Weekend reads: How retracted work continues to spread; claims of PhD thesis plagiarism in the wine industry; Brexit and research integrity

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:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 36.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Continue reading Weekend reads: How retracted work continues to spread; claims of PhD thesis plagiarism in the wine industry; Brexit and research integrity

Study finding patients of female surgeons fare better is temporarily removed

An Elsevier journal has, for the moment, removed a paper which found that the patients of female surgeons fare better than those treated by men.

Although the journal didn’t provide an explanation for the move — unfortunately not unusual for Elsevier — a spokesman for the publisher told us that reader complaints about the methodology and statistics in the article prompted the action. 

The paper, which appeared last month in Surgery — the official journal of the Society of University Surgeons, Central Surgical Association, and the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons — was written by a group at the University of South Florida, in Tampa, led by Tara M. Barry, a general surgery resident at the institution. 

“Battle of the sexes: The effect of surgeon gender on postoperative in-hospital mortality,” isn’t available on the journal website. However, a conference abstract by the authors states: 

Continue reading Study finding patients of female surgeons fare better is temporarily removed

Editors say they won’t retract intelligent design paper despite subject being “not in any way a suitable topic” for their journal

The editors of a journal that published a highly controversial paper on intelligent design say retraction is off the table, at least for the moment. 

The drama involves an article in the September issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, an Elsevier title, titled “Using statistical methods to model the fine-tuning of molecular machines and systems.” The authors, Steinar Thorvaldsen, of the University of Tromsø, Norway, and Ola Hössjer, a mathematician at Stockholm University in Sweden, tried to make the case that they saw evidence of a Master Builder in biological systems: 

Continue reading Editors say they won’t retract intelligent design paper despite subject being “not in any way a suitable topic” for their journal

The bizarre anti-vaccine paper a Florida professor has been trying to have retracted to no avail

Robert Speth

Fly, meet elephant’s back.

Robert Speth has spent the last 19 months trying to get two of the world’s largest medical publishers to retract an article he considers to be a “travesty” of pseudoscientific claims and overtly anti-vaccination bias. In the process, he has uncovered slipshod management of a journal’s editorial board that angered, among others, a former FDA commissioner. 

The paper that triggered Speth, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., appeared in 2018 in Clinical and Translational Medicine. Titled (awkwardly)  “Cancer; an induced disease of twentieth century! Induction of tolerance, increased entropy and ‘Dark Energy’: loss of biorhythms (Anabolism v. Catabolism),” it was written by Mahin Khatami, formerly a program director at the National Institutes of Health. 

Although you might not be familiar with Khatami, who was born in Iran but trained in the United States, her bio speaks (loudly) for itself: 

Continue reading The bizarre anti-vaccine paper a Florida professor has been trying to have retracted to no avail

In which a researcher named Das plagiarizes from another researcher named Das, one with 20 retractions

via Flickr

Sometimes things get pretty meta around here. 

Exhibit A: The journal Current Medical Chemistry has retracted a 2012 paper for plagiarizing from a 2011 article — and the senior authors of each article share the same last name. 

Ho hum, you say. But that name is one that might be familiar to RW readers.

Here’s the notice: 

Continue reading In which a researcher named Das plagiarizes from another researcher named Das, one with 20 retractions

Journal retracts paper claiming that group of Indigenous Americans were Black Africans

A journal has retracted a paper on the origins of a group of Indigenous Americans after readers said the basis of the paper was long discredited.

The paper, “Early pioneers of the americas: the role of the Olmecs in urban education and social studies curriculum,” was written by scholars at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, including corresponding author Greg Wiggan, and researchers at Towson State University, and published on June 25, 2020, in the Urban Review. 

In a July 23 post on Medium, Kurly Tlapoyawa and Ruben A. Arellano “ask that the The Urban Review journal retract the article by Wiggan et al and discontinue its promotion of ‘Black Olmecs:’”

Continue reading Journal retracts paper claiming that group of Indigenous Americans were Black Africans

Researchers face disciplinary action as dozens of their studies fall under scrutiny

A group of obstetrics researchers in the Middle East is facing disciplinary action after questions were raised about the validity of the data in dozens of their published studies. 

The tale — involving contaminated clinical trials, potentially fabricated PhDs, findings of misconduct that went ignored, accusations of terrorist sympathies and unresponsive journals — requires some unpacking, so bear with us. 

We begin with a study that appeared in April in the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology (EJOG). Esmée Bordewijk, a PhD student at the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Amsterdam University Medical Center, and her colleagues reported that they stumbled on the problems while conducting a literature review on ovulation induction for the venerable Cochrane Database: 

Continue reading Researchers face disciplinary action as dozens of their studies fall under scrutiny

Weekend reads: A prominent journal goes wrong; medical journals and politics; a journal with an editorial board full of dead people

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:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 35.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Continue reading Weekend reads: A prominent journal goes wrong; medical journals and politics; a journal with an editorial board full of dead people

Heard about the study claiming men who carry guitar cases are more attractive? It’s been retracted.

via PickPik

A controversial psychologist has lost a bizarre paper which claimed that men who carry guitar cases do better with the ladies.

The article, which had appeared in the journal The Psychology of Music in 2014, was one of many papers by Nicholas Guéguen that have raised eyebrows among his peers and some data sleuths — notably James Heathers and Nick Brown — who believe the results don’t withstand scrutiny. 

Guéguen, of the Université Bretagne-Sud, in France, was the subject of a misconduct investigation that in 2019 cleared him of wrongdoing. That finding came shortly after, as we reported nearly a year ago to the day, he lost a 2014 paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior on how high heels really do make women sexier:  

Continue reading Heard about the study claiming men who carry guitar cases are more attractive? It’s been retracted.

Lawyer for researcher deposed in $112.5 million Duke case asks us to remove a post

We receive occasional demand letters from attorneys here at Retraction Watch. Perhaps the most memorable was one in 2013 from an attorney claiming to represent Bharat Aggarwal. That prompted Popehat’s Ken White to enlarge our vocabulary by using the word “bumptious” in a post about the letter.

To that library of letters we can now add one from Martin Weinstein, of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, on behalf of his client Monica Kraft, now of the University of Arizona and late of Duke University. Willkie Farr & Gallagher is “an elite international law firm of approximately 750 lawyers located in 12 offices in six countries.”

Duke, as Retraction Watch readers may recall, settled a False Claims Act case last year for $112.5 million following allegations about how various members of its Department of Medicine’s Pulmonary Division responded to alleged misconduct in the department beginning in 2013. As Duke acknowledged in a court filing, “Kraft was a Principal Investigator for some research projects conducted within the Pulmonary Division and was Division Chief from January 1, 2013 through September 30, 2014.”

The facts in the previous two paragraphs are, as best we can tell, all uncontested. That is also true of all of the facts in the Dec. 20, 2019 post that Weinstein requested we remove.

We cannot, unfortunately, say the same for Weinstein’s letter.

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