by subject – Page 6 – Retraction Watch

Paper claiming ‘extensive’ harms of COVID-19 vaccines to be retracted

A journal is retracting a paper on the purported harms of vaccines against COVID-19 written in part by authors who have had similar work retracted before.

The article, “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from the Registrational Trials and Global Vaccination Campaign,” appeared late last month in Cureus, which used to be a stand-alone journal but is now owned by Springer Nature. (It has appeared frequently in these pages.)

Graham Parker, Director of Publishing and Customer Success at Cureus, told Retraction Watch:

I can confirm we will be retracting it by the end of the week, as we have provided the authors with a deadline to reply and indicate whether they agree or disagree with the retraction.

The senior author on the work was Peter McCullough, a cardiologist at the Institute of Pure and Applied Knowledge who lost his board certification after the American Board of Internal Medicine found he had “provided false or inaccurate medical information to the public.”

Econ journal board quits en masse because Wiley ‘appeared to emphasize quantity over quality’

In what has become a familiar refrain, more than 30 editors and advisors of an economics journal have resigned because they felt the publisher’s need for growth would increase the “risks of proliferation of poor-quality science.”

In a letter uploaded to Dropbox on February 7, the editors and advisors of the Journal of Economic Surveys said: “We no longer believed that the corporate policies and practices of the Journal’s publisher, Wiley, as we perceived them through several statements made by Wiley and the draft of a new editor agreement submitted to the attention of Editors-in-Chief and Managing Editors by Wiley, were coherent with ours.”

Despite involving a lawyer, the now-former editors said:

Engineering dean’s journal serves as a supply chain for ‘bizarre’ articles

Erick Jones, the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno, is under fire for publishing a journal filled with what one academic called “bizarre” and “incoherent” articles.

Jones founded the International Supply Chain Technology Journal in 2015 and served as the publication’s editor-in-chief until September 2022, when he handed off the reins to a former member of his lab. The journal notes that it requires authors to pay an “honorary” charge of $199 to publish their manuscripts.

Jones’s ORCID profile lists 71 articles published in the journal, although an accurate count is difficult because of discrepancies in the journal’s database and the title’s PDF files. The pages of the journal were also filled with articles from his wife, his son, his students and the current editor-in-chief, along with the occasional outside submission.

One of Jones’s papers, published in 2022, is titled “Using Science to Minimize Sleep Deprivation that May Reduce Train Accidents.” In the two-paragraph article, Jones and his coauthors note that “both humans and flies sleep during the night and are awake during the day, and both species require a significant amount of sleep.” After a description of an unrelated study on fly lifespans, they conclude:

No data? No problem! Undisclosed tinkering in Excel behind economics paper

Last year, a new study on green innovations and patents in 27 countries left one reader slack-jawed. The findings were no surprise. What was baffling was how the authors, two professors of economics in Europe, had pulled off the research in the first place.

The reader, a PhD student in economics, was working with the same data described in the paper. He knew they were riddled with holes – sometimes big ones: For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent. The authors made no mention of how they dealt with this problem. On the contrary, they wrote they had “balanced panel data,” which in economic parlance means a dataset with no gaps.

“I was dumbstruck for a week,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of harming his career. (His identity is known to Retraction Watch.)

‘We should have followed up’: Lancet journal retracts article on hearing aids and dementia after prodding

When Jure Mur, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, realized the replication of a published study he was working on as a “sanity check” wasn’t producing matching results, his first reaction was “annoyance,” he said.

He assumed the mistake was his own, and he’d have to thoroughly check his work to find it. “Only after double- and triple-checking my code did I start suspecting an error in the original paper,” Mur told Retraction Watch.

Mur emailed the authors of the article several times, but they never responded to him, he said. He next contacted the editors of The Lancet Public Health, which had published the original paper, “Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort,” in April 2023.

A closer look at the ‘chocolate with high cocoa content’ hoax

We are pleased to present an excerpt from The Predatory Paradox: Ethics, Politics, and Practices in Contemporary Scholarly Publishing by Amy Koerber, Jesse C. Starkey, Karin Ardon-Dryer, R. Glenn Cummins, Lyombe Eko, and Kerk F. Kee, published by Open Book Publishers, October 2023.

In 2015, Johannes Bohannon, along with three coauthors, published an article titled ‘Chocolate with High Cocoa Content as a Weight Loss Accelerator’ in the International Archives of Medicine. The article reported results from a study that divided participants into three groups, with a different diet assigned to each group, and concluded that ‘Subjects of the chocolate intervention group experienced the easiest and most successful weight loss’ (p. 1).

In a personal account published later, journalist John Bohannon described the article as an intentional hoax that he and his coauthors had carried out in response to a request from a German film crew who was making a documentary on the ‘junk-science diet industry.’ To implement the hoax, Bohannon and his coauthors created an ‘Institute of Diet and Health’ that existed only as a website, and he assumed the name ‘Johannes Bohannon’ as lead author of the study. As he explained, the research reported in the article was actually conducted, but it was “terrible science,” including major flaws that would have been detected if the article had undergone a legitimate peer-review process.

Bohannon and his colleagues’ ‘Chocolate with High Cocoa Content’ article was retracted shortly after it was published, and the editors of International Archives of Medicine published a retraction notice dated 10 June 2015 (Editorial Office 2015). The editors’ decision to retract this article ostensibly served to correct the scientific record and prevent the erroneous data reported in the published study from being circulated in subsequent literature. This manner of correcting the scientific record is an important purpose of retractions, as defined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE):

Psychology professor earns retractions after publishing with ‘repeat offenders’

A psychologist in Australia has earned a pair of retractions after publishing several papers with international coauthors suspected of authorship fraud, Retraction Watch has learned.

Kelly-Ann Allen, an associate professor at Monash University, in Clayton, and editor-in-chief of two psychology journals, declined to comment for this article.

The retraction notices, both in Frontiers journals, cite an investigation by the publisher confirming “a serious breach of our authorship policies and of publication ethics.”

Journal retracts 31 papers, bans authors and reviewers after losing its impact factor

A journal that lost its impact factor and spot in a major index this year has made good on a promise to retract dozens of papers with “compromised” peer review.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified signs of citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations. Clarivate also dropped Genetika from its Web of Science index for failing to meet editorial quality criteria.

Clarivate’s actions followed a blog post by scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik about what she called the “Iranian Plant Paper Mill, which included 31 papers published in Genetika.

‘A bit of a surprise’: Transportation officials pushed to retract archaeology article on work they funded

After bankrolling archeological work on a prehistoric site discovered during construction, a state department of transportation has successfully lobbied to retract an article about the researchers’ findings officials said were “published prematurely.”

The whole process was “a bit of a surprise” for the paper’s co-authors, said Logan Miller, one of the authors and an archeology professor at Illinois State University. He and lead author David Leslie both told Retraction Watch they stand by the article’s findings, but declined to comment further about the retraction.

Their research began in 2019, when the Connecticut Department of Transportation (CTDOT) wanted to replace a bridge in the town of Avon. When construction workers started digging into the old bridge’s foundations, however, they discovered thousands of ancient objects from the Paleoindians, the earliest known people to live in New England. CTDOT temporarily halted the work and contracted an archaeology firm to excavate the site.

Publisher pulls books about philosophers Žižek and Venn over citation issues

A large U.S. university press has stopped selling two scholarly books about the philosophers Slavoj Žižek and John Venn due to problems with how the authors cited – or didn’t cite – source material.

In both cases, the University of Chicago Press stated on its website that the titles, released in 2023 and 2022, respectively, were “no longer available for sale.” But only “John Venn: A Life in Logic” by Lukas M. Verburgt was “retracted,” according to the publisher.

The author of the other publication – “How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual” – told us he had been afforded a chance to fix his mistakes. These included “several insufficient, missing, or erroneous citations of source material upon which the author builds his argument,” the University of Chicago Press stated.

“The publisher has given me the opportunity to correct the book and resubmit it for review,” said Eliran Bar-El, a sociologist at the University of York, in England. “In light of it being an ongoing process, I cannot provide further details until there is a review outcome, which will be reflected appropriately in my publication list. At this time, I would like to genuinely thank the observant readers who have brought this to my attention.”

Verburgt, whose work contains “numerous instances of insufficiently cited source material,” does not appear to have been quite as lucky.

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