Retraction Watch

A study on fruit flies is retracted “owing to legal issues of confidentiality”

A preliminary study which found that using cold treatment worked to combat a Mediterranean species of fruit flies in blueberries has been retracted.

The study, “Cold Responses of the Mediterranean Fruit Fly Ceratitis capitata Wiedemann (Diptera: Tephritidae) in Blueberry” was published in Insects, an MDPI journal on May 1, 2020.

The retraction appears to be due to some kind of ethics breach, not the findings of the paper itself. It is unclear, however, what kind of ethics breach took place, and none of the authors has responded to requests for comment. The article’s URL in the journal doesn’t even show the abstract but at the time of this writing the full text is available (labeled as retracted) on PubMed.

The retraction notice, dated June 9, 2020 reads:

An influential osteoporosis study is “likely fraudulent” — but not retracted

Alison Avenell first came across The Yamaguchi Osteoporosis Study (YOPS) when she was working on a 2014 Cochrane Review on bone fractures.

She cited the study but felt something was off about it. “I suppose, together with my collaborators over the years, we developed sort of antennae for rather suspicious looking studies,” Avenell, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, told Retraction Watch. “And when you see a relatively large trial with just two authors, you think to yourself, that’s not possible.”

Avenell and her colleagues, whose work we’ve written about before, were critical to the retraction of fraudulent research by the late Yoshihiro Sato and his collaborator Jun Iwamoto, who rank third and fourth, respectively, on our retraction leaderboard.

Coming up short: Journal retracts penis enlargement paper after realizing it was homeopathy

Researchers compared Impaza with sildenafil (Viagra)

Over the objection of all of the authors, a journal has retracted an article on a homeopathic approach to penis enlargement and virility after deciding that the putative remedy wasn’t potent enough for the task at hand.

The paper, “Effects of chronic treatment with the eNOS stimulator Impaza on penis length and sexual behaviors in rats with a high baseline of sexual activity,” appeared in the International Journal of Impotence Research — a Springer Nature title — in March 2013.

Among the authors of the article was Oleg Epstein, a Russian scientist whose company, OOO NPF Materia Medica Holding, of Moscow, makes homeopathic products. Epstein’s research has been the subject of multiple retractions, as we’ve reported, embarrassing reputable journals into whose pages he managed to publish papers on homeopathy.

Impaza, a name which sounds more like a Subaru than a sexual aid, purportedly:

A two-year drama: The anatomy of a retraction request

For more than a decade, I have been working with colleagues to request retractions from editors and publishers for plagiarizing articles, mostly in my discipline of philosophy and related fields. But almost two years ago I requested a retraction from a seismology journal. Since I have no training in the science of earthquakes, how did I get involved?

In June 2017 I read an article on Retraction Watch, “Plagiarism costs author five papers in five different journals” involving a researcher in civil engineering. The unrelated subject matters represented by each of the journals surprised me, as they involved refugee studies, educational philosophy, disaster medicine, and life quality studies. These are important disciplines, but they are not obviously related to each other, nor to civil engineering.

A year later I wondered whether any more retractions had appeared for that same researcher, and I came across an unretracted 2011 article by that researcher in the journal Earthquake Science. After two minutes of online searching I discovered it was a near-identical copy of a 2002 article by different authors in the Elsevier journal Engineering Structures. My lack of training in seismology was not an impediment to making this determination; the only major differences between the two articles were the titles and the authors of record. (The detailed tables, figures, photos, data visualizations, and paragraphs were identical but for minor elements.)

Major indexing service sounds alarm on self-citations by nearly 50 journals

Clarivate’s logo

More than 70% of the citations in one journal were to other papers in that journal. Another published a single paper that cited nearly 200 other articles in the journal.

Now, Clarivate, the company behind the Impact Factor, is taking steps to fight such behavior, suppressing 33 journals from their indexing service and subjecting 15 more to expressions of concern — all for apparent self-citation that boosted the journals’ rankings.

The list includes some of publishing’s biggest players: Nine journals published by Elsevier, seven by Springer Nature, six by Taylor & Francis, and five by Wiley.

Journal calls 2012 paper “deeply offensive to particular minorities”

An Elsevier journal plans to issue a retraction notice this week about a widely criticized 2012 paper claiming to find links between skin color, aggression, and sexuality.

Earlier this month, we reported that the journal, Personality and Individual Differences (PAID), would retract the study “Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?” by the late authors Philippe Rushton and Donald Templer, published in 2012.

The paper was the subject of a highly critical Medium post in November 2019, and of a petition with more than 1,000 signatures sent to Elsevier earlier this month.

The four-page retraction notice, provided to Retraction Watch by Elsevier, begins with a description of the history, policies and procedures at the journal, then launches into a litany of issues with the paper:

Editors in chief past and present apologize for publishing article that “feed[s] into racist narratives”

The previous and current editors in chief of a psychology journal have apologized for publishing an article about which one of them writes, “in retrospect I can certainly see that their article does feed into racist narratives.”

Earlier this month, we reported that the authors of “Declines in Religiosity Predict Increases in Violent Crime—but Not Among Countries With Relatively High Average IQ,” first published in January in Psychological Science, had requested its retraction because they realized they had not vetted the research behind the paper well enough before submitting.

In a retraction notice dated yesterday, the journal’s current editor in chief, Patricia Bauer, writes that the article “has been retracted at the request of the authors:”

Weekend reads: A deluge of papers, reviewed in haste; a dog food study faces scrutiny; the trouble with research evaluations

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 tale of why it’s so difficult to publish a critical letter
A disappearing act
An apology by an anesthesiology researcher for misconduct
The temporary withdrawal of a COVID-19 “baby cage” study
A cancer researcher being sued for $900,000 in unpaid legal fees

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

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Drug delivery study with duplicated images is retracted

A study that found a way to deliver certain kinds of drugs more effectively in mice is being retracted today.

The study, “Molecular targeting of FATP4 transporter for oral delivery of therapeutic peptide” was overseen by Haifa Shen at the Houston Methodist Research Institute and published in Science Advances on April 1.

Several readers, including scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik, posted concerns about the article’s images on PubPeer within weeks of the paper’s publication. The concerns involved overlapping and duplicate images, and this gem:

Could the authors clarify if some of the mice had two sets of major organs, please?

The retraction notice says:

Law firm sues OSU cancer researcher for $900,000 in unpaid fees following failed libel suit

Carlo Croce may be back in court again — but this time, as a defendant.

Last month, Croce lost a defamation suit he filed against David Sanders, a Purdue researcher who was quoted in a 2017 New York Times story about allegations regarding Croce’s work. Croce had already lost an appeal of a related suit against the Times.

It turns out that Croce had not paid his attorneys — Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, Ohio — in a number of those cases, to the tune of $923,445.51, according to a lawsuit filed against Croce last week in Franklin County Court.

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