Category: surgery retractions

Can you retract something that never existed in the first place? At least one journal thinks the answer to that conundrum is yes. 

That journal would be Medicine. In September 2020, the Wolters Kluwer journal published a paper titled “Tranexamic acid reduces blood cost in long-segment spinal fusion surgery: A randomized controlled study protocol” by a group in China led by Linyu Yang, of the Department of Orthopedics at the Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, in Sichuan. 

The article promised – but failed to deliver – a “Table 1”, an omission the peer reviewers and journal staff missed during the production process. Five months later, said table still had not materialized, prompting the following notice: 

Continue reading Journal retracts a paper it published with a missing table after author fails to provide it

An Elsevier journal has, for the moment, removed a paper which found that the patients of female surgeons fare better than those treated by men.

Although the journal didn’t provide an explanation for the move — unfortunately not unusual for Elsevier — a spokesman for the publisher told us that reader complaints about the methodology and statistics in the article prompted the action. 

The paper, which appeared last month in Surgery — the official journal of the Society of University Surgeons, Central Surgical Association, and the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons — was written by a group at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, led by Tara M. Barry, a general surgery resident at the institution. 

“Battle of the sexes: The effect of surgeon gender on postoperative in-hospital mortality,” isn’t available on the journal website. However, a conference abstract by the authors states: 

Continue reading Study finding patients of female surgeons fare better is temporarily removed

After whistleblowers in China prompted the retraction of a 2018 paper that overstated the number of patients treated in a study, another journal says it’s investigating a second article by the same group.

Last month, as we reported, the Journal of Surgical Oncology retracted “Long‐term outcomes of 530 esophageal squamous cell carcinoma patients with minimally invasive Ivor Lewis esophagectomy.” The move was prompted by whistleblowers who notified the journal that the 530 cases could not have been performed at the authors’ institution, Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou. 

After our post, a Twitter user pointed us to a second article by the group, in BMC Cancer, which claimed to report data on 697 subjects over just one additional year — a highly improbable figure. 

Continue reading Cancer surgery group in China may lose second 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.” 

Continue reading Journal to retract paper that spawned #medbikini

A group of pediatric surgeons in China has lost their 2016 paper on a technique for repairing abdominal defects in children because they apparently had trouble keeping those defects straight. 

The article, “A new technique for extraperitoneal repair of inguinal hernia,” appeared in the Journal of Surgical Research, an Elsevier title. The authors reported that a laparoscopic method of repairing inguinal hernias in children was superior to conventional, open surgery. According to the authors, they had nearly 1,900 patients to prove their point. 

But as the retraction notice indicates, the numbers didn’t add up. 

Continue reading What’s the hernia? Authors lose surgery paper for miscounting cases