Category: by subject

Controversial paper critiquing climate change science set to be retracted because of plagiarism

A controversial study of how relationships between climate change scientists may affect the field, and that has been dogged by charges of plagiarism, will be retracted, USA Today reports.

The abstract of the 2008 paper in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, by Edward Wegman and colleagues, concluded:

We conjecture that certain styles of co-authorship lead to the possibility of group-think, reduced creativity, and the possibility of less rigorous reviewing processes.

According to USA Today: Continue reading Controversial paper critiquing climate change science set to be retracted because of plagiarism

Psychology Today apparently retracts Kanazawa piece on why black women are “rated less physically attractive”

Psychology Today has apparently yanked a blog post by London School of Economics evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa that wondered why black women were considered less attractive than other women.

The post, titled “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women, But Black Men Are Rated Better Looking Than Other Men?” was posted yesterday and available here, but that page now returns a 503 error.

A number of people have archived the post, however, including a communications and media professional who blogs at Chic.Seven. Her pdf is available here.

The post uses data from Add Health, a federally funded study:

Add Health was developed in response to a mandate from the U.S. Congress to fund a study of adolescent health, and Waves I and II focus on the forces that may influence adolescents’ health and risk behaviors, including personal traits, families, friendships, romantic relationships, peer groups, schools, neighborhoods, and communities. As participants have aged into adulthood, however, the scientific goals of the study have expanded and evolved. Wave III, conducted when respondents were between 18 and 26 years old, focuses on how adolescent experiences and behaviors are related to decisions, behavior, and health outcomes in the transition to adulthood.

Excerpts of the post, which really needs the graphs Kanazawa included — available at Chic.Seven’s blog — to be remotely comprehensible: Continue reading Psychology Today apparently retracts Kanazawa piece on why black women are “rated less physically attractive”

Another math paper retracted because of duplication

Last month, we brought you news of two retractions in math journals for duplicate publication and apparent guest authorship. Last week, we learned that the lead author of one of those papers, Amir Mahmood, has retracted another paper, this one in Nonlinear Analysis: Real World Applications.

According to the retraction notice, the paper was an “accidental duplication of an article that has already been published” in Communications in Nonlinear Science and Numerical Simulation.

The papers share two authors: Mahmood, of the department of mathematics at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology and the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences of GC University, both in Lahore, Pakistan; and N.A. Khan, of the University of Karachi’s math department. Khan was also on one of the two papers we wrote about last month, but not the one Mahmood co-authored. Those two papers’ shared author was M. Jamil.

Mahmood told Retraction Watch by email that the papers are not duplicates, and that the journal editors could not explain to him why they were.

Retraction Watch readers can be the judge. The abstract of the retracted paper: Continue reading Another math paper retracted because of duplication

Yes, Virginia, medical writers really do commit plagiarism, says a surgery retraction

Readers may recall a recent post on a study purporting to show that one of the best insurance policies against a retraction is to employ a medical writer. Well, a group of Iranian surgeons did just that. How’d it work out for them?

Of course, since you’re reading about this on Retraction Watch, you already know the answer to that one, don’t you?

The World Journal of Surgery has retracted a 2010 article written by hired guns who apparently decided to perform wordthievery rather than wordsmithery.

Here’s the notice (stated, oddly, as an “erratum” to the original paper): Continue reading Yes, Virginia, medical writers really do commit plagiarism, says a surgery retraction

Another unofficial record? Authors walk back arcane blue crab paper — 15 years later

Portunus trituberculatus, courtesy NOAA

If a paper that has never been cited is retracted, will it be missed?

Japanese researchers have retracted an obscure 1996 article in an equally obscure physics journal after concluding — some 15 years later — that their fundamental assertion was mistaken.

The paper, “Uptake and excretion of cobalt in the crustacean Portunus trituberculatus,” in  Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms, purported to show that a form of the element cobalt might be helpful in tracing the growth of Portunus trituberculatus, otherwise known as the blue crab.

That’s the world’s most harvested crab species and a particular favorite in Asia. But don’t confuse it with the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, Callinectes sapidus, of William Warner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Beautiful Swimmers.

The problem with such elemental tracers, it seems, is that crabs moult repeatedly, shedding their shells, along with the elements that build up inside them. According to researchers from the Research Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and the Osaka Prefectural Fisheries Experimental Station, however, a volatile form of cobalt, previously undetected, could be a suitable element for tracing the growth of both crabs and prawns — another important aquaculture species in Asia — over time.

But that turned out to be a (shell)fish tale. Per the retraction notice, which appears in the May 15, 2011 issue of the journal: Continue reading Another unofficial record? Authors walk back arcane blue crab paper — 15 years later

Blood retracts two, including a disputed paper from the Karolinska Institute

The journal Blood has two retractions this month, one of which seems particularly interesting. So let’s deal with the other one first.

The paper, “MicroRNAs 15a/16-1 function as tumor suppressor genes in multiple myeloma,” appeared online in October 2010. But according to the retraction notice, the authors

have recently discovered that the cell lines used in their paper were inadvertently misidentified. The cell lines utilized in the paper have now been found to contain the bcr/abl translocation and most likely represent the K562 CML cell line, instead of MMS1 and RPM1 myeloma cell lines. Due to this issue, the relevance of the findings to myeloma and thus, the conclusions of the paper, are not supported by the data. The authors apologize to the readers, reviewers, and editors of Blood for publishing these erroneous data.

That seems straightforward enough, and we couldn’t find any evidence that this problem affected other publications.

The second paper, however, could be more significant. Continue reading Blood retracts two, including a disputed paper from the Karolinska Institute

The Importance of Being Reproducible: Keith Baggerly tells the Anil Potti story

For those Retraction Watch readers who have been following the case of Anil Potti — who has now retracted four papers — Keith Baggerly’s name will likely be familiar. Baggerly is the bioinformatician at M.D. Anderson in Houston who has been publicly questioning, in letters, papers, and The Cancer Letter, work by Potti et. al.

Yesterday, Baggerly gave a keynote at the Council of Science Editors meeting in Baltimore. It was a fascinating — and riveting — walk through how, after a group at M.D. Anderson asked him and his team to evaluate the Potti group’s tools for predicting whether given patients would respond to different chemotherapies, Baggerly’s group unraveled the Potti research.

In his talk, Baggerly demonstrated all of the mislabeling and other easily recognized errors his team found when they sifted through the raw data. And yet there were a number of wince-inducing moments in which Baggerly described the cool reception he had from several journals.

There have been a lot of calls recently that journals should require that authors deposit their data.  There’s none more powerful than when they come at the end of a talk showing how that could have stopped a faulty clinical trial from ever starting.

Baggerly told Retraction Watch he just wants this story to get the widest attention possible, so he was glad to allow us to post his slides. They get appropriately technical, given the crowd, but it’s worth it. You can follow a very unofficial and rough transcript at this Twitter search, since Ivan live-tweeted the talk. Or just click over to the slideshow here.

Roundup: A new record? And paper retracts story about Canadian Paxil researcher-turned pol Kutcher

We’ve both been at conferences — Adam at the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists in Savannah, and Ivan at the Council of Science Editors in Baltimore, where he’ll be on a panel today about finding fraud — so we haven’t had a lot of time to run down retractions. But there were a few retraction-related developments in the past few days that we wanted to highlight for Retraction Watch readers:

First, another great investigation by The Cancer Letter and The New York Times, this one into the International Early Lung Cancer Action Program (I-ELCAP) run by Claudia Henschke and David Yankelevitz. The design and conclusions of that trial has been criticized by other pulmonologists.

The new investigation, however, reveals that an October 2008 review of the study found that the researchers couldn’t find 90 percent of the subjects’ consent forms. That, The Cancer Letter notes, could mean a huge number of retractions that could displace Joachim Boldt as the current record holder: Continue reading Roundup: A new record? And paper retracts story about Canadian Paxil researcher-turned pol Kutcher

Feminism & Psychology study of UK birthing classes draws ire, winds up retracted

The debate — in entrenched medical circles, anyway — over whether it’s safe to give birth at home can be fierce. Just last month, for example, Nature reported that a review of the subject in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology that found home births more dangerous than those in the hospital generated so much controversy that it forced an investigation. Outside reviewers found problems, but the journal didn’t think they rose to the level of a retraction. Critics disagreed.

The same fraught subject came up in a paper published in Feminism & Psychology last year by Mary Horton-Salway and Abigail Locke. The original paper had concluded:

Our analysis suggests that the normativity of medical interventions in labour and childbirth is discursively reproduced in ante-natal classes whilst parental choice is limited by a powerful ‘rhetoric of risk’.

In other words, NCT classes were scaring women into choosing hospital births. But it turns out that conclusion wasn’t actually supported by the findings, which were based on a review of National Childbirth Trust’s classes. That led to a retraction: Continue reading Feminism & Psychology study of UK birthing classes draws ire, winds up retracted

Data fraud at Emory leads to retractions of three cardiology papers

An investigation by Emory University in Atlanta has led to the retractions of three articles containing falsified data, but the ambiguous wording of the notices leaves us wondering if they are implying more than they state.

Two of the papers appeared in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. The notices in ATVB implicate a researcher named Lian Zuo, who worked in Emory’s division of cardiology.

Here’s one: Continue reading Data fraud at Emory leads to retractions of three cardiology papers