More than two dozen papers by a controversial psychologist who died in 1997 are “unsafe,” according to a recent report by his former employer obtained by Retraction Watch.
The research has been subject to question for decades, because the findings — including some that “bibliotherapy” could dramatically reduce the risk of dying from cancer — seemed unbelievable.
The report by King’s College London into the work of Hans Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek notes that:
An influential group that studies the economic burden of medical care has temporarily removed from its website a draft report about the cost-effectiveness of drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis amid questions about the modeling researchers used in their analysis.
The group initially did little to explain the move, despite having issued a press release for the document last week, replacing the report’s page with a brief statement:
God giveth miracles … and it seems she taketh them away as well.
A group of chemists in China has lost a 2018 paper which described a “miraculous” discovery that wasn’t.
The paper was titled “A miraculous chiral Ir–Rh bimetallic nanocatalyst for asymmetric hydrogenation of activated ketones,” and it appeared in Organic Chemistry Frontiers, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The authors, from the State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals at Dalian University of Technology, purported to show that:
A psychology researcher at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has left a tenure-track position there less than a year after she and a co-author retracted a paper whose methods had been questioned online, Retraction Watch has learned.
Ping Dong and Chen-bo Zhong, a professor at the University of Toronto, where Dong received her PhD, retracted a paper from Psychological Science in November 2018, six months after publishing it. As we reported at the time, the paper
A group of ophthalmology researchers in China got caught trying to pull the wool over the eyes of readers by falsely claiming to have used a therapy that doesn’t exist.
As its title would indicate, the article, “Anti-angiogenic effect of Interleukin-26 in oxygen-induced retinopathy mice via inhibiting NFATc1-VEGF pathway,” by a team from Jinhua Municipal Central Hospital in Zhejiang, purported to show that IL-26 could prevent the growth of new blood vessels in mice with damaged retinas.
A chemical engineer in China who claims his supporting data were wiped out in a flood has notched his ninth retraction, seven from a single journal, for suspicious images and related issues.
The work of Dong Ge Tong, of Chengdu University of Technology, had come under scrutiny in PubPeer, and several of his articles received expressions of concern before ultimately falling to retraction.
Last week, the Journal of Materials Chemistry A pulled seven papers on which Tong was an author. Here’s the notice for one of those articles, “Hollow amorphous NaFePO4 nanospheres as a high-capacity and high-rate cathode for sodium-ion batteries,” first published in 2015:
A cancer researcher in England says he will be retracting a 2011 paper after acknowledging “unacceptable” manipulation of some of the figures in the article.
Richard Hill, of the University of Portsmouth, this week agreed to retract the article, “DNA-PKcs binding to p53 on the p21WAF1/CIP1 promoter blocks transcription resulting in cell death,” which appeared in the journal Oncotarget.
The paper, which Hill wrote while he was at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, had drawn scrutiny on PubPeer four years ago, with one poster noting “many indications of blot image manipulation” in the figures. Additional comments appeared earlier this month.
A microbiology journal has issued an expression of concern over image reuse in a 2010 paper whose senior author has already racked up five retractions for duplicating figures.
By our count, Waris — whose work has made several appearances in PubPeer — has lost at least five papers to retraction for image duplication and questionable data.
The authors of a controversial paper on what constitutes “normal” hormone levels in men and women — and, by implication, “male” and “female” athletes — are set to issue a massive correction of the work, Retraction Watch has learned. But an outside, albeit not disinterested, researcher who prompted the correction says the correction itself is amiss.
That finding was cited recently by an architect of the International Association of Athletics Federations’ decision to bar the South African trackstar, Caster Semenya, and other “hyperandrogenic” women (Semenya’s hormonal status has not been made public) whose hormonal constitution is arguably more male than female.
Researchers in China have lost a 2015 meta-analysis on pancreatic cancer, one of several retractions for members of the group stemming from a variety of abuses including bogus authorship and fake peer review.
The meta-analysis, “Correlation between serum levels of high mobility group box-1 protein and pancreatitis: a meta-analysis,” appeared in BioMed Research International, a Hindawi journal. The authors are affiliated with China Medical University in Shenyang and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
