by subject – Page 9 – Retraction Watch

Paper that helped form basis of pricy research tool retracted

Nearly four years after a critic pointed out flaws in a paper about a controversial research tool involved in nearly 20 retractions, the owner of that instrument has lost the article after he failed to overcome the editors’ concerns about the work.

The owner is Donald Morisky, of the University of California, Los Angeles, whose name should be well-familiar to readers of Retraction Watch.

Morisky developed the Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS), then began charging researchers up to six-figure sums to license the use of the tool in their own studies. Those who didn’t sign agreements in advance were ordered to retract their papers that used the MMAS, pay Morisky’s company retroactively, or risk legal action. (We wrote about all this in Science back in 2017. We also wrote about how Morisky and his former business partner, Steve Trubow, have been engaged in litigation over ownership of a spin-off “widget” Trubow says belongs to him. That case is ongoing.)

Outcry over ‘terminal anorexia’ response letter prompts retraction

The authors of a response to an article critiquing the use of the term “terminal anorexia” retracted their letter last month after receiving major backlash from researchers, healthcare providers, and people with eating disorders.

“Regardless of inequities in care, terminal anorexia nervosa exists: a response to Sharpe et. al,” which defended the use of the term, was published May 20 in the Journal of Eating Disorders.

The letter was a response to “Inaccessibility of care and inequitable conceptions of suffering: a collective response to the construction of “terminal” anorexia nervosa,” an article published earlier in the month in the same journal by researchers with lived experiences of eating disorders. The article outlined methodological problems with the criteria for diagnosis of a “terminal eating disorder” put forward in “Terminal anorexia nervosa: three cases and proposed clinical characteristics,” a previous paper by two of the authors of the response letter.

The response was retracted on July 17. Its retraction note reads:

Econ study retracted after researchers find ‘undocumented alterations in the code’

An economics study has been retracted after other researchers identified several inconsistencies in the study’s code and submitted a comment to the journal.

Those critics say the flaws drove the paper’s main findings, but an author of the study says they had no major effect and stands by the results.

The original paper, “Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital,” was published in the American Economic Review in September 2022. It examined the impact of a 2013 increase in the tax rate on dividends in France, concluding an increased rate can encourage the accumulation of capital. The study has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction is only the second in the journal’s history. As Retraction Watch has previously reported, research shows that it is less common for economics papers to be retracted than research in other fields.

Journal to retract papers that cost its impact factor and spot in leading index

A journal that didn’t get an impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified unusual citations in several articles will retract the offending papers, according to its editor.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports due to citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations, also known as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.”

Specifically, Clarivate identified five papers published in Genetika in 2021 that had been cited by 22 papers published in the journal Bioscience Research in 2022, Snezana Mladenovic Drinic, the editor of Genetika, told Retraction Watch. Clarivate also suppressed Bioscience Research this year, meaning that the journal did not receive a new impact factor either.

University cuts anesthesiology researcher’s funding amid four retractions

An anesthesiologist who had his funding revoked for fabricating data has earned a fourth retraction for publishing the same data in two Springer Nature journals.

Wen-fei Tan, an anesthesiologist at The First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, is the first author of the recently retracted paper “Changes in the first postoperative night bispectral index of patients after thyroidectomy with different types of primary anesthetic management: a randomized controlled trial,” published in the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (JCMC), a Springer Nature journal, in 2017. It has been cited four times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice states:

Editor won’t investigate data concerns about paper linking anti-prostitution laws to increased rape

After reading an economics paper that claimed to document an increase in the rate of rape in European countries following the passage of prostitution bans, a data scientist had questions.

The scientist, who wishes to remain anonymous, sent a detailed email to an editor of the Journal of Law and Economics, which had published the paper last November, outlining concerns about the data and methods the authors used.

Among them: the historical rates of rape recorded in the paper did not match the values in the official sources the authors said they used. In other cases, data that were available from the official sources were missing in the paper, the researchers didn’t incorporate all the data they had collected into their model, and a variable was coded inconsistently, the data scientist wrote. (We’ve made the full critique available here.)

Given the consequences the conclusions of the article could have for people in the sex industry, the data scientist wrote, “I hope that someone takes this very seriously and looks into it the [sic] validity of the analysis and the data they used.”

Highly cited Lancet long COVID study retracted and republished

One of the first studies of long COVID has been retracted and replaced seven months after editors marked it with an expression of concern citing “data errors.”

The original paper, “6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study,” was published in The Lancet in January 2021. It was “the first large cohort study with 6-months’ follow-up” of people hospitalized with COVID-19, according to an editorial published simultaneously, and has been cited more than 2,000 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The World Health Organization, for example, cited it in several documents.

Last November, the article received an expression of concern stating that a researcher had contacted the journal about inconsistencies between that study and a paper published in August 2021, also in The Lancet, describing the same cohort of patients after one year of follow up.

‘Compromised’ survey data leads to article retraction and university investigation

An article based on results from an online survey has been retracted for data issues, and an Australian university is investigating what happened.

The article, “International nursing students’ perceptions and experiences of transition to the nursing workforce – A cross-sectional survey,” became available online on Jan. 29, 2022.

Published in the journal Nurse Education in Practice, the study reported 110 responses to an online survey of nursing students who came to Australia from other countries and planned to remain there to work.

The retraction notice, posted this month, stated:

Australian study supporting mask mandates earns expression of concern

A journal has issued an expression of concern for an Australian study that supported mask mandates after researchers raised several potential problems with the design and methodology of the study.

The article, “The introduction of a mandatory mask policy was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 cases in a major metropolitan city,” was published in the journal PLOS ONE in July 2021. It has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In comments to Retraction Watch, the authors of the paper stood by their work, but a key critic said he still thought the work should have been retracted.

Torturing data to predict bitcoin prices: A book excerpt

We are pleased to present an excerpt from Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science, a new book by Pomona College economics professor Gary Smith. The Washington Post said the book’s lessons “are very much needed.”

The fact that changes in bitcoin prices are driven by fear, greed, and manipulation has not stopped people from trying to crack their secret. Empirical models of bitcoin prices are a wonderful example of data torturing because bitcoins have no intrinsic value and, so, cannot be explained credibly by economic data.

Undaunted by this reality, a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper reported the mind-boggling efforts made by Yale University economics professor Aleh Tsyvinski and a graduate student, Yukun Liu, to find empirical patterns in bitcoin prices.

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