A group of researchers in Canada and India have lost a paper on vaccine hesitancy and Covid-19 because they didn’t have the proper license to mine a database of news articles used in the study.
The paper, “Tracking COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and logistical challenges: A machine learning approach,” was published in PLOS ONE on June 2. Led by Shantanu Dutta, of the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, the researchers set out to:
Just months after Natureretracted a paper on the “Majorana” particle because other researchers found issues in the work, Science has placed an expression of concern on a different paper that suggested “a relatively easy route to creating and controlling [Majorana zero modes] MZMs in hybrid materials.”
If such particles exist, they could allow Microsoft — which employs some of the researchers involved in the work — to build a quantum computer. But scientists have suggested that the findings of various studies do not suggest the presence of Majorana particles.
The Science paper has been cited 29 times since it was published in 2020, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The EoC reads:
A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 17-year-old paper by one of the world’s most prominent behavioral psychologists after it partly failed a statistical stress test conducted by a group that has been trying to reproduce findings in the field.
The 2004 article, by Dan Ariely, of Duke University but then at MIT, and James Heyman, then a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, was published in Psychological Science. Titled “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets,” the article looked the relationship between labor and payment for that work:
A group of surgeons in Germany have retracted a 2020 paper for several errors and because a senior researcher says he should have been included as a co-author.
Sometimes, imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery.
Ask Farukh Iqbal. Earlier this year, Iqbal, of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at RMIT University, in Melbourne, Australia, was alerted to a recent paper in the journal Fuel that cited a 2020 article he’d written with some colleagues.
Iqbal read the paper and realized with dismay that not only was his work — which included parts of his thesis — cited, it was plagiarized:
Tilda Swinton has no more to do with TILDA than the data these authors used (credit: Manfred Werner (Tsui)
Irish eyes most definitely were not smiling on three papers that purported to contain data from a national repository from the Emerald Isle.
The articles, which appeared in a trio of journals from Dove Medical Press — part of Taylor & Francis — were written by various researchers at Nanchang University, in China.
Two of the articles have been retracted. “Serum Human Epididymal Protein 4 is Associated with Depressive Symptoms in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease,” from 2020, was published in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Per the abstract:
Earlier this week, we reported on the retractions of two papers on Covid-19 in Texas inmates after the journal was told that the researchers did not have proper ethics approval for the studies.
According to the senior author on the articles, however, that’s nowhere near the whole story. Kenneth Nugent, of Texas Tech Physicians in Lubbock, told us that he’d repeatedly sought — and received — approval from an institutional review board (IRB) throughout their project, articles on which appeared last year in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication.
A journal has retracted a pair of studies on Covid-19 in prisoners after the authors’ institution found that they had not obtained adequate ethics approval for the research.
The two studies appeared in the Journal of Primary Care & Community Health, a Sage publication. The authors, from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, were led by Kenneth Nugent, an internal medicine specialist at the institution.
Despite a recommendation that nine different papers be corrected and retracted, journals had, by last month, retracted just two papers by the researcher, Hari Koul, now at Louisiana State University, and corrected one. Koul, as we reported, had apparently failed to inform multiple journal editors of the need for corrections and retractions.
At the time, Jennifer Regala, the executive editor of the Journal of Urology, which just retracted two of Koul’s papers, told Retraction Watch: “We were not aware of these allegations, so of course these are of grave concern to us.” She said that the American Urological Association, which publishes the journal, planned to conduct its own investigation.
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