by subject – Page 21 – Retraction Watch

Study on reducing parents’ anxiety about children’s circumcision retracted

A pair of researchers in Turkey have lost a 2021 paper on a randomized controlled trial in pediatric surgery after a reader raised concerns about the methodology reported in the article.

However, the retraction notice – detailed though it might be – reveals that the problems could, and likely should, have been caught during peer review.

The paper, “Effect of care programme based on Comfort Theory on reducing parental anxiety in the paediatric day surgery: Randomised controlled trial,” appeared last July in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, a Wiley title. The authors, Fahriye Pazarcikci and Emine Efe, were affiliated with Isparta University of Applied Sciences and Akdeniz University, respectively.

“Paediatric day surgery” turns out to be male circumcision in boys ages 4 to 7 years, as the trial registration information on ClinicalTrials.gov indicates. Circumcision is mentioned in the full text of the paper, but not the abstract.

More than 300 at once: Publisher retracts entire conference proceedings

The tip came from the leadership of another scientific conference.

Did the Association for Computing Machinery know that they had published the proceedings of a conference with essentially the same name as that organization, IEEE, on the same dates, in the same venue, and with lots of overlapping authors?

The two versions of the meeting – the International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech) – both allegedly happened in Jakarta, Indonesia from Aug. 19-20, 2021, the tipster told ACM.

When ACM dug deeper, Scott Delman, the organization’s director of publications, told us, they saw something that looked familiar because of an investigation that led to a mass retraction of conference proceedings months earlier: A company in China billing itself as a conference organizer had handled all of the peer review.

Authors blame ‘unintentional oversight’ for including image of deceased patient in paper

The authors of a case report involving a patient who died of a rare disorder of the bone marrow have removed an image from the article after the person’s mother objected to the use of the photograph.

The paper, “Dyskeratosis congenita,” appeared in Autopsy Case Reports in 2020 and was written by a group from Upstate Medical University, part of the State University of New York system, in Syracuse.

We saw the notice in November and were curious if we could learn more. So we filed a public records request for documents related to the article – and received a response last week disclosing correspondence between Robert Stoppacher, a co-author of the report, and the editor-in-chief of the journal.

In a letter to the journal on Sept. 12, 2021, Stoppacher stated that:

Psych journal in revolt as it publishes paper saying masturbation and gay sex are harmful

Several psychiatry researchers have been unsuccessfully seeking distance from a dodgy journal with which they’re affiliated – and which has now published an article claiming homosexuality and masturbation deserve to be considered (or reconsidered, as the case may be) mental illnesses.

The 2021 paper, “Review of Removing Homosexuality and Masturbation from the List of Sexual Dysfunctions in DSM,” was written by Sayed Ali Marashi, of the Department of Psychology at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in Iran It appeared in Clinical Schizophrenia & Related Psychoses.

Oddly, the header text on the paper reads “Metallurgical Investigation of Tie Rod used for lifting Ferro-Alloy during Steel Making: A Safety Issues.”

According to the article:

Engineers’ research starts to look shaky as retractions mount

A group of structural engineering researchers based in Iran has lost at least five papers for problems with the data – and a data sleuth says more look shaky, too.

Four of the articles appeared in Construction and Building Materials between 2018 and 2020 and were written by a changing cast of characters with two constants: Mansour Ghalehnovi and Arash Karimipour, both of the Department of Civil Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Karimipour’s LinkedIn profile lists an affiliation with the University of Texas at El Paso from 2019 to January of this year.

The journal, an Elsevier title, says it began investigating the papers after a whistleblower raised questions about the integrity of the data. In some cases, for example, data in one article were found in other papers but were represented as demonstrating different materials. The authors also used images from other researchers or the internet without proper attribution.

Here’s the notice for “Experimental study on the flexural behaviour and ductility ratio of steel fibres coarse recycled aggregate concrete beams,” from 2018:

Author asks ‘Why? Why? And why?’ as his paper is retracted

A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2020 paper on exposure among cement workers to a potentially harmful chemical for a litany of errors that one might have expected peer reviewers to catch before publication – and the corresponding author is not happy.

Titled “Citrate stabilized Fe3O4/DMG modified carbon paste electrode for determination of octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane in blood plasma and urine samples of cement factory workers,” the article, which appeared in BMC Chemistry, was written by Rashid Heidarimoghadam and Abbas Farmany, of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

Farmany, of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, also happens to be a member of the journal’s editorial board, although he joined after the paper was accepted.

According to the retraction notice:

Publisher retracts 350 papers at once

IOP Publishing has retracted a total of 350 papers from two different 2021 conference proceedings because an “investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

The case is just the latest involving the discovery of papers full of gibberish – aka “tortured phrases” – thanks to the work of Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, Cyril Labbé, of University Grenoble-Alpes and Alexander Magazinov, of Skoltech, in Moscow. The tool detects papers that contain phrases that appear to have been translated from English into another language, and then back into English, likely with the involvement of paper-generating software.

The papers were in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series (232 articles), and IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (118 articles), plus four editorials.

According to IOP’s Rachael Harper, head of marketing communications, 20 of the papers were listed in the Problematic Paper Screener:

Which takes longer to produce: An infant who can sit on his own, or a retraction?

Joe Hilgard’s son wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s sharp eye for bad data when an Elsevier journal notified the social psychologist that it intended to retract a 2015 article he’d flagged on the link between exposure to violent media and aggression in adolescents.

Well, the journal has finally retracted the paper – but not before Hilgard’s son was born and started speaking (more on that in a moment).

Hilgard’s ability to spot bad data, and his tenacity at holding journals accountable for their publications, has now led to five retractions. Four of those papers belong to a researcher in China named Qian Zhang, of Southwest University in Chongqin. As readers of this blog might recall, Zhang lost a pair of papers in 2019 after Hilgard and others raised questions about the integrity of the data.

As Hilgard, who also notified Southwest University about his findings, told us back in 2019 about Zhang’s previously retracted papers:

Journal retracts a paper it published with a missing table after author fails to provide it

Mark Oniffrey, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Can you retract something that never existed in the first place? At least one journal thinks the answer to that conundrum is yes.

That journal would be Medicine. In September 2020, the Wolters Kluwer journal published a paper titled “Tranexamic acid reduces blood cost in long-segment spinal fusion surgery: A randomized controlled study protocol” by a group in China led by Linyu Yang, of the Department of Orthopedics at the Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, in Sichuan.

The article promised – but failed to deliver – a “Table 1”, an omission the peer reviewers and journal staff missed during the production process. Five months later, said table still had not materialized, prompting the following notice:

More than 100 of an anesthesiologist’s papers retracted

There’s a new entry on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. And this one is also the fourth member of the Retraction Watch Century Club.

An anesthesiology researcher in Japan is now up to 117 retractions – putting him third on our list of most-retracted authors.

Hironobu Ueshima, formerly of Showa University Hospital in Tokyo, was found to have committed misconduct in 142 papers, according to a pair of investigations, one by his erstwhile institution and another by the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists (JSA). We first reported on the existence of the investigation in June 2020, some three months after Australian anesthesiologist and journal editor John Loadsman raised concerns with journals involved in the case.

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