A prominent sleep researcher whose work has come under intense scrutiny has lost a paper for duplication, aka self-plagiarism.
Matthew Walker, of UC Berkeley, is the author of Why We Sleep, a bestselling treatise on the many woes of fatigue. Instantly popular, it was touted everywhere, from Bill Gates to The New York Times, which enthused:
Continue reading High-profile sleep researcher loses paper for duplication
Hundreds of academics, anti-poverty advocates and others have signed petitions demanding the journal Society retract a new commentary which argues, in essence, that poor Black and Hispanic people in the United States are poor because they haven’t figured out how to be more white.
One petition, to the editor of the journal, Jonathan Imber, had garnered more than 550 signatories by the time of this writing. Another, to the author of the paper, the editorial board of the journal, and the CEO of Springer Nature, which publishes the journal, was at 400 and counting.
The essay, by Lawrence Mead, a public policy researcher at New York University, argues that racism and a lack of good jobs do not explain why America, the world’s richest country, continues to have a problem with poverty. “More plausible,” Mead states, are differences in “culture”:
Continue reading Hundreds petition to retract paper they call “unscholarly, overtly racist” and full of “racially violent narratives”
A public health journal will be retracting a paper that argued for the adoption of homeopathy in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, according to the editor in chief.
We reported on Saturday that the Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice, a Springer Nature title also known by its German name, Zeitschrift für Gesundheitswissenschaften, had published “Homeopathy combat against coronavirus disease (Covid-19)” on June 5.
At the time, we had not yet heard from Joachim Kugler, the journal’s editor, about how this might have happened. Today, Kugler told Retraction Watch:
Continue reading Blaming “overflow of manuscripts” and “obviously biased” reviewers, journal will retract homeopathy-COVID-19 paper
The authors of a 2019 paper on a lethal type of poultry virus in Asia have retracted the article because of problems with the data collection. But the researchers stand by their findings, which, they say, suggest the pathogen could be harmful to humans.
The paper, titled “Novel orthobunyavirus causing severe kidney disease in broiler chickens, Malaysia, 2014-2017,” appeared in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The authors were affiliated with Ceva-Phylaxia Veterinary Biologicals Co. Ltd., and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, both in Budapest. The lead author was Vilmos Palya, a prominent veterinary scientist.
According to the abstract of the article:
Continue reading “[A] painful step”: Authors retract paper on fatal poultry virus
A paper which argued that 5G cellphone technology could lead to infection with the novel coronavirus has been retracted, but not before scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik wondered whether it was the “worst paper of 2020.”
The article, “5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells,” came from a group from Italy, the United States and Russia, and appeared in the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents. The journal is published by Biolife, which asserts that it’s peer reviewed but has not responded to a request for comment. [Please see an update on this post.]
The abstract is now marked “WITHDRAWN” on PubMed and the paper has disappeared from the journal’s website. The abstract has been preserved here. According to the authors:
Continue reading Paper blaming COVID-19 on 5G technology withdrawn
A peer-reviewed journal has published a paper that urges the adoption of homeopathy in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
[Please see an update on this post.]
The Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice — published by Springer Nature and also known by its German name, Zeitschrift für Gesundheitswissenschaften — published “Homeopathy combat against coronavirus disease (Covid-19)” on June 5. It is indexed in PubMed Central, although not on Medline.
Here’s the abstract:
Continue reading Paper urging use of homeopathy for COVID-19 appears in peer-reviewed public health journal
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 25.
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: Image duplication software debuts; papers that plagiarize Wikipedia; ‘Time to Get Serious About Research Fraud’
The Journal of Vascular Surgery says it will retract a paper about surgeons’ social media posts that said health care professionals who posted pictures of themselves in bikinis were engaging in “potentially unprofessional” behavior — and led to a firestorm on Twitter yesterday.
As Medscape reported yesterday before the retraction:
Continue reading Journal to retract paper that spawned #medbikiniMedical professionals are tweeting pictures of themselves in swimsuits with the hashtag #MedBikini, accompanied by sharp rebukes of a study that labeled such images on social media as “potentially unprofessional.”
Nature has retracted a recent commentary after the author complained that he had been misled by the relationship of the publication to a financial sponsor and told to avoid critiquing work from the institution. The journal says it is revisiting its “editorial guidelines and processes” in the wake of the case.
Kenneth Witwer, an RNA expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said he had been approached by Nature earlier this year to contribute a piece to one of the journal’s “Outlook” sections.
Outlook sections are sponsored, and in this case, the supporter was Nanjing University in China. One of the institution’s deans and star researchers, Chen-Yu Zhang, had arranged the section and written an article for it as well — a piece Witwer described as essentially an advertorial for Zhang’s questionable research. [Springer Nature, in comments to Retraction Watch, said that “The Zhang piece is advertorial, is clearly labelled as such and uses a different typeface from editorial content to promote transparency.”]
Continue reading Author retracts Nature commentary over concerns about section’s sponsorship
Didier Raoult, whose claims that hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 have been widely disputed, has had a 2018 paper corrected for what his team says was unintentional duplication of a figure.
Here’s the correction for “Identification of rickettsial immunoreactive proteins using a proximity ligation assay Western blotting and the traditional immunoproteomic approach,” which came four months after scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik pointed out potential issues in Figure 2 on PubPeer:
Continue reading Co-author of controversial hydroxychloroquine study has 2018 paper corrected for “unintentional mistake”