The co-authors of a paper that claimed jade amulets might prevent COVID-19 have tried to distance themselves from the work, in a letter to the co-editor of the journal that published it.
In fact, the first author, Moses Bility of the University of Pittsburgh, says of his co-authors:
Continue reading Co-authors of paper on COVID-19 and jade amulets blame ‘the online press’ and social media for misinterpretation in retraction letter
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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 38.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: Hydroxychloroquine champion faces ethics charges; a serial plagiarist in philosophy; another author reaches 100 retractions
So much for author instructions.
Researchers who’d submitted a paper to Social Science & Medicine on smoking in public places briefly lost their article after the journal had some confusion about an embargo they’d requested.
The article, “Neighbourhood greenspace and smoking prevalence: Results from a nationally representative survey in England,” has since been republished in the journal, an Elsevier title. So harm, no foul. But the initial appearance of the paper online earlier this fall surprised senior author Benedict Wheeler, of the University of Exeter Medical School:
Continue reading Journal drops the ball as it tries to juggle an embargo request and Elsevier’s temporary removal policy
The authors of a 2017 paper on resistance to cancer chemotherapy have retracted and replaced the article after learning that it included duplicated material from previously published work by one of the duo.
The article, “The evolution and ecology of resistance in cancer therapy,” was written by Robert Gatenby and Joel Brown, of the Moffitt Cancer Center, in Tampa, Fla. It appeared in Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine.
Richard Sever, the editor of the journal, told us that sometime after publication, a reader alerted his office that the paper included passages of text that were identical to those in a 2015 paper in Cancer Research, published by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), by Gatenby and two other co-authors:
Continue reading Author blames “multitasking dementia” for duplicated cancer paper
The Open Access Macedonian Journal of Medical Sciences, which retracted five papers recently, including one claiming that there was a black hole at the center of Earth, will no longer be indexed in a heavily used U.S. government database of journals.
According to the journal’s index page at PubMed Central (PMC), part of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “The journal no longer participates in PMC.” Volumes of the journal from 2019 and earlier will remain.
Mirko Spiroski, the founding editor of the journal, did not respond to a request for comment.
Continue reading Journal that published paper about a black hole at the center of Earth sinks into the void at a leading government database
Journals have flagged more than three dozen articles by a team of authors in Iran for concern over the integrity of their data. The moves have come in the 15 months since data sleuths raised questions about the data in more than 170 papers from the group.
Among the most recent moves, a nutrition journal has issued expressions of concern for three of the team’s articles. The papers, which appeared in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (JACN), from Taylor & Francis, were published in 2015 and 2017. The senior author on all three articles was Zatollah Asemi (also listed as Zatolla Asemi), a specialist in metabolic diseases who sits on the faculty of Kashan University of Medical Sciences.
Concerns about the findings from Asemi’s shop have been circulating for several years. The group came under scrutiny on PubPeer three years ago, when a commenter noticed apparent irregularities in the data in a 2017 paper in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology. That paper has yet to be flagged in any way.
Continue reading Journals flag concerns in three dozen papers by nutrition researchers
Three years after work from his lab was the subject of “serious allegations,” a professor at Deakin University in Australia has left his post, Retraction Watch has learned.
In an October 6, 2020 letter to staff at Deakin’s School of Medicine obtained by Retraction Watch, Dean Gary Rogers writes that Jagat Kanwar, who joined the school’s faculty in 2006, would be leaving effective October 16. Rogers continues:
Continue reading Researcher leaves post at Australian university years after papers come under scrutinyBefore 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 38.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Scholarly Research Integrity;’ amulet-COVID-19 paper retracted; bad science on voter fraud
Pro tip to would-be fraudsters: If you’re going to submit new figures to support your claims, make sure they’re not obviously fake.
That’s a lesson a group of cancer researchers learned the hard way for their 2016 article in DNA and Cell Biology titled “miR-106a-5p suppresses the proliferation, migration, and invasion of osteosarcoma cells by targeting HMGA2.” The corresponding author was Fang Ji, of The Second Military Medical University in Shanghai.
The paper appeared on PubPeer earlier this year, where a commentor noted dryly:
Continue reading Researchers tried to correct a figure after questions on PubPeer. Then the real trouble started.
Here’s a retraction notice after our own hearts.
Brain Research Bulletin, an Elsevier journal, has retracted a 2017 article which duplicated a substantial amount of previously published papers by some of the same authors. But unlike many journals, which merely point out the overlap, BRB explains to readers why the copying matters.
The article, “Erythropoietin rescues primary rat cortical neurons from pyroptosis and apoptosis via Erk1/2-Nrf2/Bach1 signal pathway,” was written by Rui Li, Li-Min Zhang and Wen-Bo Sun, anesthesiologists at Cangzhou Central Hospital in China.
According to the notice:
Continue reading Why duplicate publications matter: A retraction notice goes above and beyond