Weekend reads: “Hot-crazy matrix” paper; “comfort women” controversy; COVID-19 vaccine misinformation

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: Eleven papers corrected after nutrition prof fails to disclose patent, … Continue reading Weekend reads: “Hot-crazy matrix” paper; “comfort women” controversy; COVID-19 vaccine misinformation

Weekend reads: Robots come to scientific publishing; questions about a COVID-19 vaccine; funding by lottery

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: Johns Hopkins student newspaper deletes, then retracts, article on faculty … Continue reading Weekend reads: Robots come to scientific publishing; questions about a COVID-19 vaccine; funding by lottery

Publisher infected twice with the same anti-vaccine article

Researchers who lost a paper derided by critics as anti-vaccine have republished their article in a different journal … owned by the same publisher (hint: rhymes with “smells of beer”).  As we reported in April 2019, the original article version of “Cognition and behavior in sheep repetitively inoculated with aluminum adjuvant-containing vaccines or aluminum adjuvant … Continue reading Publisher infected twice with the same anti-vaccine article

The bizarre anti-vaccine paper a Florida professor has been trying to have retracted to no avail

Fly, meet elephant’s back. Robert Speth has spent the last 19 months trying to get two of the world’s largest medical publishers to retract an article he considers to be a “travesty” of pseudoscientific claims and overtly anti-vaccination bias. In the process, he has uncovered slipshod management of a journal’s editorial board that angered, among … Continue reading The bizarre anti-vaccine paper a Florida professor has been trying to have retracted to no avail

“A wholly frustrating and embarrassing process”: Authors retract paper on HPV vaccine and preterm birth

The authors of a 2018 paper purporting to find that the HPV vaccine guards against preterm birth have retracted the article after discovering they made a statistical error which could have masked the opposite effect.  The researchers, from New Zealand, also failed to appropriately disclose their financial ties to a company, CSL Limited, which owns … Continue reading “A wholly frustrating and embarrassing process”: Authors retract paper on HPV vaccine and preterm birth

Weekend reads: Questions about Russian COVID-19 vaccine data; a p-value pledge; why one author removed her name from a paper

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: An Elsevier book chapter that claims COVID-19 came from space; … Continue reading Weekend reads: Questions about Russian COVID-19 vaccine data; a p-value pledge; why one author removed her name from a paper

“Consistently unsurprised”: Nigerian vaccine study with no Nigerian authors retracted

Last month, PLOS ONE published a paper reporting on a trial to improve the uptake of the measles vaccine in Nigeria. The researchers were affiliated with IDinsight, a San Francisco-based “global advisory, data analytics, and research organization that helps development leaders maximize their social impact.” San Francisco is about 7,800 miles from Lagos, and the … Continue reading “Consistently unsurprised”: Nigerian vaccine study with no Nigerian authors retracted

Journal retracts paper claiming a link between the HPV vaccine and lower pregnancy rates

A paper on the human papillomavirus vaccine (HPV) that was called a “very flawed and biased study with the potential of being misinterpreted or misused” has been retracted.

Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper on vaccines and autism has been cited more than a thousand times. These researchers tried to figure out why.

Retraction Watch readers are no doubt familiar with one of the most consequential retractions of this century, namely that of the 1998 paper in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and others claiming a link between vaccines and autism. What they may also know is that the paper remains one of the most highly cited retracted … Continue reading Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent paper on vaccines and autism has been cited more than a thousand times. These researchers tried to figure out why.

Here we go again: Paper linking vaccines to cognitive damage (in sheep) retracted

In what seems like another entry in our occasional “Retraction Watch Mad Libs” series, Elsevier has withdrawn a paper that claimed to link the aluminum in vaccines to behavioral changes in sheep. The paper, which appeared online in Pharmacological Research in November of last year, was swiftly picked up by antivaccine advocates such as Celeste … Continue reading Here we go again: Paper linking vaccines to cognitive damage (in sheep) retracted