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:
A Springer Nature journal has issued an editor’s note — which seems an awful lot like an Expression of Concern — for a widely circulated but quickly contested paper about how the novel coronavirus might infect white blood cells, akin to HIV.
However, readers could be forgiven for missing that fact. Indeed, the journal itself appears to be struggling to deal with the article — which one of the corresponding authors told us he asked to withdraw weeks ago.
Just because you work in a lab doesn’t mean you get to call the data you produce your own. Ask Constantin Heil.
In the mid-2010s, Heil was a PhD student at La Sapienza University in Rome, where he conducted studies with his mentor, Giuseppe Giannini. That research led to Heil’s dissertation, a paper titled “One size does not fit all: Cell type specific tailoring of culture conditions permits establishment of divergent stable lines from murine cerebellum.”
“People started alerting me,” Vandelanotte, a public health researcher at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, told Retraction Watch. “Hey, have you seen this blog by Nick Brown? And, and then yeah, okay, that was a bad day. Let me put it that way.”
A journal has retracted two case reports by a prolific Japanese anesthesiologist who appears to be embroiled in a misconduct investigation.
The two case studies, in JA Clinical Reports, were written by Hironobu Ueshima and Hiroshi Otake, of Showa University Hospital in Tokyo. Ueshima has roughly 170 publications to his name, according to Google Scholar, so we’ll be closely watching for developments in this case.
Facing a storm of criticism on social media, a chemistry journal in Germany has suspended two editors who handled a controversial essay that it said “highlights the bias displayed in our field and many others” to women and minority researchers.
The article, “Organic synthesis-where now?’ Is thirty years old. A reflection on the current state of affairs,” by Tomas Hudlicky, of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, had appeared in Angewandte Chemie, the flagship publication of the German Chemical Society. Hudlicky’s argument included several statements that suggested a hostility to efforts on university campuses to promote diversity.
A series of back and forth publications about a 12-year-old study of nursing education ended with some unusual editorial decisions.
Darrell Spurlock, a professor of nursing at Widener University and director of the university’s Leadership Center for Nursing Education Research, co-authored a study of the Health Education Systems, Inc. (HESI) nursing test in 2008. He and his colleague found that the test was a poor predictor of failure on the National Counsel Licensure Exam (NCLEX-RN).
More than a decade later, a critique of the paper, by Dreher et al., appeared out of the blue, published last year inNursing Forum, a Wiley journal. Spurlock takes issue with the way his research was portrayed in the critique, which paints a more positive picture of the HESI test.