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: A paper that took a journal three days to accept … Continue reading Weekend reads: When peer review fails; gender imbalances in citations; COVID-19 science under scrutiny
An Elsevier journal is wearing an omelet on its face after accepting a paper by a group of authors who have completely disavowed the work. Oh, and no one seems to know who one of the authors is, which makes the second time inside of a month that we’ve reported on a case like this. … Continue reading Meet Bo Liu, international man or woman of scientific mystery
A group of researchers in Iran has retracted their case report on what they claimed was the first known case of a pregnant woman who died of Covid-19. The reason: According to the corresponding author, another group of researchers in Iran, who had first seen the patient at their hospital, had beaten them to the … Continue reading Race to be first to report first case of COVID-19 death during pregnancy leads to a retraction
Some words do more work in sentences than others. Take the example of the word “negligence,” which in the case of the following retraction notice is a veritable beast of burden. The 2019 article, “Conservative management of subglottic stenosis with home based tracheostomy care: A retrospective review of 28 patients,” appeared in the International Journal … Continue reading ‘Negligence’ — a lot of it — leads to a retraction
We’ve been keeping track of retracted coronavirus papers, but what about corrections? Here’s a guest post from Richard Jones of Cardiff University about a paper that earned widespread media coverage but turned out to be wrong. According to our best knowledge, this is the first report on COVID-19 infection and death among medical personnel in … Continue reading What it takes to correct the record: Autopsy of a COVID-19 corrigendum
The authors of a preprint on use of hydroxychloroquine — the controversial drug heavily promoted by, and now apparently taken by, President Trump, at least for a few more days — along with azithromycin for COVID-19 have withdrawn the paper. The preprint, “Hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin: a potential interest in reducing in-hospital morbidity due to COVID-19 … Continue reading French hydroxychloroquine-COVID-19 study withdrawn
The Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology has taken down a letter on whether people should abstain from sex during the coronavirus pandemic, but the editor says the article is not being retracted. Meanwhile, researchers in France have retracted a paper in which they’d claimed to have found replication of the virus that causes … Continue reading Covid-19 and sex? Rapid-fire acceptance leads to hasty withdrawal of paper
Talk about the publish-or-perish version of the circle of life. A Springer Nature journal has retracted 33 articles — 29 from one special issue, and four from another — for a laundry list of publishing sins, from fake peer review to plagiarism to stealing unpublished manuscripts. And an Elsevier journal has retracted ten papers recently … Continue reading The circle of life, publish or perish edition: Two journals retract more than 40 papers
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We’ve been tracking retractions of papers about COVID-19 as part of our database. Here’s a running list, which will be updated as needed. (For some context on these figures, see this post, our letter in Accountability in Research and the last section of this Nature news article. Also see a note about the terminology regarding … Continue reading Retracted coronavirus (COVID-19) papers