A Japanese anesthesiologist who just notched his sixth retraction apologized for his misconduct and said his institution is now investigating his entire body of work.
Hironobu Ueshima, of Showa University in Tokyo, who has roughly 170 publications, told Retraction Watch by email:
Continue reading “I want to apologize for my misconduct,” says anesthesiologist whose work is under investigation
Earlier this month, we reported on the retraction of two papers by a Japanese anesthesiologist for unreliable data. At the time, we noted that the case of Hironobu Ueshima bore watching, given his publication total runs to about 170.
[See an update on this story.]
The two retractions earlier this month came after an earlier one from the journal Medicine in April. Now, another anesthesia journal has retracted three more papers by Ueshima, citing misconduct, for a total of six.
The articles appeared in Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine in 2016 and 2019. According to the notice:
Continue reading And then there were six: three more retractions for Japanese anesthesiologist
Often, when confronted with allegations of errors in papers they have published, journal editors encourage researchers to submit letters to the editor. Based on what we hear from such letter writers, however, the journals don’t make publication an easy process. Here’s one such story from a group at Indiana University: Luis M. Mestre, Stephanie L. Dickinson, Lilian Golzarri-Arroyo, and David B. Allison.
In late 2018, in the course of reviewing papers on obesity, one of us (DA) noticed a November 2018 article in the BMC journal Biomedical Engineering Online titled “Randomized controlled trial testing weight loss and abdominal obesity outcomes of moxibustion.” The objective of the study was to determine the effect of moxibustion therapy on weight loss, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio in young Asian females living in Taiwan.
Some of the tabulated data in the paper seemed odd, so DA sent it to members of our research team asking for their input. The research team agreed, finding some irregularities in the data that seemed inconsistent with a randomized experimental design. After that, the task of carefully and thoroughly checking the published summary statistics and text in the paper was delegated to another of us (LM) and all of his work rechecked by professional statisticians and the research team.
The apparent inconsistencies and anomalies identified in the paper (i.e., large baseline differences, variance heterogeneity, and lack of details in the explanation of the study design) led to concerns about the extent to which the study report represented an accurate description of a properly conducted randomized controlled trial (RCT) and, therefore, whether the conclusions were reliable. Given the importance of reliable conclusions in the scientific literature on obesity treatment, as well as simply the integrity of the scientific literature overall, we decided to write a letter to the editor of the journal seeking either clarification or correction.
Continue reading Tortuous and torturous: Why publishing a critical letter to the editor is so difficult
Yesterday, dozens of scientists petitioned the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to “retract a paper on the effectiveness of masks, saying the study has ‘egregious errors’ and contains numerous ‘verifiably false’ statements,” as The New York Times reported. One of those scientists was James Heathers, whose name will likely be familiar to Retraction Watch readers because of his work as a scientific sleuth. We asked him to share his thoughts on why he signed the letter.
Recently, The Lancet retracted a paper critical of the drug hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID. The retraction was requested by three of the paper’s authors, who had requested a copy of the underlying data from the fourth. The data never came. No data, no paper.
The above took a few weeks. To many people, it must have looked like silence. But the entire time, out of the public eye, a furious and detailed global discussion between scientists, statisticians, and epidemiologists about the accuracy of this paper was boiling. Frankly, almost no one believed this paper. The data were too regular. The access that was reported to hospital databases was too unusual. The amount of work done didn’t fit the parameters reported.
It was … “off.” It was obvious. Something was amiss.
Continue reading I agree with your conclusions completely, and your paper is still terrible.
A review of scores of studies on antidepressants has been retracted because it used an incorrect analysis.
The original paper, published in JAMA Psychiatry on February 19, 2020, looked at individual differences in patients taking antidepressants and concluded that there were significant differences beyond the placebo effect or the data’s statistical noise. The paper earned some attention, including a story on MedPage Today.
However, the analysis didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The retraction notice reads:
Continue reading “Honest errors happen in science:” JAMA journal retracts paper on antidepressants
A Springer Nature journal has issued an editor’s note — which seems an awful lot like an Expression of Concern — for a widely circulated but quickly contested paper about how the novel coronavirus might infect white blood cells, akin to HIV.
However, readers could be forgiven for missing that fact. Indeed, the journal itself appears to be struggling to deal with the article — which one of the corresponding authors told us he asked to withdraw weeks ago.
The paper, “SARS-CoV-2 infects T lymphocytes through its spike protein-mediated membrane fusion,” appeared in early April in Cellular & Molecular Immunology. Most of the authors are based in China, and one, Shibo Jiang, is a prominent virologist with a joint affiliation at the New York Blood Center.
Continue reading A journal took three days to accept a COVID-19 paper. It’s taken two months and counting to retract it.
A journal has retracted two case reports by a prolific Japanese anesthesiologist who appears to be embroiled in a misconduct investigation.
The two case studies, in JA Clinical Reports, were written by Hironobu Ueshima and Hiroshi Otake, of Showa University Hospital in Tokyo. Ueshima has roughly 170 publications to his name, according to Google Scholar, so we’ll be closely watching for developments in this case.
The two retracted articles in JA Clinical Reports, a Springer title affiliated with the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, appeared in 2016 and 2018. The first, “Successful clavicle fracture surgery performed under selective supraclavicular nerve block using the new subclavian approach,” now carries the following notice:
Continue reading Prolific anesthesiologist in Japan has two papers retracted
A series of back and forth publications about a 12-year-old study of nursing education ended with some unusual editorial decisions.
Darrell Spurlock, a professor of nursing at Widener University and director of the university’s Leadership Center for Nursing Education Research, co-authored a study of the Health Education Systems, Inc. (HESI) nursing test in 2008. He and his colleague found that the test was a poor predictor of failure on the National Counsel Licensure Exam (NCLEX-RN).
More than a decade later, a critique of the paper, by Dreher et al., appeared out of the blue, published last year in Nursing Forum, a Wiley journal. Spurlock takes issue with the way his research was portrayed in the critique, which paints a more positive picture of the HESI test.
Continue reading A nursing journal makes two online critiques disappear
On the heels of retractions of papers based on data that has fallen under intense scrutiny, an emergency medicine group in Africa is withdrawing a tool that they built using data from the same company.
Lee Wallis, one of the editors in chief of the African Journal of Emergency Medicine, described the tool, built in a partnership with the African Federation for Emergency Medicine (AFEM) and Surgisphere, in an April 2, 2020 editorial. A PubPeer commenter noted the potential issues today (June 6), and Wallis responded there nearly immediately to say that the tool was withdrawn.
In a statement, AFEM writes:
Continue reading Group withdraws COVID-19 scoring tool based on Surgisphere data following NEJM, Lancet retractionsTwo days after issuing expressions of concern about controversial papers on Covid-19, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have retracted the articles because a number of the authors were not granted access to the underlying data.
The Lancet paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis,” which relied on data from a private company called Surgisphere and had concluded that hydroxychloroquine was linked to a higher risk of death among some COVID-19 patients, has been dogged by questions since its publication in late May. Some of those complaints led to a correction about aspects of the data, but at the time the authors stood by their conclusions — namely, that hydrochloroquine and chloroquine do not to appear to be effective against the viral infection.
That correction was followed earlier this week by the expression of concern, and now three of the four authors of the article have decided to pull it entirely. The abstaining author, Sapan Desai, is the founder of Surgisphere, whose mission statement declares that the goal of the company is to:
Continue reading Lancet, NEJM retract controversial COVID-19 studies based on Surgisphere data
