Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Hydroxychloroquine paper earns correction; company allegedly fakes COVID-19 data; why retractions fail

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

A clinical trial about COVID-19 by a convicted felon
A journal that published a critical letter and then said it was a mistake
A retraction with ‘rectitude‘
A group that tried to publish the same paper three times

How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

A convicted felon wants people to enroll in a COVID-19 clinical trial. What could go wrong?

Richard Fleming, a felon convicted of health care fraud who has been debarred by the US Food and Drug Administration, would like to invite you to participate in a clinical trial.

Fleming has registered a study on ClinicalTrials.gov to evaluate what he calls the “Fleming Method for Tissue and Vascular Differentiation and Metabolism” — a method he claims can help physicians assess pneumonia resulting from Covid-19.

According to the notes for the study:

A journal publishes a critical letter — then says it was a mistake

On Sept. 17, 2019, virologist David Sanders — who recently won a lawsuit brought against him for efforts as a scientific sleuth — wrote a letter to the Journal of Cellular Physiology about a 2004 paper whose images raised his eyebrows.

The response a day later from an editorial assistant was a hint of what was to come:

An attempt at a triple play seems likely to result in a retraction

A group of researchers in China is teetering on the edge of losing a paper because they have apparently tried to publish it three times.

Our story starts in Turkey, home to Taner Kemal Erdag, the editor in chief of Turkish Archives of Otorhinolaryngology. In August 2018, Erdag received a submission titled “Increased maternal serum placental growth hormone variant in pregnancies complicated by otosclerosis.” The corresponding author on the work was Ruiying Chen, an ear, nose and throat specialist at The First Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University.

Three weeks later, Chen contacted Erdag and asked to withdraw their article. Request denied. Erdag told us:

‘[A] disappointing situation’: Stem cell group retracts with ‘rectitude’ after error

A team of stem cell researchers at the University of Maryland has lost a 2020 paper after failing to correct an error that they’d caught prior to submission.

The paper, “Endothelial/mesenchymal stem cell crosstalk within bioprinted coculture,” appeared in Tissue Engineering Part A, a Mary Ann Liebert publication. The senior author of the article was John Fisher, who holds an endowed chair in bioengineering at Maryland and also is one of the journal’s co-editors.

According to the retraction notice:

‘Patterns in the data have led to questions’: Ob-gyns lose another paper

A group of OB/GYNs in the Middle East with a history of testing the patience of editors has lost a paper — and received in expression of concern for another — over concerns about the validity of their data.

The articles appeared in the BJOG, a Wiley publication. Both were led by Mohammad Maher, who is affiliated with Menoufia University in Egypt and the Armed Forces Hospital Southern Region, in Saudia Arabia.

Maher was first author of a 2017 paper in Obstetrics & Gynecology that the journal retracted earlier this year, after the editors were unable to resolve serious questions about the reliability of the data. As the retraction notice states, the journal made little headway with Menoufia University when it tried to follow up on concerns that the researchers’ results were almost certainly fabricated.

Weekend reads: Hamsters, cats, dogs, and other fake authors; a fraudster regains her medical license; how to ruin journal titles

Sending thoughts to our readers and wishing them the best in this uncertain time.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

the retraction of a French study on hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19
the retraction of a well-publicized study from a JAMA journal about physician burnout
a tenth retraction for an associate vice president of research
another whodunit

How many papers about COVID-19 have been retracted? We’ve been keeping track, as part of our database. Here’s our frequently updated list.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

What it takes to correct the record: Autopsy of a COVID-19 corrigendum

We’ve been keeping track of retracted coronavirus papers, but what about corrections? Here’s a guest post from Richard Jones of Cardiff University about a paper that earned widespread media coverage but turned out to be wrong.

According to our best knowledge, this is the first report on COVID-19 infection and death among medical personnel in a Forensic Medicine unit.

So ended a letter from Thailand to the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, accepted on 9^th April 2020 within 3 days of receipt, and published as an ubiquitous “Pre-Proof.”

The authors of that letter stated that there had been only two COVID-19 patients amongst medical personnel in Thailand at that time, one of whom was a “forensic medicine professional” working in Bangkok.

French hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study withdrawn

The authors of a preprint on use of hydroxychloroquine — the controversial drug heavily promoted by, and now apparently taken by, President Trump, at least for a few more days — along with azithromycin for COVID-19 have withdrawn the paper.

The preprint, “Hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin: a potential interest in reducing in-hospital morbidity due to COVID-19 pneumonia (HI-ZY-COVID)?” was posted to medRxiv on May 11 by authors at Hopital Raymond Poincare, and sometime yesterday replaced with this statement:

Former grad student faked cancer research data, says federal watchdog

A former graduate student at the University of Cincinnati falsified data in a published article, since retracted, and an unpublished manuscript, according to government investigators.

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said Logan Fulford doctored images while working at the university on experiments supported by two federally funded grants. Fulford, who is now a senior clinical research associate at IQVIA, a health care consulting company, entered into a voluntary settlement with the agency but neither denied nor admitted to the misconduct.

The published paper, titled “The transcription factor FOXF1 promotes prostate cancer by stimulating the mitogen-activated protein kinase ERK5,” appeared in Science Signaling in 2016. Fulford was first author on the article, which the journal retracted in 2018, after initially flagging it with an expression of concern.

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