clinical study retractions – Page 13

The list of retracted COVID-19 papers is up to 33

To the list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted so far, add this:

The Korean Journal of Anesthesiology has retracted an article it published last month on ventilating COVID patients because it was nearly identical to one that had appeared in a different journal three months earlier.

The offending article, “Noninvasive versus invasive ventilation: one modality cannot fit all during COVID-19 outbreak,” was written by Abhishek Singh, an anesthesiologist at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

‘Women’s respect is a priority for us’: Journal finally retracts paper claiming women with endometriosis are more attractive

The journal that published a paper claiming that attractive women were more likely to develop endometriosis has finally retracted the article, more than a month after the authors called for the move.

The article, “Attractiveness of women with rectovaginal endometriosis: a case-control study,” appeared in September 2012 in Fertility and Sterility, an official publication of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Over the years, it had been the subject of criticism.

In early August, the authors of the paper, from Italy, called for the retraction of the work. But that didn’t happen until now.

Per the retraction notice, which is undated — as has become common for Elsevier journals that overwrite their original HTML pages — but seems to have appeared within the last few days:

Going cold turkey: Infectious disease-poultry researcher up to 14 retractions

Nine strikes in a row in bowling is called a “golden turkey.” So what do you call 10 papers on poultry pulled at once for plagiarism?

We first wrote about Sajid Umar in July 2018, when he’d lost a 2016 article in Scientifica for plagiarism and other sins, and then again earlier this summer when he notched two more retractions from Poultry Science for “grave mistakes.”

Now, the World’s Poultry Science Journal, a Taylor & Francis title, has pulled 10 more of Umar’s articles — bringing his total to 14, by our count. According to the retraction notice for the 2017 paper “Mycoplasmosis in poultry: update on diagnosis and preventive measures”:

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.

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