Last February, Richard Pollock was reading a review in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews — a prominent resource for evidence-based medicine — when he spotted an error.
In the first figure, which compared the effectiveness of two different treatments for the most common form of liver cancer, a label was switched. The error made it seem like the “worse” treatment was better than the more effective option.
Pollock, a health economist, was concerned enough to send an email to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the corresponding author, on February 20th. Abdel-Rahman, an oncologist at the University of Alberta, wrote back the next day, saying he would review the comments with experts at Cochrane, “and if there is any typos in the publication, it will be corrected immediately.” Emails seen by Retraction Watch show that, when replying to this email, Abdel-Rahman copied one of Cochrane’s editors, Dimitrinka Nikolova.
Months passed. Pollock sent another email to Abdel-Rahman and two Cochrane editors — Nikolova and Christian Gluud — on June 15th. Then, on November 16th, the journal pulled the review with a brief notice:
A physiology journal has retracted a pair of papers from a group in Australia after learning that the flawed work was the subject of an institutional investigation.
The articles, both of which were published last year in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, came from a group at the Murdoch Applied Sports Science Laboratory, part of Murdoch University. The first author on both papers was Liam J. Hughes, a PhD student at Murdoch who was terminated as a result of the misconduct.
The authors of a 2019 meta-analysis in a JAMA journal on exercise and heart disease have retracted the paper after discovering that a quarter of the studies they’d used in the analysis did not belong.
An oncology journal has retracted a review article on the hypothetical link between Covid-19 and cancer after determining that the medical writer who authored the work hadn’t done all the writing herself.
Calvo-Guirado has in the past disputed the retractions of his research. And at least one of his co-authors, Georgios Romanos, of the State University of New York Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine, speculated that Calvo-Guirado was reusing images to limit the number of lab animals that would need to be sacrificed in his studies.
An undergraduate student in the United Kingdom has taken to task the editors of a purportedly scholarly journal for having published more than 100 papers by a Maltese researcher with a deep affinity for Star Trek.
In a Dec. 8, 2020, letter to the editors of Early Human Development (EHD), Hampton Gaddy, a BA student at the University of Oxford, accuses the journal of having published “a large number of unprofessional articles” by Victor Grech, of the University of Malta.
Grech is a pediatric cardiologist, and, evidently a huge Star Trek fan. He’s also a prolific author, and seems to have turned EHD into something of a personal fanzine. As Gaddy notes in his letter, Grech has written at least 113 papers in EHD, an Elsevier title, 57 as sole author:
The authors of a meta-analysis on predicting cardiovascular disease have retracted the paper because it included a study that was retracted between the time they submitted their article and the date it was published.
If only there were a repository of retracted articles that authors and editors could check to see if the references in the studies they publish are still reliable.
After a petition from nearly two dozen people in Europe, the United States and Asia, a public health journal says it is investigating an article it published last January about a way to detect the virus that causes COVID-19.
The paper, “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR,” appeared in Eurosurveillance. It was received on January 21 and accepted on January 22, a remarkably quick turnaround under normal circumstances, although not unheard of during the pandemic. It has been cited well over 800 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
The senior author of the work was Christian Drosten, of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, who became something of a celebrity virologist — the Anthony Fauci of Germany — in the early days of the pandemic. As Science reported in late April, Drosten’s podcast, Coronavirus Update, became the most popular podcast in Germany, garnering more than 1 million downloads per episode.
A student newspaper at Johns Hopkins has retracted an article claiming that COVID-19 has had “relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”
The article, “A closer look at U.S. deaths due to COVID-19” (link from the Wayback Machine) was published on November 22 and relied on a presentation by Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Hopkins.
