by subject – Page 8 – Retraction Watch

Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting

Last week, an environmental journal published a paper on the use of renewable energy in cleaning up contaminated land. To read it, you would have to pay 40 euros. But you still wouldn’t know for sure who wrote it.

Ostensibly authored by researchers in China, “Revitalizing our earth: unleashing the power of green energy in soil remediation for a sustainable future” includes the extraneous phrase “Regenerate response” at the end of a methods section. For those unfamiliar, “Regenerate response” is a button in OpenAI’s ChatGPT that prompts the chatbot to rework an unsatisfactory answer.

“Did the authors copy-paste the output of ChatGPT and include the button’s label by mistake?” wondered Guillaume Cabanac, a professor of computer science at the University of Toulouse, in France, in a comment on PubPeer.

And, he added, “How come this meaningless wording survived proofreading by the coauthors, editors, referees, copy editors, and typesetters?”

To guard against fraud, medical research should be a profession: A book excerpt

We are pleased to present an excerpt from Trust in Medical Research, a freely available new book by Warwick P. Anderson, emeritus professor of physiology and biomedical sciences at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

It has always been difficult for me to admit that we have a genuine and substantial problem of fraud and rubbish science in medical research. I suspect this is true for most scientists. We want to think of science as being free from half-truths and fake news. We hope that the high moral purpose of medical research will guard against wrongdoing, that it will weigh on our minds so heavily that we all take care to work and publish honestly and competently.

We know that scientists sometimes make unintentional mistakes due to ignorance, but we also know in our hearts that some people are so ambitious that they push the envelope, stretch the truth and take shortcuts. We know, too, that a few others go further and get carried away by the prospects of scientific and financial rewards and so cheat, commit fraud and lie in publications. This is what some humans do in all walks of life.

We know all this, but it is fair to say that we generally do not want to face up to it. Jennifer Byrne at the University of Sydney put it well when she wrote that we tend to overlook the research fraud issue “because the scientific community has been unwilling to have frank and open discussions about it”:

How a canceled panel on sex plays into censorship by the right: A guest post

Alice Dreger *Credit: Dylan Lees Photography*

In case you didn’t get the memo, the presidents of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) want you to stop talking about sex already.

Or at least they want anthropologists to stop.

Anthropology groups cancel conference panel on why biological sex is “necessary” for research

Two anthropology organizations co-hosting a conference this fall have removed from the program a panel presentation entitled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology.”

The panel had been slated for the joint annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), to be held in Toronto in November.

In a letter informing the panelists of the decision, Ramona Pérez and Monica Heller, presidents of the AAA and CASCA, respectively, wrote that the executive boards of the two groups had reviewed the submission “at the request of numerous members” and decided to remove it from the conference program. They wrote:

Yale professor’s book ‘systematically misrepresents’ sources, review claims

The first book of a Yale professor of Chinese history contains a “multitude of problems,” according to a no-holds-barred review published last month.

Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine: The Administrative Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century Qing State appeared last August from Harvard University Press. Its author, Maura Dykstra, is now an assistant professor of history at Yale.

In an extensive review that appeared in the Journal of Chinese History on August 31, George Qiao, an assistant professor of history and Asian languages and civilizations at Amherst College in Massachusetts, wrote that Dykstra’s book “fails to meet basic academic standards” and is “filled with misinformation.”

The book’s problems, according to Qiao, include typos, as well as:

Guest post: Genomics has a spreadsheet problem

Surveys show spreadsheets are the most widely used analytical tool in academic research. But they are prone to errors. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Health England lost 16,000 test results after using an old Excel file format to handle data. Whether this mix-up hampered local infection control is anybody’s guess, but it certainly could have.

The software is causing trouble for other lines of research, too, as our team and others have shown: Genomics studies that rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage data turn out to be riddled with erroneous gene names, or gene-name errors, and the issue is affecting more and more journals.

Exclusive: Probe suggests new retraction awaiting embattled Korean heart doctor

A prominent physician-scientist in South Korea may soon be facing his fourth retraction. Last month, Hui-Nam Pak of Yonsei University was found guilty of duplicate publication, a form of academic misconduct, according to a report from the school’s committee on research integrity Retraction Watch has obtained.

Pak, a cardiologist, has had dozens of papers flagged on PubPeer. As we reported in February, journals pulled two of his papers the previous month after a whistleblower pointed out problems with the articles. One was retracted for “a number of issues related to scientific misconduct,” while the other was a duplicate publication. A third paper by Pak was retracted years earlier after mistakenly being published twice by the same journal.

Our February story triggered a flood of comments, many of them malicious. Some likened whistleblowing to “academic vandalism.” Others asserted that “whistleblowers deserve strong legal penalties” and that “immoral whistleblowers” seemed bent on ruining Pak’s “outstanding career.” Many comments were rejected for not adhering to our commenting policies, in particular making unsubstantiated claims.

The September 12 report from Yonsei University (in Korean) explains that an “informant” reported two of Pak’s papers to the school’s Research Ethics Integrity Committee on March 7.

Swedish beauty study that sparked ‘storm of criticism’ is cleared

The economist behind a controversial study showing attractive female students got lower grades after classes moved online during the pandemic has been acquitted of research misconduct, according to a report from his former institution.

But the researcher, Adrian Mehic, did not get off without reproof: Even if the work kept to the letter of the law, it may still have had “unethical consequences,” Erik Renström, vice-chancellor of Lund University in Sweden, wrote in the June 8 report (in Swedish).

In the study, a jury made up largely of final-year high schoolers rated the looks of university students based on pictures taken from social media accounts. The ratings were then linked to other publicly available data about the students, including academic performance. The findings, published in the journal Economics Letters in August 2022, made headlines across the globe.

But the students had not consented to the research, nor were they informed about it. The revelation unleashed “a storm of criticism at the university,” according to local media.

Paper that found ‘climate crisis’ to be ‘not evident yet’ retracted after re-review

An article published last January in a physics journal attracted attention for its conclusion that–contrary to mainstream climate science–extreme weather events have not become more intense or more frequent as the temperature of the earth’s surface has increased.

Now, the journal’s editors have retracted the article after a post-publication review found “that the conclusions of the article were not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors.”

In the abstract of “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming,” published in The European Physical Journal Plus, the authors wrote:

Ex-cops tangle with journals over strip clubs and sex crimes

A study by two economists who found opening strip clubs or escort services caused sex crimes in the neighborhood to drop contains “fatal errors” and should be retracted, argues a group of past and current law enforcement officers, including three academics.

“None of us are prudes or even anti-strip club,” Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former Baltimore police officer, wrote in a thread on X (formerly Twitter). “But if you claim strip clubs reduce sex crimes – and by 13 percent! – you’re delving into serious policy issues.”

He added: “This is very typical of academics getting out of their field. They have second-hand data. They crunch the numbers … They don’t know what the data mean.”

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