Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: A costly code glitch; sparks fly over a heart trial; cancer researcher faced five investigations

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:

the retraction of a study that claimed high heels made women more attractive;
an update from a whistleblower in a case involving 30 retractions;
a journal’s NBA moment;
an investigation at a Harvard cancer lab;
and a major milestone for our database.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

A journal has its version of an NBA moment

Authors are calling “no traveling” on Liver Research for changing their affiliation without permission.

Editors at the publication changed the affiliation of a group of researchers from several institutions in Taiwan– including the Taipei Veterans General Hospital and the National Yang-Ming University School of Medicine, also in Taipei — to mainland China.

The notice for the article, “Do different bariatric surgery procedures impact hepassocin plasma levels in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus?,” reads:

Our database just reached a big milestone: 20,000 retractions. Will you help us with the next 20,000?

Nicolas Guéguen has a distinction, albeit even if it’s one he probably wishes he didn’t have: The retraction of his paper on whether high heels make women more attractive was the 20,000th retraction in our database.

That’s right: Earlier this month, the Retraction Watch database — retractionwatchdatabase.org — logged its 20,000th retraction. As our readers may recall, we first announced plans for the database in late 2014 thanks to a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and officially launched it a year ago with a feature package in Science.

At some 1,400 retractions per year, we were bound to reach this milestone at some point. But it’s worth noting that there were fewer than 40 retractions in 2000, meaning that the pace has accelerated, in turn meaning more work for our own indefatigable researcher, Alison Abritis, who has made sure — with help at the start by dozens of librarians, grad students and others — that we could keep up.

Pass the salt…off as your own? Plagiarism, meet salinity.

A group of physicists in Morocco have lost a 2018 paper over plagiarism and other concerns.

The article, “A 2D fluid motion model of the estuarine water circulation: Physical analysis of the salinity stratification in the Sebou estuary,” appeared in European Physics Journal Plus. The first author, Soufiane Haddout, is listed as being at Ibn Tofail University in Kenitra.

According to the notice:

Cancer lab at Harvard subject of inquiry

Harvard has investigated work from the lab of a cancer researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center that has been under scrutiny on PubPeer for more than five years.

Questions about the output of the lab, run by James W. Mier, began appearing on PubPeer in 2014, with comments about images that looked manipulated. The pseudonymous whistleblower Clare Francis sent Gretchen Brodnicki, Harvard Medical School’s dean for faculty and research integrity, an email about those comments on Sept. 27, 2014, and on July 24 of this year, Brodnicki asked Francis to resend that email.

Also that month, the journal Clinical Cancer Research issued an expression of concern for a 2006 paper by Mier and colleagues, which stated:

A researcher with 30 retractions and counting: The whistleblower speaks

Via U.S. SEC Office of the Whistleblower

Retraction Watch readers who have been following our coverage of retractions by Ali Nazari may have noticed that an anonymous whistleblower was the person who flagged the issues for journals and publishers. That whistleblower uses the pseudonym Artemisia Stricta, and we’re pleased to present a guest post written by him or her.

Something is seriously out of place with the roughly 200 publications by Ali Nazari, a scientist at Swinburne University who studies structural materials. Some of these problems have been known by journals and publishers for years — some since 2012 — yet their response has been mixed. Some have retracted papers. Some have decided not to, so far. And others have been mum.

Controversial AI expert admits to plagiarism, blames hectic schedule

People scrolling through Siraj Raval’s Twitter feed, or watching his videos or paying money to hear his insights on “data literacy” likely expect that what they’re hearing are original pearls from an AI expert. Apparently, they shouldn’t.

Raval has admitted to stealing large amounts of text in a recently published paper on “neural qubit,” which he says he has removed from his website (although it seems to still be available), along with a YouTube video related to the work.

In an Oct. 13 tweet Raval copped to the misconduct:

We’re phasing out one of our email alerts. Here’s how to keep up with Retraction Watch.

As some Retraction Watch readers have known, we’ve had off-and-on technological issues with the site. At least in some cases, those problems seem to have been due to DDOS attacks. We’ve been taking steps to ensure the site’s reliability, and we’re taking another one.

Since our inception in 2010, we’ve offered a way to receive an email alert about every new post as it is published. We know that for some readers, such alerts are the preferred way to learn of new posts. However, the various ways to do that all create vulnerabilities on the site, which in turn offer bots ways to compromise us.

In 2014, a study claimed high heels made women more attractive. Now it’s been retracted.

Perhaps you saw the headlines back in 2014, ones like “Science Proves It: Men Really Do Find High Heels Sexier,” from TIME.

Or maybe this quote, from the author of a study in Archives of Sexual Behavior, on CNBC:

Weekend reads: A CRISPR retraction; questions about football concussion data; an ethicist who has led to more than 20 retractions

The week at Retraction Watch featured a university’s findings that dozens of papers by a famous psychologist were “unsafe;” a researcher who will soon be up to 30 retractions; and a psychology professor who took an unusual opportunity to try to undermine her critics. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

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