Retraction Watch

Less than two weeks ago, PLOS ONE published a paper about the parents of teenagers who appeared to immediately start questioning their gender identity around the time of puberty. Then the critiques flooded in.

The paper — about a highly contentious issue — surveyed parents who felt that their children had suddenly started to question their gender identity around the time of puberty, prompting author Lisa Littman at Brown University to coin a new phenomenon as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Any discussion of transgender identity in young children can get politicized, and this paper was no exception.

The political aspect of the findings aside, readers have raised some serious concerns about the methodology behind the PLOS ONE paper. So far,  multiple comments on the paper have pointed out potential issues in what one user dubbed a “fatally flawed paper” — such as the lack of a control group, the fact that Littman recruited study participants from allegedly biased websites, and only interviewed parents, not children or their clinicians. Brown University even took down a press release touting the study when it first appeared. And the journal has announced it’s taking a second look at the paper.

Earlier this year, The Advocate, a publication focused on LGBT issues, published a commentary titled “‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’” is biased junk science,” after the Journal for Adolescent Health published one of Littman’s poster abstracts. According the Advocate:

Continue reading Reader outcry prompts Brown to retract press release on trans teens

Late last year, news stories trumpeted the findings: Older women who received surgery to fix their cataracts were less likely to die over the course of a study period.

Now, the same group of authors is saying the exact opposite may be true.

Last week, the researchers retracted their 2017 paper in JAMA Ophthalmology and replaced it with an updated version that reports that women who received the surgery actually had a higher risk of dying.  

The original paper was covered by many news outlets — including Reuters and the New York Times — some of which suggested the procedure may help with more than just vision (even though the study, by its nature, couldn’t determine whether or not surgery caused women to live longer). Annette Flanagin, the Executive Managing Editor for The JAMA Network, told us the publisher tried to get the word out about the significant change to the findings:

Continue reading A high-profile paper linked cataract surgery to a lower risk of death. It was wrong.

A 2017 paper, when originally published, had a fairly clear message: People who got the flu vaccine every year were no less protected than someone who had skipped last year’s dose. But now that it’s been retracted, the picture is somewhat less clear.

The retraction notice in BMC Medicine doesn’t provide much information — it simply says the authors included and omitted some information that affects the conclusions.

Last author Bryna Warshawsky, the medical director of communicable diseases at Public Health Ontario in Canada, provided some additional explanation to Retraction Watch — namely, that after addressing errors in the analysis, the researchers found that there were actually slight differences; specifically, for some strains of the flu, the new analysis suggests that the flu shot was slightly more effective in people who’d skipped last year’s dose.

Warshawsky told Retraction Watch she and her team have submitted the corrected paper to the journal, and the bottom line message stays the same:

Continue reading Authors retract paper on effects of skipping the flu vaccine

A journal has retracted a 2016 article for a litany of flaws, including plagiarism and a massive self-inflicted wound that should have obviated the first offense.  

According to the notice in Cardiology Research and Practice (a Hindawi title) for the paper, which compared two methods of threading a catheter into the heart’s arteries:

Continue reading Hello, reviewers? How did a study manage to say it was randomized, but also that it wasn’t?