Retraction Watch

Stanford prof ordered to pay legal fees after dropping $10 million defamation case against another scientist

A Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million — then dropped the suit — has been ordered to pay the defendants’ legal fees based on a statute “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Mark Jacobson, who studies renewable energy at Stanford, sued in September 2017 in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia for defamation over a 2017 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that critiqued a 2015 article he had written in the same journal. He sued PNAS and the first author of the paper, Christopher Clack, an executive at a firm that analyzes renewable energy.

At the time, Kenneth White, a lawyer at Southern California firm Brown White & Osborn who frequently blogs at Popehat about legal issues related to free speech, said of the suit:

Leading anesthesiologist retracts paper after reader “noticed that the statistical approach was sub-optimal”

An anesthesia journal has retracted a 2020 paper by a group from China, Turkey and the United States after a post-publication review discovered issues with the analysis.

According to the notice, in the European Journal of Anaesthesiology:

Retraction of paper on police killings and race not due to “‘mob’ pressure” or “distaste for the political views of people citing the work approvingly,” say authors

The researchers who earlier this week called for the retraction of their hotly debated paper on police shootings and race say the reasons for their decision to pull the article have been misinterpreted.

Crime researchers David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, and Joe Cesario, of Michigan State University, initially referred in a retraction statement to citations to the work of Heather Mac Donald, of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, who wrote about the PNAS article for the City Journal and the Wall Street Journal.

Those pieces, Cesario and Johnson said, had unfairly co-opted the paper, ““Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” to argue against the existence of racial bias in police shootings.

In an amended statement, the authors noticeably omit references to Mac Donald. On Wednesday, Cesario told Retraction Watch:

77-year-old paper by controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck earns an expression of concern

Journals have issued expressions of concern for seven more papers by Hans Eysenck, including one for a paper the now-deceased psychologist published in the middle of World War II.

Suspicions about Eysenck, who died in 1997, surfaced in the early 1990s, if not before. At least 14 of his papers have been retracted so far — a total his biographer has said could well eclipse 60. And 71 have now been hit with expressions of concern.

The latest such moves come from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, which issued the following notice:

Duke group retracts Nature journal paper

A Nature journal is retracting a 2018 research letter about the genetics of flower patterns over concerns about the reliability of the data.

The letter, “Two genetic changes in cis-regulatory elements caused evolution of petal spot position in Clarkia,” appeared in Nature Plants and was written by a team of researchers at Duke University, including Mark Rausher, a prominent plant geneticist and the John Carlisle Kilgo Professor of Biology at the institution. The paper has been cited 12 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

Per the retraction notice:

The case of the stolen journal

When you think of valuable items to steal, you might imagine cash, cars, or jewelry. But what about journals?

That’s what my colleagues and I from Disseropedia, the journals project of Dissernet, which was created to fight plagiarism in Russia, recently found.

The story begins when my Dissernet colleague Andrei Rostovtsev discovered several cases of translation plagiarism and gifted co-authorship in the articles submitted to the journal Talent Development and Excellence by Russian scholars. Those cases are available at these four links.

Authors of study on race and police killings ask for its retraction, citing “continued misuse” in the media

The authors of a controversial paper on race and police shootings say they are retracting the article, which became a flashpoint in the debate over killings by police, and now amid protests following the murder of George Floyd.

[See an update on this post.]

The 2019 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” found “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-White officers.” It has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science, earning it a “hot paper” designation.

Joseph Cesario, a researcher at Michigan State University, told Retraction Watch that he and David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author, have submitted a request for retraction to PNAS. In the request, they write:

Indexer “obviously made a mistake” in sanctioning taxonomy journal, says editor

The Clarivate logo

Zoologists are up in arms that a leading taxonomy journal is being called out for excessive self-citation and being denied an Impact Factor.

Last week, Clarivate announced that it was suppressing 33 journals from its Journal Citation Report, which would mean no Impact Factor for those journals, because of high levels of self-citation that distorted journal rankings. One of those journals was Zootaxa, which since 2015 has published more than a quarter of all newly described taxa in the literature.

Denying Zootaxa an Impact Factor — which is used, for better or for worse, by universities and other institutions to determine whether a journal is worthy of publishing in — is unfair and damages the field, taxonomists said this past week.

For example, Wayne Maddison, a professor of botany and zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, tweeted:

“Where there are girls, there are cats” returns, with a new title

The cats are back.

As promised, Biological Conservation has replaced a controversial paper on feral cats in China whose cringeworthy title — “Where there are girls, there are cats” — prompted an outcry on social media that resulted in a temporary retraction.

The new article boasts a different, non-gendered title: “Understanding how free-ranging cats interact with humans: A case study in China with management implications.” But it makes more or less the same point: Where there are women, there are more cats:

Weekend reads: Sexism in a medical textbook; proof Reviewer 2 is a jerk; COVID-19 and research misconduct

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:

the retraction of a paper that editors called “deeply offensive to particular minorities“
alarm over self-citation at nearly 50 journals
the story of why a retraction took nearly two years
a retraction because editors realized a penis enlargement drug was just homeopathy

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 22.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

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