A virology journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 article on mosquito-borne infections in Africa after one of the authors identified errors in the publication — an episode that has prompted a change in practice at the journal to avoid similar issues in the future.
The article, “Mosquito-borne arboviruses in Uganda: history, transmission and burden,” was written by a group in the United Kingdom and Uganda and appeared in the Journal of General Virology last June.
The authors of a study comparing hydroxychloroquine and the antiviral agent favipiravir as treatments for COVID-19 have lost the paper after post-publication peer review determined that the data did not support the conclusions.
A journal has retracted a study that sought to dispel fears about the risks — real and inflated — associated with travel to high altitudes after receiving complaints from a group of experts who found fault with the paper.
That’s the official version. The backstory is somewhat more complex.
“Acute Mountain Sickness, High Altitude Pulmonary Edema, and High Altitude Cerebral Edema: A view from the High Andes” was published online in February 2021 in Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology, an Elsevier title. The authors were Gustavo Zubieta-Calleja and his daughter, Natalia Zubieta-DeUrioste, of the High Altitude Pulmonary and Pathology Institute in La Paz, Bolivia — which, at nearly 12,000 feet above sea level, is no stranger to hypoxia.
A World Health Organization (WHO) database of papers about COVID-19 contains hundreds of articles published in hijacked journals whose publishers have stolen titles and legitimacy from the original publications.
That’s what I found when I analyzed the WHO’s “COVID-19 Global literature on coronavirus disease,” which as of August 1 included more than 318,000 papers sourced from typically trusted databases including the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Medline, Elsevier’s Scopus, and Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
But the collection hosts hundreds of papers published in hijacked journals with fraudulent publishing practices. Hijacked, or clone, journals mimic legitimate publishers by creating a clone website or registering an expired one. They accept papers — often wildly out of scope of the original publication — without peer review, and collect fees from the authors.
A group of researchers in Canada and India have lost a paper on vaccine hesitancy and Covid-19 because they didn’t have the proper license to mine a database of news articles used in the study.
The paper, “Tracking COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and logistical challenges: A machine learning approach,” was published in PLOS ONE on June 2. Led by Shantanu Dutta, of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, the researchers set out to:
A group of surgeons in Germany have retracted a 2020 paper for several errors and because a senior researcher says he should have been included as a co-author.
Earlier this week, we reported on the retractions of two papers on Covid-19 in Texas inmates after the journal was told that the researchers did not have proper ethics approval for the studies.
According to the senior author on the articles, however, that’s nowhere near the whole story. Kenneth Nugent, of Texas Tech Physicians in Lubbock, told us that he’d repeatedly sought — and received — approval from an institutional review board (IRB) throughout their project, articles on which appeared last year in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication.
A journal has retracted a pair of studies on Covid-19 in prisoners after the authors’ institution found that they had not obtained adequate ethics approval for the research.
The two studies appeared in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication. The authors, from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, were led by Kenneth Nugent, an internal medicine specialist at the institution.
A nursing journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a researcher in Scotland after learning that she’d taken a wee bit more credit for the article than she deserved.
O’Connor had been a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow before moving to the University of Edinburgh, from which she received the Florence Nightingale Scholarship, a year-long fellowship award for nursing researchers. While at Edinburgh, she wrote and published the paper in question, using data that she’d had access to in Glasgow.
JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a paper claiming that children’s masks trap too-high concentrations of carbon dioxide a little more than two weeks after publishing it.
Walach and his colleagues responded to critics of the JAMA Pediatrics paper earlier this month, as we reported. But the journals apparently found that response wanting, according to the retraction notice:
