Uncategorized – Page 2 – Retraction Watch

French hydroxychloroquine study has “major methodological shortcomings” and is “fully irresponsible,” says review, but is not being retracted

A March 2020 paper that set off months of angry debates about whether hydroxychloroquine is effective in treating COVID-19 has “gross methodological shortcomings” that “do not justify the far-reaching conclusions about the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19,” according to a review commissioned by the journal that published the original work.

The comments, by Frits Rosendaal, of Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, came as part of a review commissioned by International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC), which publishes the journal along with Elsiever. ISAC had issued a statement about the paper in April, saying it “does not meet the [International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy’s] expected standard.”

The study, Rosendaal writes,

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

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:

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

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:

Software error grounds pigeon-smarts paper

Pigeons definitely get a bad rap. Some might consider them mere rats with wings, purveyors of pestilence, distributors of dung, but rock doves aren’t, well, as dumb as their name might suggest. Pigeons are perhaps the world’s most accurate homers, they seem to have an innate knack for game theory and they can detect breast cancer in mammograms better than many doctors.

So when researchers in Germany reported in 2017 that pigeons were as adept, if not better, than people in multitasking, the findings seemed plausible. The study, which appeared in Current Biology, garnered a bit of media attention, including this piece in The Scientist, and has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics Web of Science.

Turns out, that was a flight of fancy.

Endocrinology researcher in South Korea scores four retractions in a year

Chonnam National University via Wikimedia

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:

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

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:

Award-winning researcher in India retracts two papers, corrects three

Kithiganahalli Narayanaswamy Balaji, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has retracted two papers and corrected three for duplication of images.

Balaji, who won the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize from India’s Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) “for outstanding contributions to science and technology,” is last author of the five papers, which were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) from 2008 to 2015.

The authors take responsibility for what they call “inadvertent mistakes.” The retraction notice for “Pathogen-specific TLR2 protein activation programs macrophages to induce Wnt-β-catenin signaling,” for example, concludes as follows:

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

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.

University of Kentucky moves to fire researchers after misconduct finding

The University of Kentucky has started termination proceedings against a pair of scientists found guilty of “significant departures from accepted practices of research,” according to the institution.

The scientists, Xianglin Shi, who up until now had held the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and served as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine, and Zhuo Zhang in the Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology in the College of Medicine, have lost access to their laboratories, which are shuttered, and other university equipment, UK said in a statement. A third researcher, Donghern Kim, who worked under Zhang, already has been fired in the scandal.

In October, the university told us that it was aware of the retractions but “not able to provide more information at this time.” The ongoing investigation was first reported in April by the Lexington Herald-Leader.

According to the UK’s announcement today, the inquiry, which began in June 2018, into Shi, Zhang and Kim found that:

U.S. government watchdog names investigative director

A week after news that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) would have a new interim director shortly comes news that the agency will also have a new director of its investigative division as of early next month.

Starting August 4, Alexander Runko will be the director of the ORI’s Division of Investigative Oversight (DIO). He is already working at the agency as an investigator.

According to the ORI:

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