The New York Times isn’t the only outlet that has walked back a commentary this week amid reader outrage.
Following a flood of criticism on social media, a chemistry journal in Germany has disappeared an essay by Canadian researcher who argued that efforts to promote diversity in the field were hurting science. [See an update on this post.]
Continue reading Following outrage, chemistry journal makes a paper decrying diversity efforts disappear
Following an investigation prompted by a whistleblower, a university in Australia has recommended that one of its researchers retract two papers, Retraction Watch has learned.
The reviews, “Cryptography and State-of-the-art Techniques” and “An Advanced Survey on Cloud Computing and State-of-the-art Research Issues,” were both published in 2012 in the International Journal of Computer Science Issues (IJCSI). In a May 20 letter to the whistleblower in the case, the research integrity officer at Edith Cowan University in Perth wrote:
Continue reading University recommends retraction of two computing papers for plagiarism
Two days after issuing expressions of concern about controversial papers on Covid-19, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine have retracted the articles because a number of the authors were not granted access to the underlying data.
The Lancet paper, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis,” which relied on data from a private company called Surgisphere and had concluded that hydroxychloroquine was linked to a higher risk of death among some COVID-19 patients, has been dogged by questions since its publication in late May. Some of those complaints led to a correction about aspects of the data, but at the time the authors stood by their conclusions — namely, that hydrochloroquine and chloroquine do not to appear to be effective against the viral infection.
That correction was followed earlier this week by the expression of concern, and now three of the four authors of the article have decided to pull it entirely. The abstaining author, Sapan Desai, is the founder of Surgisphere, whose mission statement declares that the goal of the company is to:
Continue reading Lancet, NEJM retract controversial COVID-19 studies based on Surgisphere data
Score one for responsiveness.
In mid-May, we reported on the retraction of three review articles by Joachim Boldt, whose papers continue to fall despite his having been exposed as a fraudster a decade ago. At the time, we wondered why another journal, Anesthesia & Analgesia, hadn’t also pulled reviews by Boldt that it had published over the years.
Now, it has.
Continue reading Slow but steady: Anesthesiology researcher with more than 100 retractions will earn two moreA group of researchers in Iran has retracted their case report on what they claimed was the first known case of a pregnant woman who died of Covid-19.
The reason: According to the corresponding author, another group of researchers in Iran, who had first seen the patient at their hospital, had beaten them to the submission punch without their knowledge. (This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a case like this.)
The paper appeared in Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, an Elsevier title, on April 11. Sometime in early May, it seems (the dates are unclear on the journal website) the group, led by a team at Zanjan University of Medical Sciences, retracted the article.
Elsevier allows authors to withdraw papers without explanation if they have appeared online but not yet in print, which is the case here. So the retraction notice says, well, nothing:
Continue reading Race to be first to report first case of COVID-19 death during pregnancy leads to a retraction
[See update on this story.]
As controversy swirls around two papers that used data from Surgisphere, the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet have placed expression of concerns on the relevant papers.
Here’s the NEJM expression of concern:
Continue reading NEJM, Lancet place expressions of concern on controversial studies of drugs for COVID-19
A group of anesthesiology researchers in India has had 10 papers retracted from a single journal because of a “high rate of similarity from various other articles along with overwhelming evidence of data fabrication.”
The retractions came after one of the authors of the papers submitted a manuscript to a different journal whose editor sniffed out issues and raised a red flag.
The Saudi Journal of Anesthesia has retracted ten articles by Anjan Das, of Kolkata, and colleagues:
Continue reading Anesthesiology group loses ten papers at once in one journal
One of the world’s leading medical journals has retracted a widely circulated paper published in April that concluded that “both surgical and cotton masks seem to be ineffective in preventing the dissemination of SARS–CoV-2 from the coughs of patients with COVID-19 to the environment and external mask surface.”
The study, published by the Annals of Internal Medicine, has been cited by dozens of news stories, nearly 10,000 Twitter users — some of whom raised red flags about its methods — and by the World Health Organization.
But it turns out that the authors failed to consider the limits of the test they were using to detect the presence of coronavirus.
The paper only involved four participants. Apparently, the authors thought a correction — adding more patients — would be enough:
Continue reading Top journal retracts study claiming masks ineffective in preventing COVID-19 spread
A Nature study that could have provided a “potential therapeutic target for osteoporosis and bone metastases of cancer” has been retracted.
Since being published in 2014 by researchers at UT Southwestern, MD Anderson and elsewhere, “miR-34a blocks osteoporosis and bone metastasis by inhibiting osteoclastogenesis and Tgif2” has been cited more than 200 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
A year ago — on May 24, 2019 — Nature published a correction to the paper:
Continue reading Nature retracts study touted as step toward treatments for bone diseases
Some words do more work in sentences than others. Take the example of the word “negligence,” which in the case of the following retraction notice is a veritable beast of burden.
The 2019 article, “Conservative management of subglottic stenosis with home based tracheostomy care: A retrospective review of 28 patients,” appeared in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, an Elsevier title. The authors, led by Andrew Pelser, have affiliations in the United Kingdom and South Africa — a fact that appears to be non-trivial.
Per the abstract:
Continue reading ‘Negligence’ — a lot of it — leads to a retraction
