Retraction Watch

List of retracted COVID-19 papers grows past 70

As Retraction Watch readers may know, as part of keeping our database of retractions up to date, we’ve been publishing a running list of COVID-19 papers that have been retracted. That list has been steadily growing since the end of April, but yesterday the number jumped from 45 to 72, so we thought we’d walk through where the additional retractions came from.

Ten of the new retractions are from one publisher — Elsevier — and for one reason: Elsevier screwed up. How? Well, they published these ten papers twice. The error has nothing at all to do with the authors or the quality of the work, according to the notices. We’ve commented on this phenomenon before.

Psychology journal retracts two articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

A psychology journal has retracted a pair of decades-old articles by a now-deceased psychologist with noxious views about race and intelligence after the editors concluded that his work was “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda.”

The author, J. Philippe Rushton, was affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, where he was notorious for publishing highly questionable studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that

Psychology paper retracted after creators of tool allege “serious breach of copyright”

A researcher in Ecuador has lost a 2019 paper on the application of a widely-used psychological research instrument after the owner of the tool flexed their copyright muscle.

The episode — like another one, recently — echoes the case of Donald Morisky, a UCLA researcher who developed an instrument for assessing medication adherence — and then began charging other scientists small fortunes (and, in some cases, large ones) for use of the tool, or forcing retractions when they failed to comply. (For more on the Morisky case, see our 2017 piece in Science and this recent warning by journal editors.)

Written by Paúl Arias-Medina, of the University of Cuenca, the article, “Psychometric properties of the self-report version of the strengths and difficulties questionnaire in the Ecuadorian context: an evaluation of four models,” appeared in BMC Psychology.

Per the paper’s abstract:

Medical writer loses COVID-19-cancer paper for plagiarism

An oncology journal has retracted a review article on the hypothetical link between Covid-19 and cancer after determining that the medical writer who authored the work hadn’t done all the writing herself.

The paper, “Clinical sequelae of the novel coronavirus: does COVID-19 infection predispose patients to cancer?” appeared in Future Oncology in May and was written by Priya Hays, who at the time was a technical writer with Talis Biomedical Corp., in Menlo Park, Calif. Hays is currently with Abbott, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also has a company called Hays Documentation Specialists, which offers a variety of manuscript services, including academic writing and something called “unstructured authoring assistance.”

As the retraction notice indicates, Hays appears to have had some authoring assistance of her own:

Weekend reads: $1.5 million payout after failure to disclose conflicts; systematic review retractions; entire class penalized for cheating

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 year-ed tax-deductible donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Publisher retracts 14 papers by doctor who ran afoul of U.S. FDA for marketing supplements
Nature Communications retracts much-criticized paper on mentorship
Texas bone researcher faked data in Nature paper, says federal watchdog, as university rescinds professorships
After legal threats from Herbalife, Elsevier journal retracts — and then removes — a paper
‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers
‘Misconduct on a grand and terrible scale’: Dental scientist up to 26 retractions

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 40.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

‘Misconduct on a grand and terrible scale’: Dental scientist up to 26 retractions

A dentistry researcher in Spain with a history of reusing and manipulating images has notched two more retractions, giving him 26.

The new retractions move Jose´ Luis Calvo-Guirado, of Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, into a tie for 24th place on the Retraction Watch leaderboard.

Calvo-Guirado has in the past disputed the retractions of his research. And at least one of his co-authors, Georgios Romanos, of the State University of New York Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine, speculated that Calvo-Guirado was reusing images to limit the number of lab animals that would need to be sacrificed in his studies.

The latest retractions involve two papers in Annals of Anatomy, an Elsevier publication, including the 2018 article “A new procedure for processing extracted teeth for immediate grafting in post-extraction sockets. An experimental study in American Fox Hound dogs.” According to the notice, the paper contained manipulated images that were reused in subsequently retracted articles:

‘I thought I had messed up my experiment’: How a grad student discovered an error that might affect hundreds of papers

Earlier this month, we reported on how Susanne Stoll, a graduate student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University College London, discovered an error that toppled a highly-cited 2014 article — and which might affect hundreds of other papers in the field of perception.

We spoke with Stoll about the experience.

Retraction Watch (RW): What did it feel like to find such a significant error? Did you doubt yourself at first, and, if so when did you realize you’d found something both real and important?

After legal threats from Herbalife, Elsevier journal retracts — and then removes — a paper

Bowing to legal pressure from the supplement maker Herbalife, Elsevier earlier this year retracted — and then removed — a paper which claimed that a young woman in India died of liver failure after using the company’s products. The move has led to more legal threats.

In August 2018, a group of researchers in India published a report in the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hepatology about the death, involving a 24-year-old woman who had taken a variety of supplements produced by Herbalife, a massive, and massively controversial, maker of nonprescription diet aids.

The group, led by Cyriac Abby Philips, of Cochin Gastroenterology, in Kerala, India, asserted that tests of Herbalife products similar to those the woman had been taking revealed the presence of heavy metals, bacteria and, in most samples, “undisclosed toxic compounds including traces of psychotropic recreational agent.”

The case report — titled “Slimming to the death: Herbalife®-associated fatal acute liver failure-heavy metals, toxic compounds, bacterial contaminants and psychotropic agents in products sold in India” — is far from the first time scientists have linked Herbalife products to liver damage. They’ve done so here, here and here, to cite just a few instances.

Texas bone researcher faked data in Nature paper, says federal watchdog, as university rescinds professorships

A pharmacologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who lost a highly cited 2014 paper in Nature for questions about the integrity of her data has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — and UT Southwestern has rescinded two professorships she previously held.

According to ORI, Yihong Wan, an associate professor of pharmacology at UT Southwestern:

Nature Communications retracts much-criticized paper on mentorship

A month after announcing it would be conducting a “priority” investigation into a November 17 paper that claimed women in science fare better with male rather than female mentors, Nature Communications has retracted the article.

In the article, “The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance,” the authors — a trio from New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi — write that “While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career.” It drew nearly immediate criticism, for example:

The recent @NatureComms paper doesn’t tell us much about the impact of gender on mentorship but it sure does tell us that the statistics community needs to do a better job teaching scientists about correlation, causation, and confounding
— Daniela Witten (@daniela_witten) November 19, 2020

On November 19, the journal added an editor’s note saying it would be looking into these criticisms, and today, the article was retracted following review by three experts. The retraction notice reads, in part:

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