A researcher who co-authored a now-retracted paper claiming that two vaccinated people died of COVID-19 for every three deaths prevented has had an affiliation with a Polish university terminated.
Yesterday, Poznan University tweeted about the researcher, Harald Walach:
Today, it confirmed the move in a statement:
Continue reading University terminates affiliation with researcher who had paper on COVID-19 vaccines retracted as mask study comes under scrutiny
A “costly mistake” has led to the retraction of a paper by a team of dermatology researchers in West Virginia who failed to obtain permission to use the data in their study for the specific purpose for which it was used.
The article, “Association Between Alopecia Areata and Natural Hair Color Among White Individuals,” which appeared in March 2021 in JAMA Dermatology, was a case-control study based on data from the UK Biobank — a large repository of medical and genetic data from people in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the article was Michael Kolodney, the chair of the department of dermatology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown.
In fact, Kolodney and his colleagues had produced two articles using data from the biobank: one on alopecia areata — an autoimmune condition that causes relatively early-onset hair loss — and another that linked baldness to an increased risk of Covid-19 in men. The Covid research was published in November 2020 as a letter to the editor in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
The Covid paper remains intact. But as the retraction notice indicates, the folks at UK Biobank hadn’t granted Kolodney’s group permission to publish the alopecia findings:
Continue reading ‘A costly mistake’ prompts retraction of paper on hair loss
Last month, Retraction Watch reported on the case of Hironobo Ueshima, an anesthesiology researcher found guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers. A journal editor, John Loadsman, was the first to suspect there were issues in Ueshima’s work. But this was hardly the first time Loadsman had been the canary in the coal mine of the anesthesiology literature, placing him squarely on our ever-growing list of scientific sleuths that includes Elisabeth Bik, who has been in the news recently because of threats. In this Q&A, we ask Loadsman what happened in the Ueshima case, and for his sense of how big a problem fraud in the literature is.
Retraction Watch (RW): You were the editor who first spotted problems with Ueshima’s work. Walk us through how you cracked the case. What made you suspect that his data were not kosher?
Continue reading Meet a sleuth whose work has led to the identification of hundreds of fraudulent papers
A journal has retracted — and replaced — an article on “tribalism” in medicine and deleted a tweet about it, too, after readers complained that the language in the piece was offensive to Indigenous peoples.
The article, which appeared in the Journal of Hospital Medicine in April, was titled “Tribalism: The Good, The Bad, and The Future.” The authors were Zahir Kanjee and Leslie Bilello, of Harvard Medical School.
The journal used social media to promote the article — which prompted a flood of criticism about the use of the word “tribalism” and its permutations.
On May 21, Samir Shah, the editor-in-chief of JHM, and four other editors issued a statement apologizing for publishing the article:
Continue reading Medical journal retracts article on “tribalism” after readers call it offensive
A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles.
The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of meditation developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and promoted by the Art of Living Foundation, which describes itself thusly:
Continue reading Two meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary outcomes
A Japanese anesthesiologist has been found guilty of fabricating data and other misconduct in 142 articles, leading to his termination and the sanction of several of his co-authors.
Showa University says its investigation into Hironobu Ueshima, the existence of which we first reported on last June, found that the prolific researcher had doctored his results, falsified his findings and tinkered with authorship.
The university’s report on the case is available here, in Japanese, and a similar report from the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists is available here in English. The JSA report cites 142 papers — including 120 letters to the editor, 12 original papers, and 9 case reports — with evidence of misconduct including fabricated data and improper authorship. The investigation also found evidence of misconduct in several unpublished studies by Ueshima. By our count, he has six retractions to date.
Continue reading Anesthesiology researcher guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers: Investigation
When a Twitter user tipped us off last week to the mysterious disappearance of a preprint of a paper on a potential new therapy to treat Covid-19, we were curious. Was it a hidden retraction, or something else?
The article, titled “Effectiveness of ZYESAMI™ (Aviptadil) in Accelerating Recovery and Shortening Hospitalization in Critically-Ill Patients with COVID-19 Respiratory Failure: Interim Report from a Phase 2B/3 Multicenter Trial,” had popped up on SSRN on April 1.
The trial was funded by NeuroRX, the maker of Zyesami, which trumpeted the results in a series of press releases dating back to February 2021. NeuroRX has been partnering with Relief Therapeutics on the development of the drug, but that marriage seems to be rather rocky.
Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist in France, tweeted that by May 10 the paper had vanished with only a trace of meta-data. As another Twitter user noted, however, the article had reappeared on the preprint server with a different title. (We see the post date on SSRN as May 11.)
We took a look at the two articles and found some interesting differences.
Continue reading ‘Preprints are works in progress’: The tale of a disappearing COVID-19 paper
A drug maker has blinked in a lawsuit against the leading anesthesiology society in the United States, along with several anesthesiology researchers, who it claims libeled the company in a series of articles and other materials critical of its main product.
As we reported last month, Pacira Biosciences, which makes the local anesthetic agent Exparel, field the suit in federal court in April, alleging that the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), the editor of its flagship journal, Anesthesiology, and others, were unfairly targeting the drug.
The company asked the court for a preliminary injunction to retract two papers and an editorial about Exparel that Anesthesiology published in February. But on May 7, Pacira withdrew the motion, about a week after the ASA filed its own motion calling for a quick hearing on the merits of the company’s motion.
According to an unusually forceful statement (for a medical society) from the ASA:
Continue reading Drug company withdraws court motion requesting retraction of papers critical of its painkiller
Six months after we reported that journals had slapped expressions of concern on more than three dozen papers by a group of nutrition researchers in Iran, the retractions have started to trickle in.
But clock started nearly two years ago, after data sleuths presented journals with questions about the findings in roughly 170 papers by the authors. So far we’ve seen only six retractions, from two journals, of the suspect papers. As one of the sleuths said, “yep, pretty slow.”
Central to the case is Zatollah Asemi, of the Department of Nutrition at Kashan University of Medical Sciences. As we wrote last November:
Continue reading “Yep, pretty slow”: Nutrition researchers lose six papers
A group of anesthesiology researchers in China have lost their 2020 paper on nerve blocks during lung surgery after finding that the work contained “too many” errors to stand. But after hearing from the top editor of the journal, it’s pretty clear “too many errors” was a euphemism for even worse problems.
The article, “Opioid-sparing effect of modified intercostal nerve block during single-port thoracoscopic lobectomy: A randomised controlled trial,” came from a team at Anhui Medical University. The senior author was Guang-hong Xu. The paper appeared online in early December in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology.
At which point it caught the attention of a reader in Australia, who emailed the journal to point out fishiness in the data.
Charles Marc Samama, the editor-in-chief of the EJA, told us:
Continue reading “We didn’t want to hurt them. We are polite”: When a retraction notice pulls punches