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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
A pharmacologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who lost a highly cited 2014 paper in Nature for questions about the integrity of her data has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) — and UT Southwestern has rescinded two professorships she previously held.
In the article, “The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance,” the authors — a trio from New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi — write that “While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career.” It drew nearly immediate criticism, for example:
The recent @NatureComms paper doesn’t tell us much about the impact of gender on mentorship but it sure does tell us that the statistics community needs to do a better job teaching scientists about correlation, causation, and confounding
On November 19, the journal added an editor’s note saying it would be looking into these criticisms, and today, the article was retracted following review by three experts. The retraction notice reads, in part:
Dove Press last week retracted 14 papers by Marty Hinz, a Minnesota doctor who caught the attention of the U.S. FDA years ago for hyping supplements sold by a company he once owned.
The 14 articles — on the use of supplements to treat conditions ranging from Crohn’s disease to Parkinson’s disease — were among 20 that the publisher slapped expressions of concern on earlier this year. The other six articles flagged in April remain under review, a spokesperson for Taylor & Francis, which owns Dove, tells Retraction Watch.
That move came two and a half years after Stephen Barrett — a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatch — alerted Dove to his concerns about Hinz’s failure to disclose conflicts of interest on the papers. Barrett says Hinz has used those papers to support claims that supplements made by Hinz’s former company, now owned by his daughter but from which he has received royalties, are effective in treating various conditions.