by subject – Page 29 – Retraction Watch

Study finding patients of female surgeons fare better is temporarily removed

An Elsevier journal has, for the moment, removed a paper which found that the patients of female surgeons fare better than those treated by men.

Although the journal didn’t provide an explanation for the move — unfortunately not unusual for Elsevier — a spokesman for the publisher told us that reader complaints about the methodology and statistics in the article prompted the action.

The paper, which appeared last month in Surgery — the official journal of the Society of University Surgeons, Central Surgical Association, and the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons — was written by a group at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, led by Tara M. Barry, a general surgery resident at the institution.

“Battle of the sexes: The effect of surgeon gender on postoperative in-hospital mortality,” isn’t available on the journal website. However, a conference abstract by the authors states:

Journal retracts paper claiming that group of Indigenous Americans were Black Africans

A journal has retracted a paper on the origins of a group of Indigenous Americans after readers said the basis of the paper was long discredited.

The paper, “Early pioneers of the americas: the role of the Olmecs in urban education and social studies curriculum,” was written by scholars at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, including corresponding author Greg Wiggan, and researchers at Towson State University, and published on June 25, 2020, in the Urban Review.

In a July 23 post on Medium, Kurly Tlapoyawa and Ruben A. Arellano “ask that the The Urban Review journal retract the article by Wiggan et al and discontinue its promotion of ‘Black Olmecs:’”

Researchers face disciplinary action as dozens of their studies fall under scrutiny

A group of obstetrics researchers in the Middle East is facing disciplinary action after questions were raised about the validity of the data in dozens of their published studies.

The tale — involving contaminated clinical trials, potentially fabricated PhDs, findings of misconduct that went ignored, accusations of terrorist sympathies and unresponsive journals — requires some unpacking, so bear with us.

We begin with a study that appeared in April in the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology (EJOG). Esmée Bordewijk, a PhD student at the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Amsterdam University Medical Center, and her colleagues reported that they stumbled on the problems while conducting a literature review on ovulation induction for the venerable Cochrane Database:

Heard about the study claiming men who carry guitar cases are more attractive? It’s been retracted.

A controversial psychologist has lost a bizarre paper which claimed that men who carry guitar cases do better with the ladies.

The article, which had appeared in the journal The Psychology of Music in 2014, was one of many papers by Nicholas Guéguen that have raised eyebrows among his peers and some data sleuths — notably James Heathers and Nick Brown — who believe the results don’t withstand scrutiny.

Guéguen, of the Université Bretagne-Sud, in France, was the subject of a misconduct investigation that in 2019 cleared him of wrongdoing. That finding came shortly after, as we reported nearly a year ago to the day, he lost a 2014 paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior on how high heels really do make women sexier:

30 years later, physics journal retracts paper that blamed feminism for many of society’s ills

For those of you who think that critiques of feminism have no place in journals about physics, the Canadian Journal of Physics agrees. But it took them 30 years to get there.

The journal has retracted a 1990 article by a notorious male chauvinist who claimed, among other things, that feminism was responsible for an increase in cheating in school, psychological damage in young children and an overall decay in society.

The case has echoes of the controversy over Thomas Hudlicky, another Canadian chemist who recently lost a ~~30-year-old~~ paper for sexism and anti-diversity views.

This time, the author was Gordon Freeman, a now-emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Alberta, in Canada. Its title is one of those science-y-sounding strings of words that say both very little and, on reflection, quite a lot: “Kinetics of nonhomogeneous processes in human society: Unethical behaviour and societal chaos.”

Almond, no joy: Plant geneticist in Iran up to at least six retractions

A plant geneticist in Iran is up to at least six retractions for misuse of figures and other material from previously published papers.

The newest retraction involves a 2017 paper in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature publication, titled “Comparison of traditional and new generation DNA markers declares high genetic diversity and differentiated population structure of wild almond species.” PubPeer commenters have been discussing it for some seven months.

According to the notice:

“This unfortunate situation”: Journal retracts bizarre paper about a black hole at the center of Earth

A black hole, not at the center of the Earth (via Wikimedia)

It was a paper that caught the attention — and bemusement — of Twitter:

What

(and I cannot stress this enough)

*the fuck*https://t.co/bt2d8ebryg
— Paul Byrne (@ThePlanetaryGuy) September 22, 2020

And now it is no more, along with four more articles from the Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences in what was billed as a special issue on Global Dermatology.

Here’s the whole title: “A black hole at the center of earth plays the role of the biggest system of telecommunication for connecting DNAs, dark DNAs and molecules of water on 4+N- dimensional manifold.” (Be warned that the link takes you to a login.)

You may fairly wonder what a terrestrial black hole and skin diseases have in common. The abstract, which we present for posterity, sheds no, ahem, light on the question:

Exclusive: University of Arizona says former researcher committed misconduct by plagiarizing figure

A former researcher in the University of Arizona’s optics school engaged in “a serious case of research misconduct,” Retraction Watch has learned.

Palash Gangopadhyay, who until 2019 was a research scientist at Arizona, used a figure from a 2003 paper by other authors when he co-authored a 2018 paper in Optics Letters titled “High sensitivity magnetometer using nanocomposite polymers with large magneto-optic response,” Wyant College of Optical Sciences dean Thomas Koch wrote to colleagues in an email obtained by Retraction Watch. The 2003 paper appeared in an obstetrics journal.

The 2018 paper has been cited nine times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Koch wrote:

Journal retracts paper claiming smarter people are more likely to use a condom to avoid HIV

A psychology journal has retracted a 2020 paper purporting to find that smarter people are more likely to use a condom during sex to avoid HIV.

The new study, by researchers from Singapore and the United States led by Sean Lee of the Singapore Management University School of Social Sciences, appeared in Personality and Individual Differences.

The paper claimed to find that:

Publisher retracts nearly two dozen articles, blocks nearly three dozen more, from alias-employing author who plagiarized

IOP Publishing has retracted nearly two dozen conference proceedings which had been cribbed from other articles, translated into English and festooned with citations to the authors’ own work.

According to the publisher, 12 of the 29 authors on the papers come from the same institution, Universidad de la Costa, in Barranquilla, Colombia. IOP says the institution is investigating.

The first author on most of the papers is Jesus Silva, who appears to be affiliated with the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, in Lima, Peru — and has now joined our leaderboard with 23 retractions. For some, the first author is Amelec Viloria, of Universidad de la Costa.

Except, according to IOP Publishing, Silva and Viloria are the same person, using an alias on some of the articles.

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