by subject – Page 13 – Retraction Watch

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:

Exclusive: Australia space scientist made up data, probe finds

A space scientist formerly based at the University of Sydney made up data in an unpublished manuscript, an investigation by the institution has found.

The researcher, Joachim Schmidt, “utilised Adobe Photoshop to make up results,” according to a letter dated Feb. 15, 2023, from Emma Johnston, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of Sydney, to scientists at the University of Michigan who reported complaints in late 2019 about work by Schmidt and his former professor Iver Cairns to the Australian institution.

“Given the above, the Panel found there had been breaches of the Research Code on the part of Dr Schmidt. The breaches were viewed as serious, and the Panel considered them to be sufficiently serious to warrant a finding of research misconduct as defined in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research,” the letter, obtained by Retraction Watch, stated.

Paper co-authored by controversial Australian journalist earns expression of concern

One more paper co-authored by Australian health journalist Maryanne Demasi has earned an expression of concern for image duplication.

The move comes seven years after the journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) was first made aware of potential problems with a figure in Demasi’s paper that showed Western blots. It marks the third time one of the former researcher’s scientific publications has been officially flagged as concerning or retracted.

Demasi, who earned her PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2004, has been in the news recently after she did a controversial interview with the lead author of a Cochrane review that cast doubt on face masks. She has drawn frequent rebuke over the past decade, beginning with a 2013 program in which her reporting questioned statins. She and her co-authors told us in 2018 that they believe her work as a journalist made her research a target of criticism.

Legal scholar who claimed false affiliations moves on to creating dubious legal yearbooks

In April 2022, Ioannis Kalpouzos, a professor at Harvard Law, received an invitation to join the editorial board of the newly-launched American Yearbook of International Law. But something gave him pause.

“The title sounded a bit dodgy – it sounded like something I should have heard of,” Kalpouzos told Retraction Watch, adding that with some Googling he “found that it wasn’t really a thing.”

“If somebody’s not in the know, it’s easier for them to be duped, I suppose,” Kalpouzos said, but his instincts told him that such a yearbook would most likely be published by an established law review.

So he declined.

‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention.

A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the treatment’s efficacy in people with moderate to severe depression. That meant the drug worked better than electric shock therapy, an option when antidepressants fail. It was a breakthrough.

“I thought, you know, wow, this is something that I’m comfortable prescribing that could make a huge difference for my patients,” said Ross, who at the time was doing his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.

But when he looked up the study, he discovered several oddities. For instance, the number of patients who experienced an adverse event differed by exactly one for 17 out of 18 single events like fatigue or bloating. That seemed unlikely to have occurred by chance. And all of the scores of statistical tests the authors had done turned out just the way they would have wanted, a dream that rarely comes true in biomedical sciences.

Prominent Korean heart doctor earns two retractions in a month

Two Korean journals last month pulled papers by a prominent cardiologist at Yonsei University, Professor Hui-Nam Pak, with one retraction notice citing “issues related to scientific misconduct.”

Commenters on PubPeer had raised several concerns about data integrity, “mixed-up” data and “statistical nonsense” in “eNOS3 Genetic Polymorphism Is Related to Post-Ablation Early Recurrence of Atrial Fibrillation,” which was published in 2015 in Yonsei Medical Journal. The journal retracted the paper on January 19, noting that “we have recently become aware of a number of issues related to scientific misconduct.”

The article was coauthored by Patrick Ellinor, acting chief of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Did David Hume retract 2 essays on immorality to avoid religious controversy?

We may never identify the earliest retracted paper. For the time being, this 1756 article about Benjamin Franklin is the earliest one in our database. And here might be a runner-up, of a sort, from a friend of Franklin’s the following year.

David Hume is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of his or any age. His writings on causality, reason, and empiricism, as well as his history of England, were considered masterpieces when they appeared in the 18th century.

In 1757, Hume published a collection of previously released works under the title “Four Dissertations,” which helped – if that’s the right word – cement his reputation as one of the age’s leading skeptics about religion.

‘Kafkaesque nightmare’: Judge wants researcher reinstated as NIH grant PI after med school’s misconduct finding

A federal judge has denied a request for a preliminary injunction by a breast cancer researcher at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn who sued the university last year after an institutional investigation determined that she committed research misconduct.

However, the judge noted “troubling aspects of this case that bear on serious public health concerns” – namely the discontinuation of the scientist’s research – and also expressed concern about SUNY Downstate and the NIH’s treatment of her.

As we’ve previously reported, Stacy Blain, an associate professor of pediatrics and cell biology at SUNY Downstate, has alleged the university discriminated against her for decades because of her sex, and that the investigation’s finding of misconduct was the result of retaliation after she complained of the discrimination.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: