clinical study retractions – Page 4

Buzzy Lancet long COVID paper under investigation for ‘data errors’

An early and influential paper on long COVID that appeared in The Lancet has been flagged with an expression of concern while the journal investigates “data errors” brought to light by a reader.

An editorial that accompanied the paper when it was published in January of last year described it as “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19. The article has received plenty of attention since then.

Titled “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study,” the paper has been cited nearly 1,600 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Altmetric finds references to it in multiple documents from the World Health Organization.

Journal editor in chief who published controversial Covid papers resigns

The editor in chief of the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) has resigned with more than a year left of his term, according to an email announcing his move to colleagues.

In the email, first reproduced in Steve Kirsch’s Substack newsletter, the editor, Jose L. Domingo, cited “deep discrepancies” with the journal’s direction under publisher Elsevier as the reason for his early resignation. He shared the email with us when we reached out for comment.

Domingo, a professor of toxicology and environmental Health at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Spain, listed three main points of contention: an agreement for the journal to publish documents for the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials, which Domingo believed to be a “drag” on the journal’s impact factor; FCT’s recent designation as the official journal of the Chinese Society of Toxicology; and a February editorial he wrote requesting submissions “on the potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines.”

He wrote:

How many ducks do you need to line up to get a publication retracted?

In July 2017, we notified the Journal of Bone and Mineral Metabolism (JBMM) of concerns about a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in rats which featured, among other problems, extensive duplication of data in a separate publication, large numbers of discrepancies in the methods and results between the publications, and serious concerns about the governance and conduct of the research.

The journal sought an explanation from the authors, Jun Iwamoto and Yoshihiro Sato, who currently have 119 retractions between them. The response avoided addressing most of the concerns and attributed all the discrepancies to minor errors, and was accepted by JBMM.

In the intervening years, however, evidence about problems in the group’s work has mounted. And yet the paper remains neither retracted nor corrected. It has become just another in a long list of studies, along with ten others in the journal, that we have beaten our heads against the wall to have journals fix.

A grad student finds a ‘typo’ in a psychedelic study’s script that leads to a retraction

Sometime after it was published, Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports.

The original article was written by a group led by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. Titled “A mechanistic model of the neural entropy increase elicited by psychedelic drugs,” the paper purported to help illuminate what happens in the brain under the influence of substances like LSD.

But the findings of the study wouldn’t replicate. And unlike some researchers who might blow off criticism of their work, or blame the replicators for the failure, Herzog sent Lodder the scripts his team had used.

Lodder found the problem quickly. As Herzog related to Retraction Watch, Lodder (whose schedule has been challenging the past few weeks as we’ve played phone tag) [See update on this post.]:

Journal says ivermectin study met standard for ‘credible science’

A journal editor is defending his decision to publish a new paper showing that ivermectin can prevent Covid-19, despite more than a dozen retractions of such papers from the literature.

The article, “Regular Use of Ivermectin as Prophylaxis for COVID-19 Led Up to a 92% Reduction in COVID-19 Mortality Rate in a Dose-Response Manner: Results of a Prospective Observational Study of a Strictly Controlled Population of 88,012 Subjects,” appeared in Cureus August 31.

The authors included Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist better known as the leader of the Front-Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, based in Madison, Wis. Kory has been an active promoter of the use of ivermectin and other questionable remedies for Covid-19 – even testifying before Congress about his ideas – although his most high-profile paper on the topic was retracted last November.

How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions

In July of 2017, Mohamed Rezk, of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Menoufia University in Egypt, submitted a manuscript to the journal Anesthesia with a colleague.

The manuscript, “Analgesic and antiemetic effect of Intraperitoneal magnesium sulfate in laparoscopic salpingectomy: a randomized controlled trial,” caught the attention of John Carlisle, an editor at the journal whose name will be familiar to Retraction Watch readers as the sleuth whose statistical analyses have identified hundreds of papers with implausible clinical trial data.

The baseline data appeared unremarkable, Carlisle told us, but the same wasn’t true of the outcomes data. Of 24 values that could have been odd or even numbers, all of them were even.

The probability of that was “0.000000000000000000000 something,” Carlisle said.

Guest post: What happened when we tried to get a paper claiming ‘billions of lives are potentially at risk’ from COVID-19 vaccines retracted

In February, the editor-in-chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology published an editorial calling for “Papers on potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines.” Following this call, in April 2022, the journal – no stranger to Retraction Watch readers – published an article titled “Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs.”

At more than 16,000 words and more than 200 references, the article was submitted on February 9^th and accepted on April 8^th. It claims that “billions of lives are potentially at risk” with Covid-19 vaccines.

Such an important statement should be supported by facts. But this is not at all the case. And yet the paper has been shared more than 45,000 times on social media, in ways that decrease trust in science and the COVID-19 vaccine, despite the robust evidence that it is both safe and efficient.

‘One would not want to tarnish another journal’: Why a republished COVID-19 masks study doesn’t say it was retracted

When a retracted paper is republished in a new journal, should it note the retraction?

A few readers have asked us that question as they forwarded a paper published in May in Environmental Research, an Elsevier title. The study, “Carbon dioxide rises beyond acceptable safety levels in children under nose and mouth covering: Results of an experimental measurement study in healthy children,” bore striking similarities to a paper by the same authors that was retracted from JAMA Pediatrics in July 2021.

That retraction was the second for the paper’s first author, Harald Walach, who also lost an affiliation with a university in Poland. Walach tells us that he let the editor know about the JAMA Pediatrics retraction before he submitted the manuscript:

University’s story changes: It requested 33 retractions, not ‘several’

The University of Wyoming has requested that journals retract 33 papers by a former associate dean and “highly cited researcher” at the institution.

The news came just a week after we broke the story that heart researcher Jun Ren had been demoted following an earlier investigation. At the time, a university spokesperson told us that “Based on the findings of this examination, the university is recommending retraction of several publications due to concerns regarding data irregularities inconsistent with published conclusions.”

Exclusive: OSU investigation finds dishonesty and “permissive culture of data manipulation” in cancer research lab

A university investigation found an emeritus professor had committed research misconduct after reviewing dozens of allegations, culminating in a recommendation to retract 10 papers and revoke his emeritus status.

The Ohio State University investigated 20 manuscripts by the cancer research group of Samson Jacob after the university received allegations in 2017 of image manipulation stretching over years of work, according to a misconduct investigation report we obtained via a public records request.

The 209-page report, dated February 9, 2021, tells the story of an investigation spanning more than a decade of Jacob’s lab’s work that encountered “dishonesty” from the lab members interviewed.

After determining that Jacob had committed research misconduct, the investigation committee recommended sanctions and asked for the immediate retraction of 10 papers in addition to the 10 that had already been addressed (nine retracted and one corrected) prior to the close of the inquiry. The school revoked Jacob’s emeritus position in May 2021, the OSU Lantern reported at the time.

The investigation committee reviewed 67 allegations, but declined to probe many more concerns that surfaced for the sake of time, according to the report.

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