Retraction Watch

Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper on vaccines and autism has been cited more than a thousand times. These researchers tried to figure out why.

Retraction Watch readers are no doubt familiar with one of the most consequential retractions of this century, namely that of the 1998 paper in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and others claiming a link between vaccines and autism. What they may also know is that the paper remains one of the most highly cited retracted articles of all time, as demonstrated by our leaderboard of such papers.

With that in mind, six librarians from institutions in Wisconsin had a question: ” What are the characteristics of citations of the retracted 1998 article by Wakefield et al that purported to show an association between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism?” A paper describing their findings was published on Friday in JAMA Network Open.

We asked corresponding author Elizabeth Suelzer, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, to answer several questions about the paper.

Retraction Watch (RW): Why did you decide to focus on the Wakefield paper, and what were your findings?

Weekend reads: Falsified authorship; allegations about more than 200 papers; honoring an exploitative scientist

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 30-year-old paper cited by creationists;
A chemistry paper retracted after ten years of being in limbo;
An accounting paper corrected for methodology that “does not generate the results;”
The story of what happened when reviewers asked authors to change their study design.

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Reviewers asked authors to change their study design. It apparently didn’t go well.

In what the editor of a psychiatry journal says in an unusual case, the authors of a paper on treatments for depression have retracted it after being alerted to “inconsistencies” stemming from a change to their study design that the peer reviewers had requested.

Here’s the retraction notice, in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease:

Two spectrometry papers retracted, one for “intolerable” mistakes. The authors don’t agree.

Saudi researchers have lost a pair of papers in a spectrometry journal for errors the editors found fatal but the authors apparently dismiss as trivial.

The articles appeared in the Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The principal author on both papers is Mohammad Gondal, of the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dharhan. According to his website, Gondal is a highly decorated physicist, with

‘The methodology does not generate the results’: Journal corrects accounting study with flawed methods

What a difference a Yi,t=β0+β1IOˆi,t+β2Xi,t+ωt+εi,t.Yi,t=β0+β1IO^i,t+β2Xi,t+ωt+εi,t. makes.

The authors of a 2016 paper on institutional investing have corrected their article — to include the equation above — in the wake of persistent questions about their methodology. The move follows the protracted retraction earlier this year of a similar article in The Accounting Review by the duo, Andrew Bird and Stephen Karolyi, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, for related problems.

The bottom line, it seems, is that Bird and Karolyi appear to be unable adequately to explain their research methods in ways that stand up to scrutiny.

The correction involves a paper published in The Review of Financial Studies, from Oxford University Press, titled “Do institutional investors demand public disclosure. According to the statement (the meat of which is behind a paywall):

After ten years of being in limbo, a chemistry paper is retracted

In May of this year, François-Xavier Coudert, a chemist at PSL University in Paris, had a question about a paper in Chemistry: A European Journal.

This @ChemEurJ paper has been “early view” (a.k.a. “ASAP”) for 10 years now, online but not published in any issue. How can that even happen?? @Wiley_Chemistry pic.twitter.com/OE3fj1sakp
— FX Coudert (@fxcoudert) May 19, 2019

Several days later, he had an answer — sort of — along with an apology for readers from Haymo Ross, the journal’s editor in chief.

Thirty years after publication, a paper cited by creationists is retracted

A paper by a Russian researcher who has been dogged by allegations of fraud has been retracted, 30 years to the month after its publication, and 25 years after the journal published a strongly critical letter to the editor.

The 1989 paper on the genetics of wild timber voles by Dmitrii A. Kuznetsov in the International Journal of Neuroscience was, according to Dan Larhammar, a professor of molecular cell biology at Uppsala University in Sweden and now president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, being used by creationists as evidence for their beliefs. Larhammar published a letter to the editor about the paper in 1994 that concluded:

Weekend reads: Is nutrition science the worst-performing science?; gender bias in peer review; the Sherlock Holmes of science fraud

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

two investigations at King’s College London that found “poor research practices“
a five-year ban on federal U.S. funding for a researcher who reused images over and over again
sanctions for a former Johns Hopkins postdoc for data fabrication

Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

A failure at Renal Failure leads to retraction of duplicate article

A kidney journal has retracted a 2019 paper by a group of researchers in China for an unfortunate own-goal.

The article, “The relationship between hemodialysis mortality and the Chinese medical insurance type,” was first published in January in Renal Failure, a Taylor & Francis title. It appeared again in the journal nine months later.

According to the retraction notice:

‘Reused over and over again:’ Image recycling leads to 5-year funding ban for cancer researcher

A former researcher at Boys Town National Research Hospital in Nebraska has agreed to a five-year ban from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) on receiving federal science funding after being found guilty of having fabricated data in numerous grant applications and articles.

According to the ORI, Sudhakar Yakkanti, a Harvard-trained cancer specialist who from 2004 to 2012 held the post of Director of the Cell Signaling, Retinal & Tumor Angiogenesis Laboratory at Boys Town:

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