In journalism, we have a running joke: Once something happens three times, it is a trend.
Well, one publisher’s propensity for making articles disappear from journal websites seems to be a trend. Twice this month, we have reported on Wiley’s disappearing act. Angewandte Chemie, a top chemistry journal, made an editorial decrying diversity efforts disappear. And Nursing Forum did the same thing with two letters that they said would only appear in print — but were briefly online.
Often, when confronted with allegations of errors in papers they have published, journal editors encourage researchers to submit letters to the editor. Based on what we hear from such letter writers, however, the journals don’t make publication an easy process. Here’s one such story from a group at Indiana University: Luis M. Mestre, Stephanie L. Dickinson, Lilian Golzarri-Arroyo, and David B. Allison.
In late 2018, in the course of reviewing papers on obesity, one of us (DA) noticed a November 2018 article in the BMC journal Biomedical Engineering Online titled “Randomized controlled trial testing weight loss and abdominal obesity outcomes of moxibustion.” The objective of the study was to determine the effect of moxibustion therapy on weight loss, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio in young Asian females living in Taiwan.
Some of the tabulated data in the paper seemed odd, so DA sent it to members of our research team asking for their input. The research team agreed, finding some irregularities in the data that seemed inconsistent with a randomized experimental design. After that, the task of carefully and thoroughly checking the published summary statistics and text in the paper was delegated to another of us (LM) and all of his work rechecked by professional statisticians and the research team.
The apparent inconsistencies and anomalies identified in the paper (i.e., large baseline differences, variance heterogeneity, and lack of details in the explanation of the study design) led to concerns about the extent to which the study report represented an accurate description of a properly conducted randomized controlled trial (RCT) and, therefore, whether the conclusions were reliable. Given the importance of reliable conclusions in the scientific literature on obesity treatment, as well as simply the integrity of the scientific literature overall, we decided to write a letter to the editor of the journal seeking either clarification or correction.
Yesterday, dozens of scientists petitioned the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to “retract a paper on the effectiveness of masks, saying the study has ‘egregious errors’ and contains numerous ‘verifiably false’ statements,” as The New York Times reported. One of those scientists was James Heathers, whose name will likely be familiar to Retraction Watch readers because of his work as a scientific sleuth. We asked him to share his thoughts on why he signed the letter.
The above took a few weeks. To many people, it must have looked like silence. But the entire time, out of the public eye, a furious and detailed global discussion between scientists, statisticians, and epidemiologists about the accuracy of this paper was boiling. Frankly, almost no one believed this paper. The data were too regular. The access that was reported to hospital databases was too unusual. The amount of work done didn’t fit the parameters reported.
It was … “off.” It was obvious. Something was amiss.
A review of scores of studies on antidepressants has been retracted because it used an incorrect analysis.
The original paper, published in JAMA Psychiatry on February 19, 2020, looked at individual differences in patients taking antidepressants and concluded that there were significant differences beyond the placebo effect or the data’s statistical noise. The paper earned some attention, including a story on MedPage Today.
However, the analysis didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The retraction notice reads:
The authors of a paper that some critics have labeled white supremacy in academic robes say they will be retracting the article because some of the data they’d used for their analysis were “highly questionable.”
The January 2020 article, from a group led by Cory Clark, of Heterodox Academy and New York University, was titled “Declines in religiosity predict increases in violent crime—but not among countries with relatively high average IQ.”
Appearing in Psychological Science, the flagship publication of the Association for Psychological Science, the paper argued that:
A group of researchers based at Harvard Medical School have retracted their 2019 paper in Nature after a data sleuth detected evidence of suspect images in the article.
The move comes ten months after the journal first heard from the sleuth, Elisabeth Bik.
The paper, “Fatty acids and cancer-amplified ZDHHC19 promote STAT3 activation through S-palmitoylation,” came from the lab of Xu Wu, of the Cutaneous Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues. It appeared last August — and immediately caught the attention of Rune Linding, who flagged it for Bik, who in turn noticed several regions of concerning duplications in a few of the Western blots that appeared in the paper.
The study’s authors, John Rushton and Donald Templer, both deceased, hypothesized that skin color was related to aggression and sexuality in humans. It has been cited just nine times in eight years, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
Is too much irony even a thing? Let’s test the principle.
The guest editor of a special issue on failures in public health and related projects has quit the effort because she and her colleagues couldn’t convince the journal to include more researchers from developing countries in the initiative.
In a blog post about the ill-fated venture, the “WASH Failures Team” — Dani Barrington, Esther Shaylor and Rebecca Sindall — describe their initial excitement, and subsequent dismay, as the International Journal of Environmental Research and Health, an MDPI title, first agreed to publish the special issue but then informed the team that it wanted to focus on first-world problems.
Initially, all three women believed they would be responsible for the project, but the journal approved only Barrington for the guest editor post:
