2021: A review of the year’s 3,200 retractions

2021 was – as is always the case – a busy year at Retraction Watch. How could it not be, with our database of retractions surpassing 30,000 – and then 32,000 – with ten percent happening this year alone?

Oh, and the pandemic. There were 72 retractions on our list of retracted COVID-19 papers when we wrote this end-of-year message in 2020. Today, there are 205.

Perhaps it was scrutiny of pandemic-related scientific claims, or recognition of paper mills and other industrialized fakery as a serious problem, or just gathering momentum as sleuths began to get their due in wider circles, but it did feel as though 2021 was a year in which retractions – and larger issues in scientific integrity – played a big role.

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‘A clusterf**K’: Authors plagiarize material from NIH and elsewhere, make legal threats — then see their paper retracted

“clusterfuck,” by J E Theriot, via CC BY 2.0 license

Stolen data, “gross” misconduct, a strange game of scientific telephone, and accusations of intimidation – Santa came late to Retraction Watch but he delivered the goods in style.

Last May, the journal Cureus published a paper titled “Idiopathic CD4+ Lymphocytopenia Due to Homozygous Loss of the CD4 Start Codon.” The paper caught the notice of Andrea Lisco, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, who earlier this month was looking for his own article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on the same topic. Lisco told us: 

I did accidentally run in the Cureus paper while I was looking for my original publication on JID and I did report it immediately to Cureus and JID editorial offices.

The journal acted with what we’d consider to be remarkable haste. Within a few weeks came the following retraction notice: 

Continue reading ‘A clusterf**K’: Authors plagiarize material from NIH and elsewhere, make legal threats — then see their paper retracted

‘Highly professional, but the process seems to take a long time’: Is this the best way to correct the record?

A Nature journal has retracted a 2021 paper which made a bold claim about certain chemical reactions after several researchers raised questions about the analysis – but not before another group pulled their own article which built on the flawed findings. 

The first article, “The amine-catalysed Suzuki–Miyaura-type coupling of aryl halides and arylboronic acids,” appeared in Nature Catalysis in January. Most of the authors were affiliated with Hefei University of Technology, in China. The paper has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. 

After publication, at least three groups of researchers published Matters Arising letters in the journal questioning the validity of the results, all of which appeared on December 2: 

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Medical journal retracts letter calling hijab ‘an instrument of oppression’

The image in question

A major Canadian medical journal has retracted a letter to the editor by a prominent surgeon in Quebec who expressed reservations about a photo the journal had published of two young girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab.

The photo in question (above) ran on the cover of the November 8, 2021 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.The image prompted a letter from Sherif Emil, an endowed chair of surgery at Montreal Children’s Hospital of McGill University. Published December 20, the letter voiced concern that the photograph used “an instrument of oppression [the headcovering] as a symbol of diversity and inclusion.” (That’s in the title of the letter, which the journal now acknowledges writing, not Emil.) 

As the CBC reported, Emil wrote that:

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Weekend reads: Academania; redaction bias; a Harvard star falls; top retractions of 2021

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:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 204. There are now more than 32,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Academania; redaction bias; a Harvard star falls; top retractions of 2021

‘Why did this take over five years?’ Reflecting on two new retractions

Frits Rosendaal

In September 2015, after a lengthy investigation, the Committee on Scientific Integrity (CSI) of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) advised the LUMC Board of Directors to ask for retraction of two publications because of major data manipulation in images. The case involved Maria Fousteri, who by then had left LUMC.

In the Netherlands it is possible to ask a second opinion, as a non-binding but influential appeal procedure, from the national LOWI (Landelijk Orgaan Wetenschappelijke Integriteit). Fousteri did so. In May 2016, after careful deliberations and a hearing of individuals directly involved, the LOWI fully supported the conclusion of the CSI.

This led the Board to inform several parties, including the defendant’s current employer, and agencies that had provided grants based on the fraudulent work, and to formally ask the journal Molecular Cell to retract two publications. They would not do so for more than five years, with retraction notices published only this month that list data manipulations in several figures.

Continue reading ‘Why did this take over five years?’ Reflecting on two new retractions

Harvard journal retracts paper on Black advocacy in elections

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review has retracted an article which claimed – or misclaimed, as the case may be – that an African American advocacy movement discouraged Blacks from voting for Democratic politicians and suppressed news about the Covid-19 pandemic.

The article, “Disinformation creep: ADOS and the strategic weaponization of breaking news,” appeared in the Special Issue on Disinformation in the 2020 Elections published in January by the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy.

ADOS is short for American Descendants of Slavery, an online movement that calls for reparations for slavery in the United States. The movement – which uses the hashtag #ADOS on social media – was founded by Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore.

The article was written by Mutale Nkonde, the founding CEO of AI For the People, and co-authors including several affiliated with MoveOn, a progressive  political organization. 

According to the abstract of the paper, which is no longer available online: 

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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: 

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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:

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

Robert Wechsler-Reya

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:

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