by subject – Page 12 – Retraction Watch

Highly cited Lancet long COVID study retracted and republished

One of the first studies of long COVID has been retracted and replaced seven months after editors marked it with an expression of concern citing “data errors.”

The original paper, “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study,” was published in The Lancet in January 2021. It was “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19, according to an editorial published simultaneously, and has been cited more than 2,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The World Health Organization, for example, cited it in several documents.

Last November, the article received an expression of concern stating that a researcher had contacted the journal about inconsistencies between that study and a paper published in August 2021, also in The Lancet, describing the same cohort of patients after one year of follow up.

‘Compromised’ survey data leads to article retraction and university investigation

An article based on results from an online survey has been retracted for data issues, and an Australian university is investigating what happened.

The article, “International nursing students’ perceptions and experiences of transition to the nursing workforce – A cross-sectional survey,” became available online on Jan. 29, 2022.

Published in the journal Nurse Education in Practice, the study reported 110 responses to an online survey of nursing students who came to Australia from other countries and planned to remain there to work.

The retraction notice, posted this month, stated:

Australian study supporting mask mandates earns expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for an Australian study that supported mask mandates after researchers raised several potential problems with the design and methodology of the study.

The article, “The introduction of a mandatory mask policy was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 cases in a major metropolitan city,” was published in the journal PLOS ONE in July 2021. It has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In comments to Retraction Watch, the authors of the paper stood by their work, but a key critic said he still thought the work should have been retracted.

Torturing data to predict bitcoin prices: A book excerpt

We are pleased to present an excerpt from Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, a new book by Pomona College economics professor Gary Smith. The Washington Post said the book’s lessons “are very much needed.”

The fact that changes in bitcoin prices are driven by fear, greed, and manipulation has not stopped people from trying to crack their secret. Empirical models of bitcoin prices are a wonderful example of data torturing because bitcoins have no intrinsic value and, so, cannot be explained credibly by economic data.

Undaunted by this reality, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper reported the mind-boggling efforts made by Yale University economics professor Aleh Tsyvinski and a graduate student, Yukun Liu, to find empirical patterns in bitcoin prices.

Guest post: What happened when we tried to get a book with misinformation about our field retracted

For much of the past year, we and several colleagues in our field have been trying to convince a publisher to retract a book.

Advocates are using the text because it contains details on how to advance numerous laws in the United States and throughout the world. The text is also currently being used to influence judicial decisions that affect the lives of thousands of families.

The problem is, the work contains a massive amount of misinformation, misquoted sources, plagiarized text, and many other flaws.

We have been so disappointed with the failure of the publisher and the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) to address our concerns and our request for retraction that we have decided to share our experience with the scientific community.

Author denies Chinese censorship prompted COVID-19 retraction

The corresponding author of a recently published – and then quickly retracted – letter in The Lancet decrying the failure of the Chinese Ministry of Health to pay doctors and other health care workers says authorities did not pressure him to withdraw the piece.

The letter begins:

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end in China, medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to fight the omicron (B.1.1.529) variant are now facing a new challenge. Despite their heroic efforts, many of them are now struggling to receive the financial compensation they deserve.

The second sentence cites a blog post on Weixin.

“Unapproved euthanasia” of rats in neuroscience study leads to retraction

A 2017 paper describing neuroscience research with rats has been retracted after “data mis-management,” including the mistreatment of the animals, came to light.

The retracted paper was the second by Subimal Datta, a professor of psychology and anesthesiology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to receive a flag for data problems.

The article, “BNDF heterozygosity is associated with memory deficits and alterations in cortical and hippocampal EEG power,” was published in Behavioural Brain Research and has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, published March 31, stated:

High-profile paper that used AI to identify suicide risk from brain scans retracted for flawed methods

In 2017, a paper published in Nature Human Behavior made international headlines for the authors’ claim they had developed a way to analyze brain scans using machine learning to identify youth at risk for suicide.

“It was a big, splashy finding,” said Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. But at a neuroimaging conference soon after the publication, other researchers discussed the study “in kind of a sense of disbelief,” he said.

The 91% accuracy for identifying suicidality that the researchers reported, from a sample size of just a few dozen participants, he said, “kind of went against what we as a field were starting to understand about the nature of these brain phenotype markers based off of neuroimaging data.”

After six years of scrutiny, during which Verstynen attempted to replicate the work but found a key problem, the authors of the 2017 paper have retracted the article.

One small error for a physicist, one giant blunder for planetary science

For a decade, scientists have been scratching their heads when trying to put a date on primeval events like the crystallization of the magma ocean on the moon or the early formation of Earth’s continental crust.

Their problem? A revised estimate of the half-life of a radioactive isotope called samarium-146 that is used to gauge the age of ancient rocks.

The updated value, published in 2012 in Science, shortened samarium-146’s half-life by a whopping 35 million years, down to 68 million years from the standard estimate of 103. This reset the clock on the solar system’s early history and suggested the oldest rocks on Earth could have formed tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought.

“Bust Size and Hitchhiking” author earns five expressions of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern about five papers by a psychology researcher whose studies related to women’s sexual behavior and perceived attractiveness have raised eyebrows.

As we’ve previously reported, sleuths have identified seemingly impossible and likely fabricated results in the work of Nicolas Guéguen, a professor of marketing at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, leading to the retraction of four of his papers.

The latest expression of concern relates to five articles in Perceptual and Motor Skills, a SAGE title, which has published eight studies of Guéguen’s, including several on which he is listed as the sole author.

The notice applies to:

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