An Elsevier journal is wearing an omelet on its face after accepting a paper by a group of authors who have completely disavowed the work.
Oh, and no one seems to know who one of the authors is, which makes the second time inside of a month that we’ve reported on a case like this.
The article’s title also misspelled “neuroprogenitor.” But we digress.
Continue reading Meet Bo Liu, international man or woman of scientific mystery
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:
Continue reading Failure fails as publisher privileges the privileged
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.
The paper, “SARS-CoV-2 infects T lymphocytes through its spike protein-mediated membrane fusion,” appeared in early April in Cellular & Molecular Immunology. Most of the authors are based in China, and one, Shibo Jiang, is a prominent virologist with a joint affiliation at the New York Blood Center.
Continue reading A journal took three days to accept a COVID-19 paper. It’s taken two months and counting to retract it.
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.”
Heil — who is now working in Switzerland for a company called SOPHiA Genetics — used some of those data to publish a 2019 article, “Hedgehog pathway permissive conditions allow generation of immortal cell lines from granule cells derived from cancerous and non-cancerous cerebellum,” in a peer-reviewed journal, Open Biology, which belongs to the Royal Society.
Continue reading There is no I in data: Former grad student has paper retracted after mentor objects
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:
Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
Continue reading Weekend reads: A wake-up call?; paper’s author accused of racism; an editor resigns over personal attacks
In April of this year, Corneel Vandelanotte realized something had gone wrong with a paper he had recently published.
First, there was a post about his paper by Nick Brown, a scientific sleuth, questioning the results, ethics, and authors behind the work. That was followed by a comment on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik, another scientific sleuth.
“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.”
Continue reading ‘How I got fooled’: The story behind the retraction of a study of gamers
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.
The two retracted articles in JA Clinical Reports, a Springer title affiliated with the Japanese Society of Anesthesiologists, appeared in 2016 and 2018. The first, “Successful clavicle fracture surgery performed under selective supraclavicular nerve block using the new subclavian approach,” now carries the following notice:
Continue reading Prolific anesthesiologist in Japan has two papers retracted
A criminologist whose work has been under scrutiny for a year is set to have a sixth paper retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.
Last July, Justin Pickett, of the University of Albany at the State University of New York, posted a 27-page explanation of why he was asking for one of his papers to be retracted. The paper in question had been co-authored by Eric A. Stewart, a professor at Florida State University, whose work had been questioned by an anonymous correspondent.
Following pickup of the story by The Chronicle of Higher Education, that paper was eventually retracted, along with four others Stewart co-authored. But that was not the end of the tale.
Continue reading Criminology researcher to lose sixth paper
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.
And the 16 members of the journal’s international advisory board — which includes Nobel Laureates — resigned while denouncing the essay.
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.
The journal initially removed the essay without a notice, which isn’t best practice for retractions. It has since issued this statement from Neville Compton, the editor-in-chief:
Continue reading Controversial essay at German chemistry journal leads to suspensions, mass resignations
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 in Nursing 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.
Continue reading A nursing journal makes two online critiques disappear