by subject – Page 13 – Retraction Watch

A grad student finds a ‘typo’ in a psychedelic study’s script that leads to a retraction

Sometime after it was published, Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports.

The original article was written by a group led by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. Titled “A mechanistic model of the neural entropy increase elicited by psychedelic drugs,” the paper purported to help illuminate what happens in the brain under the influence of substances like LSD.

But the findings of the study wouldn’t replicate. And unlike some researchers who might blow off criticism of their work, or blame the replicators for the failure, Herzog sent Lodder the scripts his team had used.

Lodder found the problem quickly. As Herzog related to Retraction Watch, Lodder (whose schedule has been challenging the past few weeks as we’ve played phone tag) [See update on this post.]:

Can you explain what these 1,500 papers are doing in this journal?

The Internet of Things. Computer science. Botany. COVID-19.

All worthwhile subjects, to be sure. But what do they have to do with materials science?

That’s what James Heathers, who will be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch as a “data thug,” found himself wondering after he spent a weekend looking into articles published by Materials Today: Proceedings. He found at least 1,500 off-topic papers, many with abstracts containing “tortured phrases” that may have been written by translation or paraphrasing software, and a few with titles that had been previously advertised with author positions for sale online.

He detailed his findings in a blog post today, and says that the journal – an Elsevier title – has published many articles that look like the work of a paper mill.

Dental school dean up to five retractions for cancer research papers

A dental school dean with a history of publishing cancer research papers is up to five retractions.

Russell Taichman, the dean of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s school of dentistry, lost two papers in Cancer Research earlier this month, after losing three others since 2020. Most of the retractions came after PubPeer comments about duplicated images in some of the papers.

In April of 2020, Elisabeth Bik commented on two of Taichman’s papers that would later be retracted, pointing out potentially recycled images between the articles.

None of the authors responded on PubPeer, but Taichman apparently took her comments to heart, and credited her in a retraction notice.

Journal says ivermectin study met standard for ‘credible science’

A journal editor is defending his decision to publish a new paper showing that ivermectin can prevent Covid-19, despite more than a dozen retractions of such papers from the literature.

The article, “Regular Use of Ivermectin as Prophylaxis for COVID-19 Led Up to a 92% Reduction in COVID-19 Mortality Rate in a Dose-Response Manner: Results of a Prospective Observational Study of a Strictly Controlled Population of 88,012 Subjects,” appeared in Cureus August 31.

The authors included Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist better known as the leader of the Front-Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, based in Madison, Wis. Kory has been an active promoter of the use of ivermectin and other questionable remedies for Covid-19 – even testifying before Congress about his ideas – although his most high-profile paper on the topic was retracted last November.

How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions

In July of 2017, Mohamed Rezk, of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Menoufia University in Egypt, submitted a manuscript to the journal Anesthesia with a colleague.

The manuscript, “Analgesic and antiemetic effect of Intraperitoneal magnesium sulfate in laparoscopic salpingectomy: a randomized controlled trial,” caught the attention of John Carlisle, an editor at the journal whose name will be familiar to Retraction Watch readers as the sleuth whose statistical analyses have identified hundreds of papers with implausible clinical trial data.

The baseline data appeared unremarkable, Carlisle told us, but the same wasn’t true of the outcomes data. Of 24 values that could have been odd or even numbers, all of them were even.

The probability of that was “0.000000000000000000000 something,” Carlisle said.

Brain tumor researchers retract paper from Science journal

A detail from Fig. 6 of the now-retracted paper

A brain tumor researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has retracted a paper from Science Translational Medicine, and is a co-author on an article that another journal is examining.

The problems in both papers, and several others with shared authors, came to light via comments on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik and a pseudonymous commenter.

The Science Translational Medicine paper, “A subset of PARP inhibitors induces lethal telomere fusion in ALT-dependent tumor cells,” was published last May by a group led by Russell O. Pieper, director of basic science in the UCSF Brain Tumor Center and vice-chairman of the UCSF department of neurological surgery. The paper has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

An editor on why he ignores anonymous whistleblowers – and why authors are free to publish ‘bullshit and fiction’

Just over a decade ago, in the second year of Retraction Watch’s existence, we wrote a column in the now-defunct Lab Times urging journal editors to stop ignoring complaints from anonymous whistleblowers. The Committee on Publication Ethics didn’t think anonymity was a problem as long as the complaints were evidence-based, so why should editors?

And journals have come a long way over the last decade in this regard. Some retraction notices even credit anonymous – and even pseudonymous – correspondents.

Guido Schmitz, however, appears not to have gotten the memo.

Exclusive: Cancer researcher sues med school for retaliation after research misconduct finding

A breast cancer researcher at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn has sued the university for sex discrimination and retaliation after an institutional investigation found she committed research misconduct.

Stacy Blain, an associate professor in the departments of pediatrics and cell biology at Downstate, has alleged that the university violated the Equal Pay Act by paying her less than her male colleagues; discriminated against her based on her sex since she joined the faculty in 2002, including by conducting multiple investigations into her lab’s work; and used the latest investigation and its finding that she committed research misconduct to retaliate against her for accusing the university of sex discrimination.

From the lawsuit:

Guest post: What happened when we tried to get a paper claiming ‘billions of lives are potentially at risk’ from COVID-19 vaccines retracted

In February, the editor-in-chief of Food and Chemical Toxicology published an editorial calling for “Papers on potential toxic effects of COVID-19 vaccines.” Following this call, in April 2022, the journal – no stranger to Retraction Watch readers – published an article titled “Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs.”

At more than 16,000 words and more than 200 references, the article was submitted on February 9^th and accepted on April 8^th. It claims that “billions of lives are potentially at risk” with Covid-19 vaccines.

Such an important statement should be supported by facts. But this is not at all the case. And yet the paper has been shared more than 45,000 times on social media, in ways that decrease trust in science and the COVID-19 vaccine, despite the robust evidence that it is both safe and efficient.

14 retractions for researchers who falsely claimed US physicist as co-author

Groups of researchers from around the world have racked up a total of 14 retractions for faked authorship. And one author seems to have been up to those and other shenanigans for a decade.

All of the 14 papers include David Ross, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. There was just one problem: Ross retired in 2003.

We first reported on two of the retractions in March 2021. At the time, we noted that two papers in journals published by Emerald also included Ross’ name somewhat improbably. Emerald apparently retracted those two articles in June of this year, along with four others. (Emerald does not date the retraction notices, nor does it give the notices their own DOIs. Both steps are considered best practice.)

All of the notices include this passage:

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