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The University of California, Irvine, appears to be putting some distance between the administration and a lecturer at the school who threatened Retraction Watch with legal action after we inquired about the misbehavior of one of his colleagues. 

Last month, we reported on the case of Constance Iloh, a UCI education scholar whose work has come under scrutiny for plagiarism and misuse of references. Before posting our story, we emailed Iloh multiple times for comment on two retractions and a pair of corrections. 

She didn’t reply — but we did hear from Eric Lindsay, a composer at the school, who told us, using a UCI email address: 

Continue reading Professor’s legal threats “were personal and not made on behalf of the University,” says University of California, Irvine

One of the world’s leading medical journals has retracted a widely circulated paper published in April that concluded that “both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment and external mask surface.”

The study, published by the Annals of Internal Medicine, has been cited by dozens of news stories, nearly 10,000 Twitter users — some of whom raised red flags about its methods — and by the World Health Organization.

But it turns out that the authors failed to consider the limits of the test they were using to detect the presence of coronavirus.

The paper only involved four participants. Apparently, the authors thought a correction — adding more patients — would be enough:

Continue reading Top journal retracts study claiming masks ineffective in preventing COVID-19 spread

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• The retraction of a paper claiming that the sun was responsible for global warming
• Fake peer review and a made-up author; and
• Four retractions following an investigation at the University of Maryland

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Continue reading Weekend reads: A whistleblower is fired; problems in heart research; doing the right thing in science

Hueng-Sik Choi, a researcher at Chonnam National University in Gwangju in South Korea, is up to four retractions for image manipulation.

The latest retraction for Choi, for a 2006 paper titled “Orphan nuclear receptor Nur77 induces zinc finger protein GIOT-1 gene expression, and GIOT-1 acts as a novel corepressor of orphan nuclear receptor SF-1 via recruitment of HDAC2,” appeared in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) earlier this month:

Continue reading Endocrinology researcher in South Korea scores four retractions in a year

Before we present this week’s Weekend Reads, a question: Do you enjoy our weekly roundup? If so, we could really use your help. Would you consider a tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• The top retractions of 2019;
• Two retractions and three corrections by an award-winning researcher;
• The retraction of a neuroscience paper from Science.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Continue reading Weekend reads: 100 fake professors; study on police killings retracted; false data won’t scuttle company buyout

It’s no secret that retractions have a stigma, which is very likely part of why authors often resist the move — even when honest error is involved. There have been at least a few proposals to change the nomenclature for some retractions over the years, from turning them into “amendments” to a new taxonomy.

Erica Boxheimer, data integrity analyst at EMBO Press, and Bernd Pulverer, chief editor of The EMBO Journal and head of scientific publications for the Press, have suggested a related solution, which builds on a 2015 proposal:

We proposed to use the term “withdrawal” instead of the canonical “retraction” for an author‐initiated retraction based on “honest mistakes”. We are now using the terms “retraction” and “withdrawal” as formally distinct content types across EMBO Press in the hope that “withdrawal” attracts less stigma and encourages self‐correction. 

As they note in an editorial in the journal last month:

In a move to add transparency in a more systematic manner, we have begun trialing a “process file” for corrections—similar to the “review process files” on our published papers, which capture the review and editorial process at the journal—for corrigenda and retractions. 

Here’s one such “process file.” We asked Pulverer and Boxheimer to describe how the approach would work.

Continue reading A publisher wants to destigmatize retractions. Here’s how.