Retraction Watch

AHA journal tones down abstract linking COVID-19 vaccines to risk of heart problems

The American Heart Association has published a corrected version of a controversial meeting abstract which claimed to show that Covid-19 vaccinations “dramatically” increased a person’s risk for serious heart problems.

The study was the work of Stephen Gundry, a cardiac surgeon who now sells dietary supplements of questionable efficacy on his website. Gundry also sees patients at the Center for Restorative Medicine and International Heart & Lung Institute in California and offers advice on YouTube.

Gundry submitted the abstract, titled “Mrna COVID Vaccines Dramatically Increase Endothelial Inflammatory Markers and ACS Risk as Measured by the PULS Cardiac Test: a Warning,” to the AHA’s 2021 scientific meeting, which apparently accepted it without much, if any, review.

At the end of November, after fielding complaints about the study, the AHA issued an expression of concern for the abstract, which was riddled with spelling errors – including calling the PULS test the “PLUS” test in the first sentence, where any reader could immediately spot the mistake – and other problems:

Court tosses $50 billion suit by ‘prince of panspermia’ against Springer Nature

A neuroscientist once called the “prince of panspermia” has lost a lawsuit against Springer Nature stemming from a 2019 paper of his that a journal retracted.

Here’s the summary from United States District Judge John P. Cronan, who heard the original case:

Researchers ‘devastated’ after finding manipulated data in study of pediatric brain tumors

An international group of cancer researchers has lost an influential 2020 paper in Nature Neuroscience after finding problems with the data that triggered an institutional investigation.

The article, “Tumor necrosis factor overcomes immune evasion in p53-mutant medulloblastoma,” represented a potentially major advance in the treatment of pediatric brain tumors, according to Robert Wechsler-Reya, the director of the Tumor Initiation & Maintenance Program at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, in La Jolla, Calif., and the senior author of the paper, which has been cited 17 times, per Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:

Two expressions of concern arrive for papers linked to beleaguered biotech Cassava

The Journal of Neuroscience has slapped expressions of concern on a pair of papers linked to the maker of a controversial drug to treat Alzheimer’s disease.

As we and others have reported, Cassava Sciences has been under intense scrutiny lately. In August, the law firm Labaton Sucharow – who is representing Cassava short sellers – submitted a “citizen’s petition” to the FDA regarding a regulatory filing from the company for its drug simulfilam and called on the agency to halt trials of the experimental medication because it had:

Revealed: The inner workings of a paper mill

In 2019, Retraction Watch ran an exclusive story of a Russian paper mill operating under the business name “International Publisher LLC”. Since then, Retraction Watch and other scientific news and blogging sites have continued to report on the activities of research paper mills, including International Publisher and its primary website, 123mi.ru. These mills provide an array of fraudulent services to researchers and academics seeking to publish articles in peer-reviewed journals. The services they provide include ghostwriting, brokering authorship positions on papers accepted for publication, and falsifying data.

Our project augments this stream of reports about paper mills as we focus on the activities of International Publisher and the papers brokered through 123mi.ru. As part of this project we are curating a database of all the papers and authorship positions that have been advertised on this website. Our database consists of roughly 2,353 unique article titles with 8,928 authorship positions. While the majority of the known paper mill activity has been in the biomedical sciences, our work on just this one paper mill demonstrates that paper mill products have infiltrated multiple scientific disciplines in which career advancement is heavily reliant on academic publications.

So far, we have identified nearly 200 published articles that may have been brokered through this paper mill and which cross disciplines including (but not limited to) humanities, social sciences, nursing, and education. We also observe numerous papers on COVID-19 that have been or currently are advertised for sale.

Our project is far from complete, but we thought it important to report on our methods and preliminary findings via Retraction Watch. In doing so, we hope to raise awareness of a serious and potentially widespread problem, along with strategies to help detect and possibly prevent fraudulent activities.

Elsevier subjects entire special issue of journal on COVID-19 to an expression of concern

Elsevier has subjected an entire special issue of a journal — including a paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill five times more people over 65 than they save — to an expression of concern.

The special issue of Toxicology Reports contained eight articles, including the vaccines paper co-authored by Ronald Kostoff.

Here’s the expression of concern, which is only linked from Kostoff et al’s vaccine paper:

Weekend reads: ‘Fraudulent and faulty research;’ a $275K settlement — but resignation — for a professor; ‘COVID-19, ivermectin, and beyond’

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:

Exercise researcher earns more retractions as investigations mount
Another setback for ‘Majorana’ particle as Science paper earns an expression of concern
Journal retracts 122 papers at once
Paper retracted because authors ‘misrepresented a published theoretical model as if they had found it’
Paper claiming a lack of evidence COVID-19 lockdowns work is retracted
Researcher uses fake email address to submit a paper mill manuscript without corresponding author’s knowledge

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 203. There are now more than 31,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Exercise researcher earns more retractions as investigations mount

Co-author James Steele, one of the sleuths who brought the issues to attention

Retractions are slowly stacking up for an exercise researcher in Brazil whose work has come under scrutiny by data sleuths, including a couple of his erstwhile co-authors. The concerns prompted an investigation by his former institution into one of his academic supervisors, who may be facing sanctions, Retraction Watch has learned.

In June 2020, the sleuths posted a preprint calling for the retraction of seven papers by the researcher, Matheus Barbalho, a PhD student at the Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, part of the Universidade da Amazônia, in Belém. The reason, according to the sleuths – who included James Steele and James Fisher, of Solent University in the United Kingdom, both of whom were co-authors on papers with Barbalho: the data were, in their view “atypical, improbable, and to put it bluntly, pretty weird.”

Since then, journals have retracted two of Barbalho’s papers (he had lost one in April 2020), citing concerns about the data in the articles.

Another setback for ‘Majorana’ particle as Science paper earns an expression of concern

Ettore Majorana, after whom the “Majorana” particle is named
By unknown author / Mondadori Collection, public domain

You might say that the third time is not the charm for a paper on some elusive fermions.

For the third time this year, a leading science journal has raised concerns about a paper on the “Majorana” particle, which, if it exists, would hold promise for building a quantum computer.

In March, Nature retracted a paper on the particle, and in July, Science placed an expression of concern on a different paper that purported to find “a relatively easy route to creating and controlling [Majorana zero modes] MZMs in hybrid materials.”

Today, Science is slapping an expression of concern on another Majorana paper:

Journal retracts 122 papers at once

A SAGE journal has retracted 122 papers because of “clear indicators that the submission and/or peer review process for these papers was manipulated.”

Those indicators, according to The International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education:

include but are not limited to submission patterns consistent with the use of paper mills, collusion between authors and reviewers during the review process, inappropriate subject matter as compared to the Journal’s Aims and Scope, poor quality peer review and requests for inappropriate citation.

A look at the first three titles suggests that they were, indeed, far out of scope:

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