The World Health Organization has officially retracted its controversial guidelines on the use of opioid analgesics.
The agency’s move applies to two statements, issued in 2011 and 2012. Last June, WHO announced that it was “discontinuing” the guidelines in the wake of a critical report which said the documents were heavily tainted by commercial bias. According to a BMJ story published at the time:
Continue reading WHO formally retracts opioid guidelines that came under fire
The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) has retracted nine papers in bulk by a group of cancer researchers in New York led by the prominent scientist Andrew Dannenberg.
The work of Dannenberg’s group at Weill Cornell — and the figures in particular — has been the subject of scrutiny on PubPeer for more than two years.
The group also lost an article more than a decade ago in The Lancet, bringing their total so far to 10. Cancer Discovery subjected a paper to an expression of concern in August. Much of the tainted work was funded by grants from the U.S. government, as well as from funding authorities in other countries.
According to the notice for 2014’s “p53 protein regulates Hsp90 ATPase activity and thereby Wnt signaling by modulating Aha1 expression“:
Continue reading Prominent cancer researcher loses nine papers, making 10
The Images in Clinical Medicine section of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is prime real estate for physicians and others wanting to share a compelling picture with their colleagues. But earlier this month, an eye specialist in Michigan saw double when he looked at the Dec. 5, 2019, installment of the feature.
Depicted was a picture from a pair of eye specialists in India who claimed to have seen a case of a person who’d suffered retinal bleeding after having been struck in the eye by a tennis ball:
Continue reading How a plagiarized eye image in the NEJM was discovered
Last week, we reported on a case at the University of Leiden in which the institution found that a former psychology researcher there had committed research misconduct. In the anonymized report — which we were able to confirm regarded Lorenza Colzato, who is listed as a faculty member at Ruhr University in Bochum and at TU Dresden — the university found a lack of ethics approval for some studies and fabricating results in some grant applications. We asked the three whistleblowers in the case — Bryant Jongkees, Roberta Sellaro, and Laura Steenbergen — to reflect on their experiences. (We should note that they did not confirm it was Colzato named in the report.)
Retraction Watch (RW): What prompted you to come forward?
Continue reading ‘A long and lonely process:’ Whistleblowers in a misconduct case speak out
A group of researchers from Iran, Italy and the UK have retracted two meta-analyses on supplements and high blood pressure after making what a statistics expert calls a common error.
Both papers were originally published in the Journal of Human Hypertension. Here’s the retraction notice for “Elevated blood pressure reduction after α-lipoic acid supplementation: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials:”
Continue reading Authors retract two studies on high blood pressure and supplements after realizing they’d made a common error
An eye journal has issued an expression of concern for a paper on glaucoma that, given the litany of problems with the data, could well have been retracted. Not least of the issues: The authors admitted to using an outside firm to conduct experiments they’d tried to pass off as having done themselves.
The article, “Fisetin rescues retinal functions by suppressing inflammatory response in a DBA/2J mouse model of glaucoma,” came from a group at People’s Hospital of Rizhao. It appeared online last February in Documenta Ophthalmologica, the journal of the International Society for Clinical Electrophysiology and Vision.
According to the researchers:
Continue reading ‘We decided to play it safe.’ Journal doesn’t retract paper even though the authors neglected to mention that they didn’t do the experiments themselves.
In what the editor of a psychiatry journal says in an unusual case, the authors of a paper on treatments for depression have retracted it after being alerted to “inconsistencies” stemming from a change to their study design that the peer reviewers had requested.
Here’s the retraction notice, in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease:
Continue reading Reviewers asked authors to change their study design. It apparently didn’t go well.
A group of pediatric surgeons in China has lost their 2016 paper on a technique for repairing abdominal defects in children because they apparently had trouble keeping those defects straight.
The article, “A new technique for extraperitoneal repair of inguinal hernia,” appeared in the Journal of Surgical Research, an Elsevier title. The authors reported that a laparoscopic method of repairing inguinal hernias in children was superior to conventional, open surgery. According to the authors, they had nearly 1,900 patients to prove their point.
But as the retraction notice indicates, the numbers didn’t add up.
Continue reading What’s the hernia? Authors lose surgery paper for miscounting cases
In a recent Retraction Watch guest post on the “Eysenck affair,” James Heathers notes the extraordinary possibility that as many as 61 Hans Eysenck publications might be retracted. I believe this figure is a significant underestimate.
This reckoning has been a long time coming. The issues surrounding Eysenck’s 1980s/1990s collaboration with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek and their unbelievable results linking personality to health outcomes have been known for decades. Many eminent researchers, including Tony Pelosi and Louis Appleby, had lined up to criticise this research even while it was still ongoing.
In 2010, I published a lengthy biography of Eysenck, Playing with fire, that detailed the context for this collaboration. In the final full chapter, I explained what prompted Eysenck to team up with this outsider figure and laid bare the extent of Eysenck’s deep and longstanding relationship with the tobacco industry. It was backed by extensive archival research and interviews with key players (including two days with Grossarth-Maticek). I had hoped it would provoke a reappraisal and remedial action. But the impact was minimal.
Continue reading 61 retractions for controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck? That’s a significant underestimate, says his biographer
A paper by Ping Dong, a former researcher at Northwestern who left her post less than a year after having a paper retracted from Psychological Science, has been subjected to an expression of concern.
The 2017 paper, in the Journal of Consumer Research, claimed to show that “Witnessing Moral Violations Increases Conformity in Consumption.” It has been cited just twice, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Knowledge.
The expression of concern reads:
Continue reading Former Northwestern psychology prof has paper subjected to an expression of concern.jpg){kind=link}
