Retraction Watch

Authors earn praise — but a “poorly worded” retraction notice — for flagging their errors

The authors of an October 2020 paper on the genetics of thyroid cancer are getting praise from the journal for retracting their article after learning that it contained a critical error.

The paper, “Mendelian randomization supports a causative effect of TSH on thyroid carcinoma,” had appeared in Endocrine-Related Cancer, a bioscientifica property.

Jonathan Fussey, a surgeon at Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, and the first author of the study, told us:

Nanoscience researcher loses four papers for image manipulation, forged authors

Journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry have retracted four articles by a researcher in China for a range of misconduct, including manipulation of images, fabrication of authors and more.

The papers were written by Rijun Gui, of Qingdao University and formerly of the School of Chemistry and Molecules Engineering at East China University of Science and Technology, in Shanghai, and published in 2013 and 2014. Gui has a sizable entry on PubPeer, where many of his studies have come under scrutiny for years. Together, the four papers have been cited nearly 150 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

It’s not quite Rashomon, but each of the retraction notices adds a bit of detail to the story.

Weekend reads: A peer review murder mystery for Halloween; learning from #medbikini; inside the publishing ring that linked COVID-19 and 5G

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:

Paper suggesting vitamin D might protect against COVID-19 earns an expression of concern
Widely cited COVID-19-masks paper under scrutiny for inaccurate stat
Dear journal: Here’s the information you left out of your retraction notice. You’re welcome.
Following Retraction Watch and PubPeer posts, journal upgrades correction to a retraction
Researchers publish the same COVID-19 paper three times
Amulets may prevent COVID-19, says a paper in Elsevier journal. (They don’t.)
Our bads: Publisher error leads to double retractions for psych researchers

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 37.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Our bads: Publisher error leads to double retractions for psych researchers

Here’s a Halloween tale that will drive authors batty.

A psychology journal has retracted two papers from the same group of authors in Spain because it published the articles inadvertently. But in doing so, the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, where the two articles were never supposed to appear but did, managed to botch the retractions, too.

One of the articles, “Sudden complex hallucinations in a 14-year-old girl: schizophrenia spectrum disorders versus dissociative disorders-the influence of early life experiences on future mental health,” was published online in June.

The other, “Abrupt and severe obsessive-compulsive disorder in an 11-year-old girl-PANDAS/PANS syndrome: an entity to be considered-management implications,” appeared in the June/July print issue of the journal. The authors were Parisá Khodayar-Pardo and Laura Álvarez-Bravos, of the Universiy of Valéncia.

The retraction notices, which arrived in September, read identically:

Amulets may prevent COVID-19, says a paper in Elsevier journal. (They don’t.)

Sometimes, we just don’t know what to say.

So we’ll let the people of Twitter comment on a paper titled “Can Traditional Chinese Medicine provide insights into controlling the COVID-19 pandemic: Serpentinization-induced lithospheric long-wavelength magnetic anomalies in Proterozoic bedrocks in a weakened geomagnetic field mediate the aberrant transformation of biogenic molecules in COVID-19 via magnetic catalysis,” claiming that

Researchers publish the same COVID-19 paper three times

If you’re looking for more evidence that researchers are flooding the zone with COVID-19 papers that do little to advance the state of the science, we present Psychology, Health & Medicine.

The journal, a Taylor & Francis title, in April published “Mental health burden for the public affected by the COVID-19 outbreak in China: Who will be the high-risk group?,” by a pair of authors in China. The researchers submitted their manuscript on March 19, received acceptance on April 6 and saw the work published on April 14.

Evidently, that wasn’t enough time to run a plagiarism check — or, as you’ll see, other due diligence — because now the journal has retracted the article for being a duplicate of two other papers in different journals. The move came after a staffer at Elsevier — a competing publisher — alerted a portfolio manager at Taylor & Francis about the issue.

In part, PHM can be considered the victim of what looks to be a scheme that took advantage of gaps in the ability to check manuscripts prior to publication.

Following Retraction Watch and PubPeer posts, journal upgrades correction to a retraction

A year ago, we posted on the case of a paper in the Journal of Cell Science in which editors:

allowed a group of researchers in Italy to correct a 2016 paper with questionable images after a faculty member in their institution — and a frequent co-author of the group’s — said his investigation found no reason to doubt their integrity.

At the time, the journal told us they were unaware that Fulvio Magni — to whom they were directed “as the person who oversees ethics issues for the institute” — was a frequent co-author with the researchers who had authored the corrected paper.

The same day we posted on the case — Oct. 29, 2019 — a PubPeer commenter pointed out new issues in Figure 4 of the paper. And now, the journal has retracted the paper:

Dear journal: Here’s the information you left out of your retraction notice. You’re welcome.

A biology researcher in Sweden has lost a 2019 article for reasons the journal doesn’t reveal, but which we’ve learned stemmed from misconduct.

The article, “Real time large scale in vivo observations reveal intrinsic synchrony, plasticity and growth cone dynamics of midline crossing axons at the ventral floor plate of the zebrafish spinal cord,” was written by Soren Andersen, then of Uppsala University, and published in the Journal of Integrative Neuroscience.

Here’s the notice:

Widely cited COVID-19-masks paper under scrutiny for inaccurate stat

You probably read a story or heard a news report over the past few days saying that if nearly all Americans wore masks to prevent COVID-19 spread, 130,000 lives could be saved by the end of February. That’s what a paper published on Friday says.

But it turns out that figure sounds twice as good as reality. Here’s the story:

On October 6, a group at the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IHME) — a frequently cited source of COVID-19 data — submitted a manuscript to Nature Medicine. The paper was accepted on October 13, and published on October 23. It concluded:

Paper suggesting vitamin D might protect against COVID-19 earns an expression of concern

PLOS ONE has issued an expression of concern for a paper it published last month suggesting that vitamin D might protect against severe COVID-19.

Central to the concerns is that the authors seem to have been too far out over their skis in asserting a link between the vitamin and the response to the infection. But as the EoC reveals, many of the potential problems can fairly be attributed to porous peer review as much as over-ambitious authors.

The article, “Vitamin D sufficiency, a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D at least 30 ng/mL reduced risk for adverse clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19 infection,” came from a group at Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran and Boston University in the United States. According to the authors:

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