Weekend reads: The backstory of a Nature retraction; an author salutes her favorite review of 2020; vaping-COVID-19 link questioned

Welcome to the first Weekend Reads 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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 72.

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: The backstory of a Nature retraction; an author salutes her favorite review of 2020; vaping-COVID-19 link questioned

A look back at retraction news in 2020 — and ahead to 2021

Like everyone else, it seems, we here at Retraction Watch are more than ready to put 2020 to bed. It was a bittersweet year to celebrate our tenth anniversary and reflect on what we’ve learned. But the work never stops, so as we’ve done every year since 2010, we’ll take a look at the most notable retractions of the last 12 months, and review some important milestones and events. 

Given that journals retracted more than 1,800 papers in 2020, we had plenty of stories from which to choose. However, leading the list would have to be the papers about the pandemic that were pulled for flaws ranging from problematic data to shaky science to absolute wackiness. Indeed, if Covid were an author, it would be fifth on our leaderboard, with 72 so far. We’re certain that’s not the high-water mark for Covid retractions given the haste with which scientists have churned out papers about the disease and the virus behind it.

The intersection of politics and science drew particular attention, such as this paper about race and police killings whose authors triggered an outcry from the right after they called for their work to be retracted. Some journals engaged in an exercise of cupboard cleaning, retracting papers offensive to minorities, women and other groups. As we argued in Wired, critics of this “purging” tended to miss the larger point: the papers deserved to be retracted not just because of their repellent content but because they were scientifically unsound. And best practices for retraction recommend that they not disappear down a “memory hole,” but that they remain online, but marked “RETRACTED.”

Continue reading A look back at retraction news in 2020 — and ahead to 2021

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. 

Continue reading List of retracted COVID-19 papers grows past 70

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

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

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:

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

Medical writer loses COVID-19-cancer paper for plagiarism

via CDC

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: 

Continue reading Medical writer loses COVID-19-cancer paper for plagiarism

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:

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

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

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

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

Jose Luis Calvo-Guirado

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:  

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

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

Susanne Stoll

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? 

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

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

Cyriac Abby Philips

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. 

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