The authors of a paper claiming that children’s masks trap concentrations of carbon dioxide higher than allowable standards in Germany have responded to critics who said the study was plagued with poor methods and unreasonable conclusions.
As we reported earlier this week, the corresponding author of the paper, Harald Walach, had his affiliation with Poznan University in Poland terminated because of a different paper he had co-authored, in the journal Vaccines. That paper has been retracted.
A widely-touted 2019 study in Nature which argued that large societies gave rise to belief in fire-and-brimstone gods — and not the other way around — has been retracted by the authors after their reanalysis of the data in the wake of criticism diluted the strength of their conclusions.
The study prompted a significant amount of interest on social media and in the global press, according to Altmetric, with articles in Scientific American, Yahoo! News, PBS, El Pais and many other publications worldwide. As Scientific American put it, Whitehouse’s group found that the advent of moralizing gods did not lead to the formation of complex societies. Rather:
Yesterday, Poznan University tweeted about the researcher, Harald Walach:
We wish to emphasize that the claims included in dr Harald Walach’s recent article in @Vaccines_MDPI do not represent the position of @PUMS_tweets. We find that the article lacked scientific diligence and proper methodology. Dr. Walach’s affiliation with PUMS was now terminated.
— Poznan University of Medical Sciences (@PUMS_tweets) July 6, 2021
A philosopher with a double-digit retraction count did not commit plagiarism, according to a report released this weekend by France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), where the researcher is employed.
Magali Roques has had 11 papers retracted from seven different journals, most of which referred to plagiarism in their notices. But as Daily Nous, which was first to report on the CNRS findings and which has been writing about the case for some months, notes, the commission says Roques’ “writings contain ‘neither academic fraud nor plagiarism properly so called.’” The report differentiates “plagiarism properly so called” from “unacknowledged borrowings,” evidence of which the commission found.
A “costly mistake” has led to the retraction of a paper by a team of dermatology researchers in West Virginia who failed to obtain permission to use the data in their study for the specific purpose for which it was used.
The article, “Association Between Alopecia Areata and Natural Hair Color Among White Individuals,” which appeared in March 2021 in JAMA Dermatology, was a case-control study based on data from the UK Biobank — a large repository of medical and genetic data from people in the United Kingdom. The senior author on the article was Michael Kolodney, the chair of the department of dermatology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown.
In fact, Kolodney and his colleagues had produced two articles using data from the biobank: one on alopecia areata — an autoimmune condition that causes relatively early-onset hair loss — and another that linked baldness to an increased risk of Covid-19 in men. The Covid research was published in November 2020 as a letter to the editor in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.
The Covid paper remains intact. But as the retraction notice indicates, the folks at UK Biobank hadn’t granted Kolodney’s group permission to publish the alopecia findings:
Last month, Retraction Watch reported on the case of Hironobo Ueshima, an anesthesiology researcher found guilty of misconduct in more than 140 papers. A journal editor, John Loadsman, was the first to suspect there were issues in Ueshima’s work. But this was hardly the first time Loadsman had been the canary in the coal mine of the anesthesiology literature, placing him squarely on our ever-growing list of scientific sleuths that includes Elisabeth Bik, who has been in the news recently because of threats. In this Q&A, we ask Loadsman what happened in the Ueshima case, and for his sense of how big a problem fraud in the literature is.
Retraction Watch (RW): You were the editor who first spotted problems with Ueshima’s work. Walk us through how you cracked the case. What made you suspect that his data were not kosher?
Contemporary social psychology has been seized over the past years by a loss of credibility and self-confidence associated with scientific fraud and unsuccessful attempts to replicate the modern corpus of knowledge. The most notorious case was that of Dietrick Stapel. Fifty-eight papers published over a decade and a half were retracted due to fraud and suspicious research practices.
One of the most poignant questions raised by the review committees in three universities where he worked was how it was possible for such dubious scientific practices to escape the notice of all the academic reviewers in the high-profile journals, the funding agencies and at the scientific conferences. Many statistical anomalies were identified readily by statisticians who assisted in the review of Stapel’s papers. The committees were forced to conclude that “there is a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data. The observed flaws were not minor ‘normal’ imperfections in statistical processing, or experimental design and execution, but violations of fundamental rules of proper scientific research.” The culture contributed to the absence of skepticism about Stapel’s extraordinary findings.
A journal has retracted — and replaced — an article on “tribalism” in medicine and deleted a tweet about it, too, after readers complained that the language in the piece was offensive to Indigenous peoples.
A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles.
The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of meditation developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and promoted by the Art of Living Foundation, which describes itself thusly:
A Japanese anesthesiologist has been found guilty of fabricating data and other misconduct in 142 articles, leading to his termination and the sanction of several of his co-authors.
Showa University says its investigation into Hironobu Ueshima, the existence of which we first reported on last June, found that the prolific researcher had doctored his results, falsified his findings and tinkered with authorship.
The university’s report on the case is available here, in Japanese, and a similar report from the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists is available here in English. The JSA report cites 142 papers — including 120 letters to the editor, 12 original papers, and 9 case reports — with evidence of misconduct including fabricated data and improper authorship. The investigation also found evidence of misconduct in several unpublished studies by Ueshima. By our count, he has six retractions to date.
