Retraction Watch

Springer Nature ‘continuing to investigate the concerns raised’ about paper linking obesity and lying

What’s the link between obesity and dishonesty?

If that question seems preposterous on its face, you’re probably among the critics of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports which claimed to find that obese people were more deceptive than thinner folk.

The researchers, led by Eugenia Polizzi di Sorrentino, of the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies at the National Research Center in Rome:

explore[d] the link between energy, obesity and dishonesty by comparing the behaviour of obese and lean subjects when hungry or sated while playing an anonymous die-under-cup task.

They found that:

Duke engineering prof corrects seven papers for failures to disclose startup he co-founded

A chemistry journal has issued corrections for seven papers after learning that one of the authors failed to list his ownership of a company with a stake in the research.

The articles, which appeared in Lab on a Chip — a journal “at the interface between physical technological advancements and high impact applications” from the Royal Society of Chemistry — came from the lab of Tony Jun Huang, of Duke University in Durham, N.C. Huang, who holds the William Bevan Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke, is a prominent figure in the field. According to his bio:

Here’s why you shouldn’t try to republish a paper you had retracted for plagiarism

A trio of speech researchers in India has lost a 2020 paper for a trifecta of malpractice: plagiarism, self-plagiarism (of a previously retracted article, no less!) and falsification of data.

The article, “Speech enhancement method using deep learning approach for hearing-impaired listeners,” appeared in January in Health Informatics Journal, a Sage title.

According to the abstract:

Weekend reads: Editors who publish in their own journals; a crackdown on paper mills; oncologist violates university policies in developing treatment

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:

A sting involving hydroxychloroquine, push scooters, and COVID-19
A home for complaints about retractions of homeopathy papers
A spider researcher using legal threats and public records requests to prevent retractions of his work

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 32.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

‘Beggers’ can’t be choosers as another meta-analysis is retracted

A group of researchers in China may be asking for a refund after, they claim, they got bad advice from a course in writing meta-analyses that led to a retraction for plagiarism and other problems.

They may not be alone. We’re aware of at least nine articles with similar issues that have been retracted so far, part of a batch of eye-catching meta-analyses.

Suspicions about the now-retracted 2014 paper — and dozens of others — emerged in October of that year, when Guillaume Filion, now at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, wrote a blog post about the articles. Filion and a colleague, Lucas Carey, of Peking University, had noticed a flurry of meta-analyses by researchers in China that had appeared in CISCOM, the articles repository for the Research Council for Complementary Medicine. As Filion wrote:

Spider researcher uses legal threats, public records requests to prevent retractions

The case of Jonathan Pruitt, a spider researcher suspected of fabricating data in potentially dozens of studies, keeps getting weirder.

Pruitt, according to our count, now has six retractions. Currently associate professor and Canada 150 Research Chair at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he made a name for himself by providing other scientists with field data — much of which now appears to be unreliable.

Among the latest developments in the case is a correction in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for a 2016 article titled “Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment.” That followed this April expression of concern, which read:

Apparent duplication from anesthesiology journal puts heart paper into intensive care

A heart journal has issued an expression of concern about a 2017 paper which looks suspiciously like a 2016 article by some of the same researchers that appeared in an anesthesiology publication.

The 2017 paper, “Efficacy of prophylactic dexmedetomidine in preventing postoperative junctional ectopic tachycardia after pediatric cardiac surgery,” was written by a group led by Doaa Mohamed El Amrousy, of Tanta University Hospital in Egypt.

Several months earlier, El Amrousy and two of his co-authors, Nagat S. El-Shmaa and Wael El Feky, published a similar article in the Annals of Cardiac Anesthesia, titled “The efficacy of pre-emptive dexmedetomidine versus amiodarone in preventing postoperative junctional ectopic tachycardia in pediatric cardiac surgery.”

How similar? Apparently too much.

Top chemistry journal retracts paper for faked data

A leading chemistry journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a pair of researchers in Switzerland after determining that it contained fabricated data.

The article, “The manganese(I)‐catalyzed asymmetric transfer hydrogenation of ketones: disclosing the macrocylic privilege,” was written by Alessandro Passera and Antonio Mezzetti, of the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. It appeared in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Readers might remember Angewandte Chemie from this post in June about a controversial article it published — and then removed — in the wake of a mass outcry that prompted much of its editorial board to resign and led to the suspension of two of its editors. Fallout from the scandal — in the form of “the journal’s interim Editor-in-Chief Committee” — is evident in the retraction notice, which reads:

Did a journal retract your paper on homeopathy? Meet the journal that will publish your complaint

A homeopathy journal that Elsevier dropped in the wake of concerns about excessive self-citation appears to have carved out a new niche for itself: self-pity.

In 2016, Homeopathy lost its slot on Thomson Reuters’s (now Clarivate’s) influential journal rankings list after an analysis found that more than 70% of citations in the papers it published were of papers it published. That led Elsevier to cut the journal loose — although it remains in business under the umbrella of Thieme, and has since earned its impact factor back. (For more on why that’s important to journals, see this story.)

Part of Homeopathy’s mission under new ownership, it seems, is to criticize journals that have spurned its contributors. Well, one journal, anyway.

Hydroxychloroquine, push-scooters, and COVID-19: A journal gets stung, and swiftly retracts

This may be the scientific publishing version of “the operation was a success, but the patient died.”

The retraction of a Trojan horse paper on the novel coronavirus has called into question the validity of another article in the same journal which found that hydroxychloroquine is effective against Covid-19.

The sting article, “SARS-CoV-2 was Unexpectedly Deadlier than Push-scooters: Could Hydroxychloroquine be the Unique Solution?” — was the brainchild of graduate student Mathieu Rebeaud, aka “Willard Oodendijk” and Florian Cova, of “The Institute for Quick and Dirty Science” (no, not really) in Switzerland. Their goal: to highlight a concerning paper in the Asian Journal of Medicine and Health, which they and others suspect of being a predatory publication — one that is happy to take money to publish anything, while pretending to perform peer review.

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