Category: environmental retractions

Activist group retracts warnings about midwest oil wells

downloadAfter receiving additional data from the government, an activist group has retracted an analysis that suggested energy companies were not taking steps to cut back on a controversial practice.

The Bakken analysis — named for North Dakota’s gigantic underground deposit of oil and natural gas — was published by the Environmental Law and Policy Center (ELPC). It focused on a practice known as “gas flaring” — burning natural gas instead of using or selling it. The analysis, released last month, found that hundreds of wells in North Dakota had not filed the necessary plans for saving excess gas produced in the course of extracting oil from wells. But after the Department of Mineral Resources provided more data — we’re not sure what kind of data, specifically — the ELPC retracted that conclusion.

The group posted the retraction notice on September 25, just four days after they presented the analysis at a news conference. It states why their recent evaluation of companies’ plans to capture excess gas might be wrong — and what they’re doing next:

Continue reading Activist group retracts warnings about midwest oil wells

Authors “did not have permission” to use pesticide data

10661An environmental journal is retracting an article about the risks of pesticides to groundwater after determining it contained data that “the authors did not have permission (implicit or explicit) to publish.”

According to the retraction note in Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, the paper said the data came from a non-author’s PhD thesis, but it’s not there. Those mysterious data were used to validate a model for pesticide exposures, described in an excerpt from the abstract:  Continue reading Authors “did not have permission” to use pesticide data

Marine mammal injury study retracted for using restricted gov’t data

Integrative ZoologyA 2012 paper that analyzed injuries to aquatic mammals in China has been retracted “due to the usage of restricted data from the Ministry of Agriculture of China.”

The authors — from Shandong University in China, The University of Hong Kong and the Peruvian Centre for Cetacean Research — “organized the collection of official documents related to strandings, bycatches and injuries of aquatic mammals in the waters of mainland China from provincial fishery administrations for the years 2000 to 2006,” according to the abstract. However, they may not have been supposed to do that.

Here’s the retraction notice from Integrative Zoology (which is paywalled, tsk, tsk):

Continue reading Marine mammal injury study retracted for using restricted gov’t data

Lizards aren’t getting hotter faster than the planet after all, says retraction

EcographyA paper that raised alarms by suggesting lizards were warming even faster than the planet has been retracted after the authors employed the wrong method to measure temperatures.

Some scientists thought that, because of the way lizards retain heat to regulate their cold-blooded bodies, they might be more sensitive to temperature changes. Well, not in this case. The paper has been retracted from Ecography because the scientists erred in calculating the “radiative conductance of the animal” — basically, how much heat it can get rid of — such that the “broad-scale” conclusions of the study are invalid.

The notice for the aptly named paper “Lizards could be warming faster than climate” reads: Continue reading Lizards aren’t getting hotter faster than the planet after all, says retraction

Paper on chemtrails, a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists, retracted

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A paper claiming to expose the “tightly held secret” that long clouds trailing from jets are toxic coal fly ash — and not, as the U.S. government says, primarily composed of harmless ice crystals — has been retracted.

The paper is called “Evidence of Coal-Fly-Ash Toxic Chemical Geoengineering in the Troposphere: Consequences for Public Health,” and was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in August. Author J. Marvin Herndon — a geophysicist, and self-described “independent researcher” — also distributed a press release about the findings.

The abstract explains:

The author presents evidence that toxic coal combustion fly ash is the most likely aerosolized particulate sprayed by tanker-jets for geoengineering, weather-modification and climate-modification purposes and describes some of the multifold consequences on public health.

The detailed retraction note, authored by the academic editor of the paper, Paul B. Tchounwou, a biologist at Jackson State University, points out some errors with the science, and notes that the “language of the paper is often not sufficiently scientifically objective:” Continue reading Paper on chemtrails, a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists, retracted

NSF investigation of high-profile plant retractions ends in two debarments

Jorge Vivanco
Jorge Vivanco

A nearly ten-year-long series of investigations into a pair of plant physiologists who received millions in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation has resulted in debarments of less than two years for each of the researchers.

The NSF Office of Inspector General recently posted its close-out report on its decision and a review of the University’s investigation, which had recommended a total of eight retractions or corrections. Although the investigator’s names have been redacted, the text of retractions and corrections quoted in the report corresponds to papers by Continue reading NSF investigation of high-profile plant retractions ends in two debarments

“We copied verbatim”: Authors insist on retraction for their own spider paper

Journal of ArachnologyThe authors of a 2015 paper about non-native spider populations in Chile are retracting it from the Journal of Arachnology because they copied the introduction of a 2011 paper verbatim.

The retraction was triggered by the first author, who “insisted on a full retraction in lieu of milder remedies,” according to the journal’s editor-in-chief.

The paper, “Alien spiders in Chile: evaluating Darwin’s naturalization hypothesis,” tested Darwin’s hypothesis that introduced species that are phylogenetically distant from native animals are more likely to thrive. It was published in April. Authors Andrés Taucare-Ríos and Ramiro O. Bustamante are both based at the University of Chile in Santiago.

The notice reads:

Continue reading “We copied verbatim”: Authors insist on retraction for their own spider paper

Author disputes retraction of pine needle paper published “without the knowledge” of all authors

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The properties of pine needles in northwestern China differ — both inside and out — depending on where on the slope of a mountain they are situated. The properties of a recent paper on this phenomenon have recently changed from “published” to “retracted.”

It appears that some of the authors didn’t realize it had been submitted to The Scientific World Journal. The paper has not been cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Here’s the notice:
Continue reading Author disputes retraction of pine needle paper published “without the knowledge” of all authors

Editors retract algae study, citing “issues with the data”

International Journal of PhytoremediationThe International Journal of Phytoremediation  has issued a retraction for a 2013 article suggesting algae could shield against gamma radiation better than lead.

Sadly, such an innovation was not to be — the editors have pulled the paper, saying:

We are now cognizant that there are issues with the data and determinations made within the manuscript that cannot be corrected through a corrigendum.

The paper is now covered by a dizzying watermark. (The first page can be seen here.)

Here’s more from the retraction for “Shielding Property of Natural Biomass Against Gamma Rays”, authored by a group of professors at Amasya University, Aksaray University, and Suleyman Demirel University in Turkey:

Continue reading Editors retract algae study, citing “issues with the data”

A tale of two journals: Elsevier retracts paper after publishing it in the wrong journal

EMIf you happen to pick up this month’s issue of Economic Modelling, there’s a little surprise on page 307—blank pages. Publisher Elsevier has retracted a paper from that space because it “inadvertently published” the paper in the journal. In fact, Elsevier meant to include the paper in the pages of its other journal, Energy Economics.

The paper, “An Approach to Computing Marginal Land-Use Change Carbon Intensities for Bioenergy in Policy Applications,” is most assuredly not about economic modeling. Rather, it describes an approach for assessing carbon emissions from the production of bioenergy crops.

Here’s the retraction notice: Continue reading A tale of two journals: Elsevier retracts paper after publishing it in the wrong journal