clinical study retractions – Page 12

University of Kentucky demotes cancer researcher following finding of misconduct by scientist in his lab

A misconduct scandal at the University of Kentucky has led to the demotion of a senior cancer researcher for his lack of oversight of a now-former scientist who fabricated data in at least four papers and two grant applications.

According to the university, the inquiry began in April 2019, after the institution received complaints about suspect figures in six papers published by UK researchers. The lead on the articles was John D’Orazio, a clinician and researcher with appointments at the Markey Cancer Center and UK Healthcare.

In November 2019, UK investigators turned their attention to Stuart Jarrett, a co-author on all six papers who had joined D’Orazio’s lab in 2012 but left in September 2019.

According to the university:

Major indexing service rejects appeals by two suppressed journals

Journals hoping that Clarivate Analytics — the company behind the Impact Factor — would reverse their decision to suppress their titles from the closely watched metric are batting .500.

In July, as we reported, Clarivate suppressed 33 journals from its Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which means they will not have a 2019 Impact Factor, because of what Clarivate said was excessive self-citation. As affected journals have noted, suppression from the list can have a major impact on journals and researchers, many of whom are judged based on where they publish, using Impact Factor as a key metric.

Two journals — Zootaxa and the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology — successfully appealed the decision, and have been reinstated in the 2019 JCR. But appeals by two others — Body Image and Forensic Science International: Genetics (FSIGEN) — have been denied, Retraction Watch has learned.

Between August 18 and August 26, nearly 500 forensic scientists from 49 countries signed a petition objecting to Clarivate’s move, according to Ulises Toscanini, director of the Laboratory PRICAI-Fundación Favaloro and a professor at Favaloro University in Buenos Aires. Toscanini, president of the executive committee of the Spanish and Portuguese Speaking Working Group of the International Society for Forensic Genetics, said FSIGEN “is a ‘niche’ journal,” and is “broadly recognized as the top journal of the area.” He continued:

Springer Nature ‘continuing to investigate the concerns raised’ about paper linking obesity and lying

What’s the link between obesity and dishonesty?

If that question seems preposterous on its face, you’re probably among the critics of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports which claimed to find that obese people were more deceptive than thinner folk.

The researchers, led by Eugenia Polizzi di Sorrentino, of the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies at the National Research Center in Rome:

explore[d] the link between energy, obesity and dishonesty by comparing the behaviour of obese and lean subjects when hungry or sated while playing an anonymous die-under-cup task.

They found that:

Hydroxychloroquine, push-scooters, and COVID-19: A journal gets stung, and swiftly retracts

This may be the scientific publishing version of “the operation was a success, but the patient died.”

The retraction of a Trojan horse paper on the novel coronavirus has called into question the validity of another article in the same journal which found that hydroxychloroquine is effective against Covid-19.

The sting article, “SARS-CoV-2 was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?” — was the brainchild of graduate student Mathieu Rebeaud, aka “Willard Oodendijk” and Florian Cova, of “The Institute for Quick and Dirty Science” (no, not really) in Switzerland. Their goal: to highlight a concerning paper in the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health, which they and others suspect of being a predatory publication — one that is happy to take money to publish anything, while pretending to perform peer review.

Study rating attractiveness of women with endometriosis is not yet retracted

Despite media reports announcing the retraction of a much-criticized study of whether women with endometriosis were more attractive than other women, the study has yet to be retracted by the journal.

Last week, several news outlets, picking up on a story in The Guardian, said the study, first published in 2012 in Fertility and Sterility, had been retracted.

The study, called “Attractiveness of women with rectovaginal endometriosis: a case-control study,” claimed to show that:

A retraction and a retraction request as Twitter users call out sexism, fat-shaming, and racism

Overweight people are more dishonest, women with endometriosis are more attractive, and affirmative action needs to stop: Papers with these three conclusions have come under intense scrutiny on social media in recent days, with at least one retracted.

First up, a study — widely criticized for being sexist — which claimed to find that

Women with rectovaginal endometriosis were judged to be more attractive than those in the two control groups. Moreover, they had a leaner silhouette, larger breasts, and an earlier coitarche.

The study, called “Attractiveness of women with rectovaginal endometriosis: a case-control study” was published in 2013 in Fertility and Sterility, an Elsevier publication. It received sharp criticism on PubPeer beginning a year ago when one commenter, “Ovine Mastadenovirus,” wrote:

Cancer surgery group in China may lose second paper

After whistleblowers in China prompted the retraction of a 2018 paper that overstated the number of patients treated in a study, another journal says it’s investigating a second article by the same group.

Last month, as we reported, the Journal of Surgical Oncology retracted “Long‐term outcomes of 530 esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients with minimally invasive Ivor Lewis esophagectomy.” The move was prompted by whistleblowers who notified the journal that the 530 cases could not have been performed at the authors’ institution, Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou.

After our post, a Twitter user pointed us to a second article by the group, in BMC Cancer, which claimed to report data on 697 subjects over just one additional year — a highly improbable figure.

A bitter aftertaste: Legal threats, alleged poisoning muddy the waters for a trial of a tea to treat malaria

Xavier Argemi first heard the claim that tea made from artemisia herbs could be useful in the treatment of malaria from a TV documentary in 2017.

The documentary, featuring Lucile Cornet-Vernet, the director of the La Maison de l’Artemisia, a non-profit organization that grows artemisia and promotes its use in centers across Africa, focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The film claimed that for decades major pharmaceutical companies have been profiting from expensive malaria drugs based on artemisinin — the antimalarial for which Tu Youyou won a Nobel Prize in 2015, after distilling it from the Artemisia annua plant — while the tea itself, an ancient Chinese herbal remedy, was just as effective at treating the disease.

His interest piqued, Argemi reached out to Cornet-Vernet, an orthodontist at Paris’ Descartes University. She shared with him the unpublished manuscript of a study — their first large-scale clinical trial — which she said showed that artemisia outperformed a go-to treatment for schistosomiasis, a different parasite-induced disease.

Argemi immediately saw red flags. “I am not a specialist of malaria or schistosomiasis, but when I read the study I was simply totally surprised by the number of inconsistencies at the very first read,” Argemi, of the Clinique Axium in Strasbourg, France, told Retraction Watch by email.

USC-Children’s Hospital Los Angeles researcher out following misconduct probe

An infectious diseases researcher found by a federal U.S. watchdog to have “recklessly” faked data in grants worth millions left his job as the investigation was coming to a close, Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported last week, Prasadarao Nemani, of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and the University of Southern California (USC), “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly including falsified and/or fabricated data” in a 2009 paper — retracted in 2018 — and four NIH grant applications, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Earlier this week, in a statement provided to Retraction Watch, CHLA said that he was no longer with the hospital or with USC:

‘Some papers can slip through the net,’ says journal that published 5G-COVID-19 paper

We have heard back this morning from the publisher of a journal that yanked a paper that linked 5G cellphone technology and the novel coronavirus last week — a paper that scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik mused was the “worst paper of 2020.”

The response to our request for comment from editor in chief Pio Conti reads a bit like a Mad Libs of excuses we hear from publishers when something goes wrong. Read carefully for:

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