clinical study retractions – Page 68

Psychologist Jens Förster earns second and third retractions as part of settlement

High-profile social psychologist Jens Förster has earned two retractions following an investigation by his former workplace. He agreed to the retractions as part of a settlement with the German Society for Psychology (DGPs).

The papers are two of eight that were found to contain “strong statistical evidence for low veracity.” According to the report from an expert panel convened at the request of the board of the University of Amsterdam, following

an extensive statistical analysis, the experts conclude that many of the experiments described in the articles show an exceptionally linear link. This linearity is not only surprising, but often also too good to be true because it is at odds with the random variation within the experiments.

One of those eight papers was retracted in 2014. In November, the American Psychology Association received an appeal to keep two of the papers, and Förster agreed to the retractions of two more:

Continue reading Psychologist Jens Förster earns second and third retractions as part of settlement

“We are living in hell:” Authors retract 2nd paper due to missing raw data

A 2006 paper investigating the effects of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and celecoxib on prostate cancer cells has been retracted because it appears to contain panels that were duplicated, and the authors could not provide the raw data to show otherwise.

This is the second paper the authors have lost because they couldn’t furnish the original data to defend their work against allegations of image manipulation. The reason: the Institute for Cancer Prevention in New York, where the authors did the work, shut its doors abruptly in 2004, co-author Bhagavathi A. Narayanan told us. (The institute closed thanks to $5.7 million in grant that was misspent, the New York Post reported at the time.)

Recently, some of Narayanan’s papers have been questioned on PubPeer; her work has been the subject of an investigation at New York University, where Narayanan is now based.

Narayanan told us that the criticism of their work has deeply affected her and her co-authors:

Continue reading “We are living in hell:” Authors retract 2nd paper due to missing raw data

CDC fixes major error in flooring risk report: Not converting to metric

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a correction notice to a report about formaldehyde in laminate flooring, saying a mistake had caused them to significantly underestimate the health risks.

The mistake: According to CBS’s 60 Minutes, the CDC sometimes didn’t convert feet to meters. Ouch.

In the corrected report, the agency estimates the health risks of the laminate flooring — by irritating the ear, nose and throat — to be three-fold higher than what they suggested in the original report, published February 10.

Here’s the note that now appears in the link to the original CDC report: Continue reading CDC fixes major error in flooring risk report: Not converting to metric

Macchiarini may be dismissed from Karolinska; dean of research resigns

There’s more news to report on the story of surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who’s been dogged by allegations of misconduct.

After the Karolinska Institutet (KI) announced it would not extend his contract and that he needed to “phase out” his research by November, it has now announced it may dismiss him.

In addition, Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren, KI’s Dean of Research, has resigned.

Here’s the statement we received from a KI spokesperson:

Continue reading Macchiarini may be dismissed from Karolinska; dean of research resigns

2001 sepsis paper “deviates from the ethical standard of authorship,” says journal

We don’t have a lot of information on a recent retraction of a 2001 paper published in a Japanese journal — just a brief and strongly worded note explaining that it follows “a strict, extensive, and judicious review.”

The paper, retracted 14 years after it was published, describes patients in Okinawa, Japan who developed severe symptoms following infection by bacteria belonging to the Aeromonas genus. One example:

The one patient was a 15-year-old high school girl student, who had been healthy in her school life, was admitted to the hospital with a sudden onset of left thigh muscle pain and swelling. She subsequently went into septic shock and died one day after admission. Pathological examination on autopsy revealed massive gas formation, skin bullas and ulcers, and extensive severe soft tissue damage throughout the body.

“Aeromonas species infection with severe clinical manifestation in Okinawa, Japan-association with gas gangrene” has been cited three times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. It was published in a Japanese journal, Rinsho Biseibutshu Jinsoku Shindan Kenkyukai Shi — which translates to the Journal of the Association for Rapid Method and Automation in Microbiology.

The retraction note suggests that there are major flaws: Continue reading 2001 sepsis paper “deviates from the ethical standard of authorship,” says journal

Do radiology journals retract fewer papers? New study suggests yes

There’s good news and bad news in radiology research, according to a new study: The number of retractions is increasing in radiology journals, but the rate of retraction remains lower than that seen in biomedical journals outside the field of radiology.

According to the study in the American Journal of Roentgenology, between 1986 and 2001, radiology journals retracted — at the most — one paper per year, but from 2002 to 2013, at least two papers were pulled each year. Overall, roughly 11 articles are retracted out of every 100,000 articles published in radiology journals — compared to 15 out of 100,000 for biomedical journals outside radiology.

Still, writes author Andrew Rosenkrantz in “Retracted Publications Within Radiology Journals:”

Continue reading Do radiology journals retract fewer papers? New study suggests yes

Sanction for Toronto researchers upheld despite court challenge

A Toronto hospital network is keeping two researchers’ labs closed even after an Ontario court quashed part of a misconduct finding by the institution.

Some background: After the University Health Network found evidence of falsified data, Sylvia Asa stepped down as Program Medical Director of the Laboratory Medicine Program, the largest hospital diagnostic laboratory in Canada. Due to the investigation, UHN suspended the labs of Asa and her husband Shereen Ezzat. In response, Asa and Ezzat asked an Ontario court to quash the misconduct findings; last month, the court overturned two out of three findings, and asked UHN to reconsider its sanction against the pair.

According to the Toronto Star, on February 4th the UHN notified the researchers that the sanction against them would be upheld, and it would not reopen the researchers’ labs.

The Star spoke to the researcher’s lawyer, Brian Moher who Continue reading Sanction for Toronto researchers upheld despite court challenge

Don’t perform heart surgery described in retracted paper, says editor

A journal is retracting a paper about a heart surgery technique after discovering the researchers did not have ethics approval to perform a the procedure on 130 patients. What’s more, the local cardiac surgical society had asked the first author to stop using the method in 2004, six years before the study was complete.

The patients in the study had atrial septal defects — a congenital hole in their hearts that allows blood to leak between chambers. The retraction note concludes with the editor in chief advising other surgeons to not use the method to close the hole described in the retracted article, “Long-term assay of off-pump atrial septal defect closure using vena caval inflow occlusion and minimally invasive approaches in 130 cases.”

A concern from a reader unraveled the paper. The retraction note explains how:

Continue reading Don’t perform heart surgery described in retracted paper, says editor

Why publishing negative findings is hard

When a researcher encountered two papers that suggested moonlight has biological effects — on both plants and humans — he took a second look at the data, and came to different conclusions. That was the easy part — getting the word out about his negative findings, however, was much more difficult.

When Jean-Luc Margot, a professor in the departments of Earth, Planetary & Space Sciences and Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to submit his reanalysis to the journals that published the original papers, both rejected it; after multiple attempts, his work ended up in different publications.

Disagreements are common but crucial in science; like they say, friction makes fire. Journals are inherently disinterested in negative findings — but should it take more than a year, in one instance, to publish an alternative interpretation to somewhat speculative findings that, at first glance, seem difficult to believe? Especially when they contain such obvious methodological issues such as presenting only a handful of data points linking biological activity to the full moon, or ignore significant confounders?

Margot did not expect to have such a difficult experience with the journals — including Biology Letters, which published the study suggesting that a plant relied on the full moon to survive: Continue reading Why publishing negative findings is hard

Paper on alleged – and paradoxical – health benefits of obesity pulled for plagiarism

An article that suggested there is no benefit to being overweight among cancer survivors – the so-called “obesity paradox” – is being retracted for plagiarizing large sections from another paper that explored the same topic in cardiovascular disease.

The journal Cancer Causes & Control pulled the 2014 article last June after determining it contained “large portions” of text from another paper in Preventive Medicine by a different set of authors, which suggested that evidence linking obesity to health benefits in cardiovascular disease may stem from a form of selection bias.

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