Britney Spears has, as Retraction Watch readers no doubt know, been in the news a great deal lately, as the battle over her father’s “broad control over her life and finances” plays out in court. But a science fiction story about Spears that published in Nature in 2008 — the year Spears’ father was appointed … Continue reading Britney Spears story prompts apology from Nature and author
A paper linking the use of a wildly popular drug for heartburn to cancer has been retracted after the authors concluded that their widely touted finding appears to have resulted from a hiccup in the way they conducted their testing. The 2016 article, in Carcinogenesis, has played a minor role in an ongoing class action … Continue reading Widely covered paper on ranitidine-cancer link retracted
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. So the saying goes. What about fool me 20 times? In December of last year, Dove Press — a unit of Taylor & Francis — retracted 14 papers by Marty Hinz, a Minnesota physician who has been sanctioned by the U.S. FDA as … Continue reading Publisher retracts 20 of a researcher’s papers — then asks him to peer review
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: Two transcendental meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary … Continue reading Weekend reads: JAMA editor resigns after review of podcast on racism and medicine; ‘Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud’; machine learning’s health credibility crisis
Move over, Reviewer 2: The legal reviewer wants your job. Last month, I was relieved when the journal Research Ethics published my article, “The Use of Confidentiality and Anonymity Protections as a Cover for Fraudulent Fieldwork Data.” One unexpected hurdle had almost thwarted publication. The problem wasn’t with the proverbial hard-to-please peer reviewer called Reviewer … Continue reading The peer reviewers and editor wanted to publish my paper. The legal team rejected it.
A pair of psychology journals have retracted two related papers on the health benefits of a popular form of meditation after a reader pointed out that the authors failed to report the primary outcome of the study underpinning the articles. The now-retracted articles describe the putatively salubrious effects of sahaj samadhi meditation, a form of … Continue reading Two meditation papers retracted for failures to report primary outcomes
It keeps happening. There was the case of Talent Development and Excellence, which cloned an existing journal and managed to index hundreds of articles in Scopus, one of the world’s leading databases for scholarly literature. The Transylvanian Review did the same thing, and so did Test Engineering and Management. These journals — which can make … Continue reading How hijacked journals keep fooling one of the world’s leading databases
All rejection is hard to take. But, as one psychology researcher has found out, “having a paper rejected half a year after publication is something new …” We’ll explain. In January 2021, Eiko Fried, of the Department of Clinical Psychology at Leiden University, in The Netherlands, published an article in Psychological Inquiry titled “Lack of … Continue reading Congratulations! Your already-published article has just been rejected
When a Twitter user tipped us off last week to the mysterious disappearance of a preprint of a paper on a potential new therapy to treat Covid-19, we were curious. Was it a hidden retraction, or something else? The article, titled “Effectiveness of ZYESAMI™ (Aviptadil) in Accelerating Recovery and Shortening Hospitalization in Critically-Ill Patients with … Continue reading ‘Preprints are works in progress’: The tale of a disappearing COVID-19 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: Drug company withdraws court motion requesting retraction of papers critical … Continue reading Weekend reads: Government interference in research; ‘mega’ reviewers; tobacco funding draws scrutiny