Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Former dean sent herself threatening letters; what it costs to sue for defamation; what a highly cited paper is worth

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

‘Tortured phrases’, lost in translation: Sleuths find even more problems at journal that just flagged 400 papers
Award-winning nursing researcher’s paper retracted for ‘failure to acknowledge the contribution of other researchers and the funding source’
Two years: That’s how long it took a PLOS journal to flag a paper after a sleuth raised concerns
Journals retract papers following publication of university investigation by Retraction Watch
Two Texas studies on COVID-19 retracted because ‘previously approved study protocols appear to violate IRB guidelines around prisoner research’
When a retraction notice leaves out important details: COVID-19, prisoners, and an IRB

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 147.

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

When a retraction notice leaves out important details: COVID-19, prisoners, and an IRB

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.

The first study, published in August 2020, was titled “A Retrospective Analysis and Comparison of Prisoners and Community-Based Patients with COVID-19 Requiring Intensive Care During the First Phase of the Pandemic in West Texas.”

The second, from November 2020, was titled “Basic Demographic Parameters Help Predict Outcomes in Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 During the First Wave of Infection in West Texas.” Only the first article has been cited (one time), according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

The retraction notice for the papers states that the authors requested their removal:

Two Texas studies on COVID-19 retracted because ‘previously approved study protocols appear to violate IRB guidelines around prisoner research’

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.

Journals retract papers following publication of university investigation by Retraction Watch

Two journals have retracted three papers by a former researcher at the University of Colorado Denver six weeks after Retraction Watch first revealed that the university had recommended correcting the research record in 2016. Another journal has issued an expression of concern for a paper flagged in the investigation.

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.

Two years: That’s how long it took a PLOS journal to flag a paper after a sleuth raised concerns

Two years after being alerted to a questionable figure in a 2016 paper by a group with a questionable publication history, a PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern about the article.

The paper, “Deprivation of L-Arginine Induces Oxidative Stress Mediated Apoptosis in Leishmania donovani Promastigotes: Contribution of the Polyamine Pathway,” was published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and was written by a team based at the Rajendra Memorial Research Institute of Medical Sciences in Patna, India, along with a few other institutions in that country.

The penultimate author of the paper is Chitra Mandal, of the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. Mandal’s name appears dozens of times on PubPeer, where posters have flagged the figures in her papers. In a 2019 article in The Hindu, Mandal hinted that an institutional investigation into her work was underway but she dismissed the problems as “unintentional minor mistakes”:

Award-winning nursing researcher’s paper retracted for ‘failure to acknowledge the contribution of other researchers and the funding source’

A nursing journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a researcher in Scotland after learning that she’d taken a wee bit more credit for the article than she deserved.

The paper was titled “Co-designing technology with people with dementia and their carers: Exploring user perspectives when co-creating a mobile health application” and was written by Siobhan O’Connor. The article, which appeared in the International Journal of Older People Nursing (IJOPN), has been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

O’Connor had been a doctoral student at the University of Glasgow before moving to the University of Edinburgh, from which she received the Florence Nightingale Scholarship, a year-long fellowship award for nursing researchers. While at Edinburgh, she wrote and published the paper in question, using data that she’d had access to in Glasgow.

‘Tortured phrases’, lost in translation: Sleuths find even more problems at journal that just flagged 400 papers

What do subterranean insect provinces and motion to clamor have to do with microprocessors and microsystems?

That’s an excellent question. Read on, dear reader.

Weekend reads: Ivermectin study retracted; Sci-Hub and citations; animal welfare violations at chinchilla lab supplier

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Elsevier says “integrity and rigor” of peer review for 400 papers fell “beneath the high standards expected”
‘In hindsight the mistake was quite stupid’: Authors retract paper on stroke
Researcher committed misconduct while at NIH, say institutes — but is allowed to publish a revised version of a paper
Paper from company claiming phototherapy could treat COVID-19 is retracted
‘Please don’t be afraid to talk about your errors and to correct them.’
JAMA journal retracts paper on masks for children

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 144.

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

JAMA journal retracts paper on masks for children

JAMA Pediatrics has retracted a paper claiming that children’s masks trap too-high concentrations of carbon dioxide a little more than two weeks after publishing it.

The paper, by Harald Walach and colleagues, came under fire immediately after it was published on June 30, and quickly earned an editor’s note. Walach had another paper — which claimed that COVID-19 vaccines caused two deaths for every three deaths they prevented — retracted just a few days later. He also lost an affiliation with a university in Poland.

Walach and his colleagues responded to critics of the JAMA Pediatrics paper earlier this month, as we reported. But the journals apparently found that response wanting, according to the retraction notice:

‘Please don’t be afraid to talk about your errors and to correct them.’

A “systematic error” in a mental health database has led to the retraction of a 2017 paper on how people with psychosis process facial expressions.

Joana Grave, a PhD student at the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, and her colleagues published their article, “The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders,” in Psychiatry Research, an Elsevier title.

According to the abstract of the paper:

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