Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: Plagiarism and death threats; peer review by robot; a university apologizes for a job ad

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.

Retraction Watch came back online on Wednesday of this week, after a 10-day outage for technical issues that may have involved a DDOS attack. That meant there was no Weekend Reads for two weeks, so to catch up, we’ll post one today, and one tomorrow. Here’s what’s been happening elsewhere:

Journal editors “flabbergasted” by responses to author’s ruse

The Pakistan Journal of Zoology got hoodwinked by a tall fishing tale. And they’re letting everyone know.

[Looking for Forensics Friday? They’ll resume as soon as we get through a backlog of posts we didn’t publish during our 10-day outage.]

The journal has retracted six papers that share a co-author who the editors say “exploited the peer-review process in the Journal of Zoology by generating fake reviewers[sic] email addresses.”

Some version of the fake peer review ruse has, as Retraction Watch readers may recall, been responsible for at least 700 retractions since 2012.

Here’s the notice, which isn’t playing catch-and-release:

The first rule of Fight Club is … you do not republish Fight Club

A pair of therapists has lost a paper in Sage Open because they’d previously published the article in another journal (more on that in a bit).

The article, “Bridging the gap between theory and practice with film: How to use Fight Club to teach existential counseling theory and techniques,” appeared in 2013. The authors were Katarzyna Peoples, a counselor at Walden University, and Stephanie Helsel, a therapist whose LinkedIn page lists her as an adjunct professor at Waynesburg University in Pennsylvania. The two appear to have connected at Duquesne University, where each received her doctoral degrees.

Here’s the gist of the article:

Forensics Friday: Can you spot the issues with this image?

Ever wanted to hone your skills as a scientific sleuth? Now’s your chance.

Thanks to the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), which is committed to educating authors on best practices in publishing, figure preparation, and reproducibility, we’re presenting the seventh in a series, Forensics Friday.

Take a look at the image below, and then take our poll. After that, click on the link below to find out the right answer.

“With great pity,” author retracts paper for “severe problems” including references that “are not allowed to be cited” and “severe law issues”

Fair warning: We’re really not sure what’s going on here.

The authors of “Effect of total flavonoids on expression of collagen, TGF-β1, and Smad 7 in hypertrophic scars,” a 2018 paper in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, have retracted it for, well, lots of reasons.

None of them is exactly clear.

Here’s the notice:

Statisticians clamor for retraction of paper by Harvard researchers they say uses a “nonsense statistic”

“Uh, hypothetical situation: you see a paper published that is based on a premise which is clearly flawed, proven by existing literature.” So began an exasperated Twitter thread by Andrew Althouse, a statistician at University of Pittsburgh, in which he debated whether a study using what he calls a “nonsense statistic” should be addressed by letters to the editor or swiftly retracted.

The thread was the latest development in an ongoing disagreement over research in surgery. In one corner, a group of Harvard researchers claim they’re improving how surgeons interpret underpowered or negative studies. In the other corner, statisticians suggest the authors are making things worse by repeatedly misusing a statistical technique called post-hoc power. The authors are giving weak surgical studies an unwarranted pass, according to critics.

Catholic medical journal pulls paper on conversion therapy over statistical problems

The journal for a religious medical group is retracting a paper that supported the discredited practice of conversion therapy for homosexuals over concerns about the statistical analyses — or lack thereof — in the research.

The paper, “Effects of therapy on religious men who have unwanted same-sex attraction,” was published last year in The Linacre Quarterly, the official journal of the Catholic Medical Association. (According to its website: “LQR explores issues at the interface of medicine and religion, focusing on bioethics and also exploring medical topics which have an ethical dimension.)

So, what were those effects? Pretty darn good, according to the article. Per the abstract:

An author told a journal their institution had no one who handled allegations. Turns out that wasn’t true.

Should journals always take authors at their word?

Take the case of a recent expression of concern in the Journal of Cell Science following concerns about image manipulation in a 2006 paper, “Inhibition of TPO-induced MEK or mTOR activity induces opposite effects on the ploidy of human differentiating megakaryocytes.”

Here’s the notice:

Weekend reads: How much is integrity worth?; killing the science poster; future of megajournals in doubt?

The week at Retraction Watch featured a big announcement: You can now receive alerts about retractions in your database of references if you use Zotero, the free, open-source research platform. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:

Forensics Friday: Notice anything odd about this figure?

Ever wanted to hone your skills as a scientific sleuth? Now’s your chance.

Take a look at the image below, and then take our poll. After that, click on the link below to find out the right answer.

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