clinical study retractions – Page 14

Paper blaming COVID-19 on 5G technology withdrawn

A paper which argued that 5G cellphone technology could lead to infection with the novel coronavirus has been retracted, but not before scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik wondered whether it was the “worst paper of 2020.”

The article, “5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells,” came from a group from Italy, the United States and Russia, and appeared in the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents. The journal is published by Biolife, which asserts that it’s peer reviewed but has not responded to a request for comment. [Please see an update on this post.]

The abstract is now marked “WITHDRAWN” on PubMed and the paper has disappeared from the journal’s website. The abstract has been preserved here. According to the authors:

Paper urging use of homeopathy for COVID-19 appears in peer-reviewed public health journal

A peer-reviewed journal has published a paper that urges the adoption of homeopathy in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

[Please see an update on this post.]

The Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice — published by Springer Nature and also known by its German name, Zeitschrift für Gesundheitswissenschaften — published “Homeopathy combat against coronavirus disease (Covid-19)” on June 5. It is indexed in PubMed Central, although not on Medline.

Here’s the abstract:

Journal to retract paper that spawned #medbikini

From the *Journal of Vascular Surgery* paper

The Journal of Vascular Surgery says it will retract a paper about surgeons’ social media posts that said health care professionals who posted pictures of themselves in bikinis were engaging in “potentially unprofessional” behavior — and led to a firestorm on Twitter yesterday.

As Medscape reported yesterday before the retraction:

Medical professionals are tweeting pictures of themselves in swimsuits with the hashtag #MedBikini, accompanied by sharp rebukes of a study that labeled such images on social media as “potentially unprofessional.”

Co-author of controversial hydroxychloroquine study has 2018 paper corrected for “unintentional mistake”

Didier Raoult, whose claims that hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 have been widely disputed, has had a 2018 paper corrected for what his team says was unintentional duplication of a figure.

Here’s the correction for “Identification of rickettsial immunoreactive proteins using a proximity ligation assay Western blotting and the traditional immunoproteomic approach,” which came four months after scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik pointed out potential issues in Figure 2 on PubPeer:

Calling exercise data “atypical, improbable, and to put it bluntly, pretty weird,” sleuths call for seven retractions

A group of data sleuths is calling for the retraction of seven articles by an exercise physiologist in Brazil whose data they believe to be “highly unlikely” to have occurred experimentally.

In a preprint posted to the server SportRxiv, the group — led by Andrew Vigotsky, a biomedical engineer at Northwestern University — details their concerns about the work of Matheus Barbalho, a PhD student at the Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, part of the Universidade da Amazônia, in Belém. Barbalho’s mentor is Paulo Gentil.

In addition to the preprint, titled “Improbable data patterns in the work of Barbalho et al,” Greg Nuckols, one of the coauthors, has posted a lengthy “explainer” about the analysis.

The Brazilian group already has one retraction, for a study in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance titled “Evidence of a ceiling effect for training volume in muscle hypertrophy and strength in trained men—less is more?” According to the notice:

Painfully awkward: Duplicate anesthesiology study retracted

A study that compared drugs used to reverse the effects of relaxants for surgery has been retracted because the majority of the results were already published.

The study, “Comparison of sugammadex and pyridostigmine bromide for reversal of rocuronium-induced neuromuscular blockade in short-term pediatric surgery,” appeared in the journal Medicine in February 2020.

The work found that the drug sugammadex worked faster than pyridostigmine in children undergoing surgery, and doesn’t appear to have anything wrong with it. But a study with the same authors and same name (barring a single uncapitalized letter) had already been published in the journal Anesthesia and Pain Medicine on July 31, 2019.

Leading anesthesiologist retracts paper after reader “noticed that the statistical approach was sub-optimal”

An anesthesia journal has retracted a 2020 paper by a group from China, Turkey and the United States after a post-publication review discovered issues with the analysis.

According to the notice, in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology:

Journal calls 2012 paper “deeply offensive to particular minorities”

An Elsevier journal plans to issue a retraction notice this week about a widely criticized 2012 paper claiming to find links between skin color, aggression, and sexuality.

Earlier this month, we reported that the journal, Personality and Individual Differences (PAID), would retract the study “Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?” by the late authors Philippe Rushton and Donald Templer, published in 2012.

The paper was the subject of a highly critical Medium post in November 2019, and of a petition with more than 1,000 signatures sent to Elsevier earlier this month.

The four-page retraction notice, provided to Retraction Watch by Elsevier, begins with a description of the history, policies and procedures at the journal, then launches into a litany of issues with the paper:

Journal temporarily withdraws COVID-19 “labor cage” study

A study whose title suggested an “effective” way to give birth during the coronavirus pandemic has been temporarily retracted because the publisher says the word “effective” was included in the title by accident.

The method (pictured above) involved an enclosed, transparent chamber walling off the mother’s upper half from the rest of the world. It wasn’t very well received, according to an Essential Baby article that cited Twitter users referring to the “delivery table shield” as a “labor cage” and “greenhouse.”

The study, called “An effective protective equipment to use in the vaginal delivery of the pregnant women with suspected/diagnosed COVID-19: Delivery Table Shield” was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology (AJOG), an Elsevier journal, on June 15. Most of the authors were affiliated with the Turkish Ministry of Health at Ankara City Hospital.

But it was swiftly removed. The temporary retraction notice says:

“I want to apologize for my misconduct,” says anesthesiologist whose work is under investigation

Showa University Hospital, via Wikimedia

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:

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