by subject – Page 36 – Retraction Watch

‘Patterns in the data have led to questions’: Ob-gyns lose another paper

A group of OB/GYNs in the Middle East with a history of testing the patience of editors has lost a paper — and received in expression of concern for another — over concerns about the validity of their data.

The articles appeared in the BJOG, a Wiley publication. Both were led by Mohammad Maher, who is affiliated with Menoufia University in Egypt and the Armed Forces Hospital Southern Region, in Saudia Arabia.

Maher was first author of a 2017 paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology that the journal retracted earlier this year, after the editors were unable to resolve serious questions about the reliability of the data. As the retraction notice states, the journal made little headway with Menoufia University when it tried to follow up on concerns that the researchers’ results were almost certainly fabricated.

What it takes to correct the record: Autopsy of a COVID-19 corrigendum

We’ve been keeping track of retracted coronavirus papers, but what about corrections? Here’s a guest post from Richard Jones of Cardiff University about a paper that earned widespread media coverage but turned out to be wrong.

According to our best knowledge, this is the first report on COVID-19 infection and death among medical personnel in a Forensic Medicine unit.

So ended a letter from Thailand to the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, accepted on 9^th April 2020 within 3 days of receipt, and published as an ubiquitous “Pre-Proof.”

The authors of that letter stated that there had been only two COVID-19 patients amongst medical personnel in Thailand at that time, one of whom was a “forensic medicine professional” working in Bangkok.

French hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study withdrawn

The authors of a preprint on use of hydroxychloroquine — the controversial drug heavily promoted by, and now apparently taken by, President Trump, at least for a few more days — along with azithromycin for COVID-19 have withdrawn the paper.

The preprint, “Hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin: a potential interest in reducing in-hospital morbidity due to COVID-19 pneumonia (HI-ZY-COVID)?” was posted to medRxiv on May 11 by authors at Hopital Raymond Poincare, and sometime yesterday replaced with this statement:

Another whodunit: The author no one can find

Readers, meet Beatriz Ychussie. Or don’t meet Beatriz Ychussie.

Ychussie is a co-author of three recently retracted math papers. Or maybe not.

The three articles — in the Journal of Inequalities and Applications, Advances in Difference Equations, and Fixed Point Theory and Applications, all Springer Nature titles — had an overlapping set of problems, including plagiarism and faked peer review. But they all had one particular problem when it came to Ychussie:

Cancer researcher loses defamation suit against critic

Carlo Croce can’t catch a break in court.

Yesterday, a Federal U.S. judge ruled against Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University, in a case Croce had filed against Purdue University professor David Sanders in 2017. As Judge James Graham, of the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division, writes in the 36-page ruling — which we’d recommend reading in its entirety:

Covid-19 and sex? Rapid-fire acceptance leads to hasty withdrawal of paper

The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has taken down a letter on whether people should abstain from sex during the coronavirus pandemic, but the editor says the article is not being retracted.

Meanwhile, researchers in France have retracted a paper in which they’d claimed to have found replication of the virus that causes Covid-19 in the dialysis fluid of a patient with kidney disease. Again, hasty publication appears to be involved. We’ve been tracking retractions of Covid-19 articles on our website, and, let’s just say, the list is almost certainly a trailing indicator of the robustness of the science here — as it is with retractions during any period.

Back to the letter. “COVID-19: Should sexual practices be discouraged during the pandemic?” was written by ZhiQiang Yin, of the Department of Dermatology at the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, in China. Yin submitted the article on April 14. The journal accepted it on the 16th and published it on April 30th.

According to the notice:

‘Aggressive’ COVID-19 strains: What it takes to correct a flawed paper

A group of researchers in Scotland have taken aim at a study published in early March which reported surprising findings on the genetics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.

But the story of what it took to correct the record about the paper is likely to be all too familiar to those who attempt such feats. It involved a blog post and a new paper — neither of which appeared on the site of the original journal that published the work, and neither of which is seeing the kind of attention paid to the original article.

The paper, “On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2,” appeared in National Science Review, published by Oxford Academic. According to the abstract:

“[I]t took a long time for the scientific community to realize that he was simply making things up”

In a world increasingly haunted by fake news, email scams and trolls on the internet deliberately emotionalizing debate and making unfounded attacks, trust is perhaps more endangered than ever.

That sounds like the breathless text of a movie trailer, but it’s how the editors of Ethnologia Europaea announce the retractions of seven more papers by Mart Bax, the Dutch anthropologist whose misconduct includes not only making up data but making up papers — at least 61 of them — as well. Bax is now up to nine retractions.

The journal, which has published an article titled “On scholarly misconduct and fraud, and what we can learn from it,” by Peter Jan Margry about Bax’s checkered career at Amsterdam Free University (Margry helped to out the misconduct), notes the sweep and success of the fraud:

Journal retracts paper on gender dysphoria after 900 critics petition

A journal has retracted a controversial paper that questioned what it called the “existing dogma” about gender.

The article, “A new theory of gender dysphoria incorporating the distress, social behavioral, and body-ownership networks,” was written by Stephen Gliske, a physicist-turned-neuroscientist at the University of Michigan.

Gliske’s paper, which received a modest amount of media attention, argued for what he calls a “multisense theory” of gender identity. As he told Newsweek last December:

Peer review bandits purloin again, this time in chemistry

A pair of researchers in India have lost a 2017 paper published by the UK’s Royal Society of Chemistry after an inquiry found that they’d stolen the guts of the work from an unpublished manuscript one of them had reviewed for another journal.

The article in question, “Tri-s-triazine (s-heptazine), a novel electron-deficient core for soft self-assembled supramolecular structures,” appeared in Chemical Communications was submitted on August 4, 2017 and published on September 25, 2017, and was written by Irla Kumar and Sandeep Kumar, of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore.

Sandeep Kumar, who is now retired, was a leading figure in the field of liquid crystals. The Royal Society of Chemistry feted him as one of the “most cited” researchers in Chemical Communications and another of its journals in 2006 and 2007. He also served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Liquid Crystals — a post that is particularly relevant in light of what follows.

According to the retraction notice:

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