by subject – Page 16 – Retraction Watch

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.

Publisher investigating “serious concerns” about article on ivermectin, COVID, and the microbiome

The publisher Frontiers has published an expression of concern for an article that proposed “ivermectin protects against COVID-19” via effects on the microbiome.

The article, “Microbiome-Based Hypothesis on Ivermectin’s Mechanism in COVID-19: Ivermectin Feeds Bifidobacteria to Boost Immunity,” was published in July 2022 in Frontiers in Microbiology. The sole author, Sabine Hazan, is affiliated with ProgenaBiome, a company based in Ventura, Calif. that “spearheads the movement of validating, verifying, and clinically applying its sequencing data, to better understand the microbiome.”

The abstract of the article stated:

J&J subsidiary alleges fraud in paper that linked cosmetic talc with mesothelioma

A key paper linking use of talc-based baby powder to cancer contains fraudulent information, according to a new complaint against an author of the article who has testified on behalf of plaintiffs.

A judge had previously allowed the release of a document confirming the identity of one of the patients in the article, who had claimed exposure to asbestos besides in baby powder, contrary to the authors’ claim that the cases in the series had no other exposures.

The paper, “Mesothelioma Associated With the Use of Cosmetic Talc,” was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in January 2020. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Corresponding author Jacqueline Moline of Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y., has also referenced the article in expert testimony for plaintiffs in talc litigation, as well as in remarks before Congress.

Influential paper linking recessions and left-wing voting patterns retracted

A highly cited economics paper that suggested people raised during recessions were more likely to vote for left-leaning political parties has been retracted, apparently due to a coding error that rendered the results invalid.

The retraction marks a rarity among economics papers, which research has shown are infrequently retracted compared to papers on other subjects. The article appears to be the first in The Review of Economic Studies to have been retracted for a reason other than publisher error.

The study’s authors, Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, are economists at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the International Monetary Fund, respectively. Giuliano is also the Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management at UCLA.

The paper, “Growing up in a Recession,” was published in November 2013. It has been cited 222 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Working papers from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have also cited the article.

Researchers lost five papers soon after scientists critiqued another of their papers in Retraction Watch

A microbiology research group at the University of Hong Kong lost five papers for image duplication in late October, weeks after other scientists published a critique in Retraction Watch of one of the group’s COVID-19 articles.

The paper on COVID-19 was published in Cell in 2021 and was led by Patrick Chiu Yat Woo and Kwok-Yung Yuen, chair of infectious diseases in the university’s Department of Microbiology.

Writing in Retraction Watch in early October, Robert Speth of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Michael Bader of the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, described their experience notifying Cell of numerous errors in the paper, and the journal’s editor refusing to publish a correction.

Weeks later, five of Yuen and Woo’s papers were retracted from two journals published by the American Society for Microbiology:

Mathematician withdraws preprint – 24 years after initial submission

Twenty-four years after submitting a manuscript on quantum algebra to the preprint server arXiv, a mathematician has now withdrawn it.

Boris Shoikhet, then of the Independent University of Moscow, posted “Lifting formulas, Moyal product, and Feigin spectral sequence,” to arXiv on Oct. 28, 1998, proposing new conjectures in the field of quantum algebra.

Last month, he withdrew the article, with the comment, “The paper has been withdrawn due to a crucial mistake in the arguments.”

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