Search Results for: sting

‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

Eric Ross was listening to a popular psychiatry podcast one day last spring when “some pretty remarkable” research findings caught his attention.  A team of researchers in Egypt had shown that adding a cheap diabetes drug—metformin—to antidepressant therapy nearly doubled the treatment’s efficacy in people with moderate to severe depression. That meant the drug worked … Continue reading ‘I was fired up’: Psychiatrist effort prompts retraction of antidepressant treatment paper

How fishy email addresses tipped off a sleuth to a paper mill

Anna Abalkina noticed something odd about a psychology paper on the “modern problems of youth extremism”: The corresponding author was affiliated with a university in Russia, but his email address had a domain name from India.  The unusual domain name was part of a pattern Abalkina, of the Freie Universität Berlin, noticed in hundreds of … Continue reading How fishy email addresses tipped off a sleuth to a paper mill

Scholar calls journal decision on ‘comfort women’ paper ‘rotten at the core’

The journal that published a hotly contested article by a professor at Harvard Law School arguing that Korean women forced into sexual slavery during World War II were willing prostitutes has reaffirmed a prior expression of concern over the paper, but stopped short of retracting the article. However, the International Review of Law and Economics … Continue reading Scholar calls journal decision on ‘comfort women’ paper ‘rotten at the core’

Exclusive: Deepfake pioneer to lose two papers after misconduct finding of faked data

Two papers coauthored by a computer scientist whose work on visual effects has been credited in big-name Hollywood movies will soon be retracted after a publisher’s investigation found falsification of data in the articles.  Retraction Watch has also learned that the University of Southern California (USC) found that Hao Li “falsely presented his research” in … Continue reading Exclusive: Deepfake pioneer to lose two papers after misconduct finding of faked data

Weekend reads: ‘Against Reviewer 2;’ forced to grant guest authorships; problems in oversight of bat virus research in China

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? The week at Retraction Watch featured: Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 289. There are more than 38,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or … Continue reading Weekend reads: ‘Against Reviewer 2;’ forced to grant guest authorships; problems in oversight of bat virus research in China

Publisher investigating “serious concerns” about article on ivermectin, COVID, and the microbiome

The publisher Frontiers has published an expression of concern for an article that proposed “ivermectin protects against COVID-19” via effects on the microbiome.   The article, “Microbiome-Based Hypothesis on Ivermectin’s Mechanism in COVID-19: Ivermectin Feeds Bifidobacteria to Boost Immunity,” was published in July 2022 in Frontiers in Microbiology. The sole author, Sabine Hazan, is affiliated with … Continue reading Publisher investigating “serious concerns” about article on ivermectin, COVID, and the microbiome

Ob-gyn who called criticism ‘racist’ and ‘hate speech’ earns retraction, several expressions of concern

There shouldn’t have been many differences between the women recruited for the three clinical trials: All of them gave birth at the same two Cairo hospitals over a period of less than three years, and all of them were treated to prevent or manage postpartum bleeding. Three samples from this pool of patients, Ben Mol … Continue reading Ob-gyn who called criticism ‘racist’ and ‘hate speech’ earns retraction, several expressions of concern

Reddit post prompts retraction of article that called Trump ‘the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter’

In October 2021, a Reddit user on the r/badscience subforum posted a long critique of an article published in PLOS ONE earlier that year that had analyzed the “anti-vaccination infodemic” on Twitter and concluded that former U.S. president Donald Trump was “the main driver of vaccine misinformation” on the platform before his account was suspended. … Continue reading Reddit post prompts retraction of article that called Trump ‘the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter’

Was a paper from Taiwan retracted because of a geopolitical dispute? 

A study in the journal Smart Materials in Medicine has earned a retraction, seemingly not because of scholarly malfeasance or an inadvertent oversight, but because of a “lack of agreement on affiliation format.”  The crucial fact seems to be that almost all of the article’s authors, including its two senior authors, list affiliations in Taiwan, … Continue reading Was a paper from Taiwan retracted because of a geopolitical dispute? 

Paper on writing centers as ‘neocolonial tools’ is retracted

Are academic writing centers agents of US hegemony, spreading the evils of colonialism as they work to topple rogue syntax and rehabilitate failing grammatical states?   So argued a pair of authors in Canada in a now-retracted 2022 article which claimed that such centers have been used as “neocolonial tools” to push American foreign policy goals.  … Continue reading Paper on writing centers as ‘neocolonial tools’ is retracted