by subject – Page 4 – Retraction Watch

Paper recommending vitamin D for COVID-19 retracted four years after expression of concern

A paper that purported to find vitamin D could reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms has been retracted from PLOS ONE, four years after the journal issued an expression of concern about the research.

The article, “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection,” appeared online September 25, 2020. Michael F. Holick, a professor of medicine at Boston University and a proponent of the use of vitamin D, was the last author among a group of other researchers from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran.

Soon after publication, the paper gained traction on platforms like Twitter (now X) as evidence vitamin D could treat COVID-19 symptoms.

Amidst this discussion, Nick Brown, a science integrity researcher at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden, and Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, a research fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia, pointed out potential flaws with the work, including the small sample size of the study and a lack of patient information such as how the patients died.

Superconductor researcher loses fifth paper

Ranga Dias, the physics researcher whose work on room-temperature superconductors has been retracted after coauthors raised concerns about the data, has lost another paper for the same reason.

This retraction brings Dias’ total to five, by our count.

The University of Rochester in New York, where Dias is an assistant professor, is investigating his work, Science has reported. Washington State University, where Dias obtained his PhD, is also investigating allegations of plagiarism in his thesis.

Dias has not responded to our request for comment about his latest retraction, of a 2021 paper in Physical Review Letters titled “Synthesis of Yttrium Superhydride Superconductor with a Transition Temperature up to 262 K by Catalytic Hydrogenation at High Pressures.” The article has been cited 178 times, according to information presented on its abstract page.

In December, the journal published an expression of concern for the paper, stating it was investigating concerns “regarding the origins and integrity of the transport data” in several of the paper’s figures “with the cooperation of the authors.”

On June 13, the journal retracted the paper. The notice states:

Elsevier reopens investigation into controversial hydroxychloroquine-COVID paper

A March 2020 paper that helped spur the discredited claim hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19 is under investigation – again – after some of its authors asked to take their names off the article.

The lead author, retired researcher Didier Raoult, has 12 retractions, according to The Retraction Watch Database. Those retractions involved violations of ethics rules. Journals are investigating many other articles by Raoult and his colleagues, including their work on hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID.

The paper, “Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open-label non-randomized clinical trial,” was published in the International Journal for Antimicrobial Agents. It has been cited more than 3,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Expression of concern coming for paper some used to link COVID-19 vaccines to deaths

The journal BMJ Public Health is placing an expression of concern on a paper it said “gave rise to widespread misreporting and misunderstanding,” namely, “claims that it implies a direct causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and mortality.”

The article, “Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the COVID-19 pandemic: ‘Our World in Data’ estimates of January 2020 to December 2022,” appeared online June 3, and quickly attracted attention and criticism. The expression of concern is not yet live.

In their conclusions, the authors wrote:

How a widely used ranking system ended up with three fake journals in its top 10 philosophy list

Recently our philosophy faculty at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, like many institutions around the world, introduced a ranking of journals based on Elsevier’s Scopus database to evaluate the research output of its employees for awards and promotions. This database is also used by our institution in the hiring process.

The database provides three main measures: CiteScore, SJR, and SNIP. CiteScore counts the citations received in four-year periods (e.g. 2020-2023) by texts published in this span and divides this figure by the number of papers published in the same interval. SJR and SNIP – which our institution uses to rank journals – are more complicated, with their full algorithms not publicly available.

We checked the Scopus philosophy list and discovered three journals published by Addleton Academic Publishers – which we had never heard of – are in the top 10 of the 2023 CiteScore ranking: Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations (3rd on the list of 806 philosophy journals indexed by Scopus in 2023), Review of Contemporary Philosophy (5/806), and Analysis and Metaphysics (6/806). All three also are in the top 100 of the 2023 SJR ranking.

Two papers retracted for plagiarizing a 50-year-old thesis

A math professor in Poland has lost two papers because she plagiarized a doctoral thesis written before the United States had put a man on the moon.

The articles by Daria Michalik, “The decomposition uniqueness for infinite Cartesian products” and “Some remarks on the uniqueness of decomposition into Cartesian product,” published in 2017 and 2016, respectively, were retracted this year from Topology and its Applications over concerns they closely resembled an unpublished 1968 dissertation from Polish topologist Zbigniew Furdzik: “On the properties of certain decompositions of topological spaces into Cartesian products.”

Michalik has associations with the Institute of Mathematics, the same institution with which Furdzik, now deceased, earned his PhD. As of August of 2023, she was a researcher at Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce, Poland.

The retraction statements for both papers read:

Veterinary journal retracts pet food company’s paper about copper in dog food

leisergu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A veterinary journal has retracted a paper from a major pet food company after criticism prompted the authors to re-examine their data.

The retraction is the first in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s 180 years of publication, Lisa Fortier, the journal’s editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. But veterinary researchers who wrote to the journal with concerns about the article say the retraction doesn’t address all the issues they raised.

The article, “Sixteen years of canine hepatic copper concentrations within normal reference ranges in dogs fed a broad range of commercial diets,” appeared online March 7. Most of the authors are affiliated with Hill’s Pet Nutrition.

Within weeks of the article’s publication, the journal got the first of seven letters “crying foul,” Fortier said.

Neuroscience journal retracts eight articles for image distortion

Elsevier’s Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy has retracted eight articles for image manipulation and overlap, with more on the way, according to the sleuth who notified the publication of the issues.

Each retraction notice credits an “anonymous reader” with having raised concerns about manipulated or duplicated images, with the journal’s editor in chief determining a retraction was warranted.

That anonymous reader was Mu Yang, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Columbia University, in New York City, who started emailing the journal about problematic papers in January 2023.

On May 16th, the journal notified Yang of the following retractions:

Journal taking ‘corrective actions’ after learning author used ChatGPT to update references

An interdisciplinary journal says it will take “corrective actions” on a paper following a thorough investigation on a paper for which one author used ChatGPT to update the references.

Krithika Srinivasan, an editor of Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space and a geographer at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, confirmed to Retraction Watch her journal is finalizing what actions need to be taken. After the probe concluded, Srinivasan says she submitted her recommendations to Sage, the journal’s publisher, who will take actions in line with their policy.

What’s clear from the probe, she says, is that “none of the incorrect references in this paper were ‘fabricated’ in the sense of being made up or false.” She notes that the original manuscript was submitted to the journal with the correct references but “the errors were generated when one of the other authors (without the knowledge of the submitting author) used chatGPT (instead of regular referencing software) to insert the citations and reference list.”

Lack of permits, ‘selective’ data halt research at Swedish prosthetics research center

In the late afternoon at a conference in Cartagena last year, a team of Swedish researchers presented their work on a technique that uses machine learning to translate the body’s own electric signals used to move a limb. They had tested it on a minor recovering from a stroke.

Documents from an internal investigation shared by Chalmers University have now revealed, however, that this case study was part of a series of regulatory lapses and suspicious research practices at the Centre for Bionics and Pain Research (CBPR) where the clinical research was conducted. The researchers seem to have conducted the study before Max Ortiz-Catalán, the center’s founder and former manager, had secured regulatory approval from the relevant Swedish agency.

Chalmers, the Centre’s home, has now suspended it after also suspecting that its data and research participants seemed “systematically selected” so that treatments appeared effective, and excluded data when treatments caused health problems. The investigation also uncovered the center had no person responsible for compliance, which is a requirement under Swedish law, and that personal data had been handled poorly.

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