papers

A team of researchers in England has retracted a 2014 paper after a graduate student affiliated with the group found a fatal error while trying to replicate parts of the work — and which might affect similar studies by other scientists, as well.

The article, “Perceptual load affects spatial tuning of neuronal populations in human early visual cortex,” was written by Benjamin de Haas, then of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London, and his colleagues at UCL.

According to the retraction notice:

Miami dean stepped down weeks after misconduct finding

Charles A. Downs, via University of Miami

An associate dean at the University of Miami stepped down from his post two weeks after agreeing to sanctions stemming from a finding of misconduct by a government watchdog, Retraction Watch has learned.

Yesterday, we reported that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Charles Downs, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in six federal grant applications while on the faculty of the University of Arizona.

Downs was appointed associate dean of Miami’s nursing school in 2018, and stepped down from the position on December 4, according to a university spokesperson. He remains an associate professor at the school.

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