The paper that appears to have triggered the Trump administration’s obsession with hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for infection with the novel coronavirus has received a statement of concern from the society that publishes the journal in which the work appeared.
Jasti Rao, who once earned $700,000 a year at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria and was named the first “Peorian of the Year” before a misconduct investigation put an end to his time there, has now lost eight papers.
Rao’s case is among the more colorful that we’ve covered. A highly-regarded cancer specialist, Rao was caught up in a morass of misdeeds, including not only plagiarism and manipulation of data but gambling and behavior tantamount to extortion of his employees. As we reported in 2018:
Two years ago, Julia Strand, an assistant professor of psychology at Carleton College, published a paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review about how people strain to listen in crowded spaces (think: when they’re doing the opposite of social distancing).
The article, titled “Talking points: A modulating circle reduces listening effort without improving speech recognition,” was a young scientist’s fantasy — splashy, fascinating findings in a well-known journal — and, according to Strand, it gave her fledgling career a jolt.
The data were “gorgeous,” she said, initially replicable and well-received:
On the surface, it would seem like a good thing when science undergirds policy decisions. But what if that science is deeply flawed? Craig Pittman, an award-winning journalist at the Tampa Bay Times and author of 4 books, writes that his new book Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle to Save the Florida Panther is “a tale of raw courage, of scientific skulduggery and political shenanigans, of big-money interests versus what’s right for everyone.” In this excerpt, Pittman explains what happened — and what didn’t — after a group of scientists known as the Science Review Team (SRT) found serious problems in research used to support regulatory policies involving panthers.
In 2003, the SRT released a report containing its verdict. As you might guess, it ripped apart Maehr’s work, piece by piece, and yes, they called him out by name. They didn’t label him a fraud, but they made it clear that Dr. Panther had done some pretty shady things.
Because they were scientists, they didn’t scream out their findings in impassioned prose. They were cool and calm—but there was no mistaking what they were saying.
Why is it so difficult to correct the scientific record in sports science? In the first installment in this series of guest posts, Matthew Tenan, a data scientist with a PhD in neuroscience, began the story of how he and some colleagues came to scrutinize a paper. In the second, he explained what happened next. In today’s final installment, he reflects on the editors’ response and what he thinks it means for his field.
In refusing to retract the Dankel and Loenneke manuscript we showed to be mathematically flawed, the editors referred to “feedback from someone with greater expertise” and included the following:
Why is it so difficult to correct the scientific record in sports science? In the first installment in this series of guest posts, Matthew Tenan, a data scientist with a PhD in neuroscience, began the story of how he and some colleagues came to scrutinize a paper. In this post, he explains what happened next.
Two years ago, following heated debate, a sports science journal banned a statistical method from its pages, and a different journal — which had published a defense of that method earlier — decided to boost its statistical chops. But as Matthew Tenan, a data scientist with a PhD in neuroscience relates in this three-part series, that doesn’t seem to have made it any easier to correct the scientific record. Here’s part one.
As it happened, I knew that paper, and I had also expressed concerns about it – when I reviewed it before publication as one of the members of the journal’s editorial board. Indeed, I was brought on to the editorial board of Sports Medicine because the journal had recently received a lot of bad press for publishing a paper about another “novel statistical method” with significant issues and I had been a vocal critic of the sports medicine and sport science field developing their own statistical methods that are not used outside of the field and validated by the wider statistics community.
Bucking the advice of university investigators, a journal founded by Hans Eysenck has issued expressions of concern — not retractions — for three articles by the deceased psychologist whose work has been dogged by controversy since the 1980s.
The move comes barely a week after other journals opted to retract 13 papers by Eysenck, who died in 1997. Those retractions were prompted by the findings of a 2019 investigation by King’s College London, where Eysenck worked until 1983. That inquiry concluded that:
A former historian at Columbia University who resigned last year in the wake of a plagiarism scandal involving his award-winning book on North Korea has lost a 2005 paper for misusing his sources.
In 2017, Charles Armstrong, once a leading figure in Korean scholarship, returned the 2014 John King Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Society after allegations emerged that he had plagiziared widely in his book, “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992.”
At the time, Armstrong admitted to having made “citation errors” in the work. However, Balazs Szalontai, an academic in Korea, insisted that the the errors were in fact plagiarism and that they were sweeping.
Now, in what Szalotai told us was the earliest instance of Armstrong’s plagiarism that he has found, the journal Cold War History is retracting an article by Armstrong. According to the notice:
The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) today retracted a paper it published last year claiming that vaping was linked to heart attacks.
The paper, by Dharma Bhatta and Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, has faced a barrage of criticism since its publication last June — and Glantz’s claims, in a blog post, that the study was “More evidence that e-cigs cause heart attacks.”
Brad Rodu, a professor at the University of Louisville who comments frequently on vaping, asked the journal to retract the study shortly after it was published. The study, he said, had failed to account for which happened first — heart attacks or vaping. The contretemps was the subject of a July 2019 story by USA Today:
