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Psychology journal apologizes for paper with ‘biased language’ about Tibet

Editors of a psychology journal have published a lengthy apology for failing to identify “biased” language and information in a paper about racial prejudice of Tibetan children against Han Chinese.

The article, “The development of Tibetan children’s racial bias in empathy: The mediating role of ethnic identity and wrongfulness of ethnic intergroup bias,” appeared in Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology in April. It has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The authors listed affiliations with institutions in China, Australia, and Canada. The article describes experiments measuring the empathy – or lack thereof – Tibetan children expressed for characters with Tibetan or Han Chinese names who experienced either social or physical pain.

Exclusive: Providence VA hires scientist previous employer found had harassed mentees

The University of Iowa found a cardiology researcher violated multiple of its policies, including harassing his former mentees when they tried to leave his lab to establish labs of their own, according to an investigation report obtained by Retraction Watch.

The researcher, Kaikobad Irani, left the school last month with a six-figure settlement, and has a new job lined up, Retraction Watch has learned.

Irani studies the molecular mechanisms of the function and dysfunction of blood vessels. He’s listed as an inventor on four patents, including an active one regarding a compound that could lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

One of Irani’s active grants names the Providence VA Medical Center as the awardee organization. A spokesperson for the VA Providence Healthcare System confirmed Irani “is in the process of onboarding and is expected to begin working around November.”

First paper retracted in string of studies using the wrong medication name

A scientific sleuth and a mother who nearly lost her daughter to a hormonal condition teamed up in January to flag a series of papers that misnamed a medication for pregnant women. They have recently started to see the fruits of their labors: one retraction and three corrections.

In 2014, Tara Skopelitis, a lab manager at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was given weekly progesterone injections to prevent preterm birth for her daughter, as reported by STAT. Six years later, after her daughter showed symptoms of an unknown hormonal condition which still hasn’t been formally diagnosed, Skopelitis discovered she should have received synthetic progesterone variant 17α-hydroxyprogesterone caproate, often referred to as 17-OHPC, 17P, sold as Makena. When the drug wasn’t available, her doctor had ordered the wrong replacement from a compounding pharmacy. Skopelitis suspects her daughter’s condition could be a result of the mixup.

The confusion lies within the literature, Skopelitis says: Many clinical trials and papers refer to 17P as intramuscular progesterone, as if they are interchangeable or even the same compound.

Researcher whose work was plagiarized haunted by impostor emails

A researcher who posted on LinkedIn about a paper that plagiarized his work says he’s now the subject of an email campaign making false allegations about his articles.

In July, we reported that Sasan Sadrizadeh, researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, had his work plagiarized in a now-retracted paper.

“In what seems to be a direct response to our efforts,” as Sadrizadeh wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, his bosses, colleagues, and journals have been inundated with emails from impostors, accusing Sadrizadeh of misuse of funds and calling for the removal of his articles. At least one journal editor seems to have taken the allegations seriously.

‘Coding’ errors prompt retraction of paper on long COVID in kids

JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a controversial 2023 paper on the incidence of long COVID in children after the authors discovered a raft of “coding” errors in their analysis that greatly underestimated the risk of the condition.

The article – a research letter titled “Post–COVID-19 Condition in Children” – was written by a group of researchers in Canada led by Lyndsey Hahn, of the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. It has been cited eight times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, and garnered significant attention on mainstream and social media sites, including by critics who said the authors fatally botched the definition of long COVID.

According to the authors, the incidence of long covid in kids was “strikingly low”, occurring in just 0.4% of young patients. Symptoms of infection in kids typically resolve within two weeks, they added.

But those reassuring findings hinged on several errors in the analysis that made the incidence of long COVID in children look less than a third of what the researchers should have reported.

“Deceit, delusion, and a classic medical fraud”: An excerpt from a new book about a cancer treatment hoax

There once was a drug named Krebiozen;

It came from below the horizon.

It used to be said, by patients now dead,

Now what do we put our reliance on?

–Limerick attributed to University of Illinois president George Stoddard and University of Illinois provost Coleman Griffith, both of whom would lose their jobs over Krebiozen

It is a story that resonates with the present: A 1950s cancer treatment hoax that showed “charges of conspiracy, elitism, and un-Americanism directed against the educational, scientific, and medical establishment are nothing new; neither is uncritical news coverage of what turns out to be quackery.” We’re pleased to share an adapted excerpt from Matthew Ehrlich’s The Krebiozen Hoax: How a Mysterious Cancer Drug Shook Organized Medicine, out today.

On March 26, 1951, one of America’s most respected scientists called a meeting at Chicago’s Drake Hotel to make a dramatic announcement: he and a Yugoslavian refugee doctor had found a drug that showed great promise in treating cancer. The scientist was Andrew Ivy, vice president of the University of Illinois (U of I) and designated spokesperson for medical ethics at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. Time magazine had gone as far as to pronounce him “the conscience of U.S. science.” Ivy’s Yugoslavian collaborator was Stevan Durovic, said to have discovered the new drug in Argentina after the Nazis forced him to flee his homeland. The drug itself was called Krebiozen, a name that was supposed to connote “cancer suppressor” or “regulator of growth.”

‘A proper editor would be horrified’: Why did a pediatric journal publish articles on the elderly?

In June, a scientist researching sarcopenia came across a relevant paper about treatment for elderly patients with complications from the disease as well as type 2 diabetes. The paper was “very bad,” he told us. “It looked like someone just copied two or three times the same text.”

The scientist, who asked to remain anonymous, became even more concerned when he realized the paper, which had the word “elderly” in its title, had been published in a pediatric journal.

“I started reading other issues of the same journal and noticed that this is a widespread problem: Chinese papers about older adults being published in pediatric journals!” he said.

Did Flint water crisis set kids back in school? Paper saying so is ‘severely flawed,’ say critics

A paper finding kids did worse in school following the Flint water crisis is “severely flawed and unreliable,” according to critics who were deeply involved in exposing the crisis.

The paper has now earned an addendum from the authors, but the critics say it should be retracted.

The authors of the article investigated whether the water crisis in Flint – a period when the drinking water in the Michigan city was contaminated with lead – affected the academic capability of children living there. The authors concluded children in Flint did worse in math after the crisis and more needed special education than before the episode.

The article was published in Science Advances in March and referenced by major news outlets like ProPublica and The Washington Post.

‘A threat to the integrity of scientific publishing’: How often are retracted papers marked that way?

How well do databases flag retracted articles?

There has been a lot of interest recently in the quality of retraction notices and notifications, including new guidelines from the National Information Standards Organization (NISO; our Ivan Oransky was a member of the committee) and a new study which Ivan and our Alison Abritis joined.

In another new paper, “Identification of Retracted Publications and Completeness of Retraction Notices in Public Health,” a group of researchers set out to study “how clearly and consistently retracted publications in public health are being presented to researchers.”

Spoiler alert: Not very.

We asked corresponding author Caitlin Bakker, of the University of Regina — who also chaired the NISO committee — some questions about the findings and their implications.

Food science journal retracts 10 papers for compromised peer review

A research group based in Pakistan has had 10 of their papers retracted from Wiley’s Food Science & Nutrition based on flaws in the peer review process.

According to the notices, which were identical for each article, “the editorial office found unambiguous evidence that the manuscript was accepted solely based on compromised and insufficient reviewer reports.”

The following articles have been retracted:

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