Retraction Watch

Paper claiming to discover new pain syndrome retracted

Researchers who said they discovered a new disease akin to rheumatoid arthritis, but caused by pollution, are standing by their claim despite the retraction of their paper last month.

The article, “Middle east pain syndrome is a pollution-induced new disease mimicking rheumatoid arthritis,” appeared in the Springer Nature journal Scientific Reports in November 2021. The paper has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, and received limited press coverage.

According to the retraction notice, “post-publication peer review by an expert has confirmed the validity” of multiple concerns raised about the study. The paper did not present data to support its claims about the presumed cause for the syndrome, didn’t “conclusively” prove that MEPS is a new disease, and the bone erosions the study claimed were a hallmark of the disease weren’t backed by scans, the notice stated. Also, a figure of the paper featured a radiograph of a patient that wasn’t part of the study.

PNAS corrects article by Kavli prize winner who threatened to sue critic

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has corrected an article by a prize-winning chemist following a report by Retraction Watch his threat to sue a fellow scientist who had submitted a letter to the journal critiquing the paper.

Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, received one quarter of this year’s Kavli Prize in nanoscience for his work on spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), the topic of the PNAS article.

As we reported last month, a lawyer representing Mirkin sent a cease and desist letter to Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, accusing Lévy of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research in a letter Lévy had submitted to PNAS about the now-corrected article.

In his letter, Lévy wrote that the article’s “presentation of SNAs as a ‘powerful class of nanotherapeutics’ is misleading.”

Journal republishes chiropractic paper it had retracted after legal threats

A journal has republished an edited version of a paper it retracted after a distributor of a chiropractic product the paper criticized wrote in to complain.

The distributor accused the publication of making “very serious, incorrect and libelous statements” and threatened legal action, Retraction Watch has learned.

Weekend reads: Happy birthday, Retraction Watch!; a mysterious conference; extreme publishing; research parasites revisited

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 400. There are more than 50,000 retractions in The Retraction Watch Database — which is now part of Crossref. The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker now contains more than 250 titles. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers? What about The Retraction Watch Mass Resignations List — or our list of nearly 100 papers with evidence they were written by ChatGPT?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Happy 14th birthday, Retraction Watch – and what a year it was

In our old diner haunt (now closed), more than a decade ago

We know we say this every year, but the last 12 months have been big ones for Retraction Watch as we celebrate our 14th birthday on August 3. We’ve continued breaking big stories and maintaining The Retraction Watch Database – while also taking big steps toward financial sustainability.

In September, we announced that the Database – which as of today contains more than 50,000 retractions – became completely open with its acquisition by Crossref. The move also allowed us to hire Gordon Sullivan, another staff member who works on the Database, and covers the costs of maintaining the Database 100% for at least five years.

We hope regular readers by now have noticed the site runs faster, with no downtime. That’s thanks to the volunteer efforts of Michael Dayah and Karl Lehenbauer, who over the past year or so have pitched in to help us with back-end platform and software issues. We can’t thank them enough for their ongoing support.

Some other highlights:

Journal retracts paper on chiropractic product after distributor complains

An article about the overuse of spinal imaging has been retracted after the distributor of a chiropractic product it criticized in passing complained to the journal.

The paper, “An investigation into the chiropractic practice and communication of routine repetitive radiographic imaging for the location of postural misalignments,” was retracted in June from the Journal of Clinical Imaging Science after the editor-in-chief learned it contained “controversial statements regarding the commercial product Denneroll,” according to the statement.

Denneroll is a line of support products that purports to help with “spinal remodeling” for people whose spines aren’t curved in the normal way, according to a company brochure. The company’s website states that the Denneroll products are “second to none in spinal orthotics.”

The retraction notice said Deed Harrison, a chiropractor whose family distributes the Denneroll product line, “claimed that the data presented against this product lacks scientific backing.” Harrison’s father, Donald Harrison, originated a technique called Chiropractic BioPhysics (CBP) which is the basis of the Denneroll product line, according to the CBP website.

Cancer paper retracted 11 years after reported plagiarism

In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief.

Eleven years later, one of the bunch, “Inflammatory Bowel Disease as a Risk Factor for Colorectal Cancer,” has been retracted.

The decision took “a ridiculously long time,” Bik said. “Perhaps they forgot to act, perhaps they lost my email, perhaps they thought it was too much trouble to check, or perhaps they were not sure what to do back in 2013, when I contacted them.”

Science and the significant trend towards spin and fairytales

What do fairytales and scientific papers have in common? Consider the story of Rumpelstiltskin.

A poor miller tries to impress the king by claiming his daughter can spin straw into gold. The avaricious king locks up the girl and tells her to spin out the gold. She fails, until a goblin, Rumpelstiltskin, comes to her rescue.

In science, publishers and editors of academic journals prefer to publish demonstrably new findings – gold – rather than replications or refutations of findings which have been published already. This “novelty pressure” requires presentation of results that are “significant” – usually that includes being “statistically significant.”

Weekend reads: Attending a predatory conference; zombie theories; difficult authors

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

Authors up past 60 retractions amid ongoing investigation

A group of researchers in Iran now have had more than 60 papers retracted for concerns about peer review and plagiarism as a publisher investigates its back catalog. One of the researchers, A. Salar Elahi, now ranks 7th on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard.

Previously, Elsevier said they would retract 26 papers from the research group at Islamic Azad University in Tehran for fake reviews in 2017 and 2018. The latest batch of 33 retracted papers originally appeared in Springer Nature’s Journal of Fusion Energy as far back as 2009.

Tim Kersjes, head of research integrity at Springer Nature told us in addition to investigating specific concerns as they arise, his unit also is running “ongoing deep-dive investigations to assess published content that has connections with content that has already been retracted for integrity concerns by ourselves or other publishers.” The recent retractions came from such an investigation that is ongoing, he said.

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