A peer-reviewed journal has published a paper that urges the adoption of homeopathy in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. [Please see an update on this post.] The Journal of Public Health: From Theory to Practice — published by Springer Nature and also known by its German name, Zeitschrift für Gesundheitswissenschaften — published “Homeopathy combat … Continue reading Paper urging use of homeopathy for COVID-19 appears in peer-reviewed public health journal
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: the retraction of a paper that editors called “deeply offensive … Continue reading Weekend reads: Sexism in a medical textbook; proof Reviewer 2 is a jerk; COVID-19 and research misconduct
For more than a decade, I have been working with colleagues to request retractions from editors and publishers for plagiarizing articles, mostly in my discipline of philosophy and related fields. But almost two years ago I requested a retraction from a seismology journal. Since I have no training in the science of earthquakes, how did … Continue reading A two-year drama: The anatomy of a retraction request
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 Springer Nature journal has issued an editor’s note — which seems an awful lot like an Expression of Concern — for a widely circulated but quickly contested paper about how the novel coronavirus might infect white blood cells, akin to HIV. However, readers could be forgiven for missing that fact. Indeed, the journal itself appears … Continue reading A journal took three days to accept a COVID-19 paper. It’s taken two months and counting to retract it.
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 clinical trial about COVID-19 by a convicted felon A … Continue reading Weekend reads: Hydroxychloroquine paper earns correction; company allegedly fakes COVID-19 data; why retractions fail
An itinerant materials scientist whose former lab head has accused publicly of misconduct is up to nine retractions for manipulating his data. We last wrote about Hossein Hosseinkhani in 2016, after he’d lost seven papers stemming from his time as a researcher in the lab of Yasuhiko Tabata, of the Institute for Frontier Life and … Continue reading Materials scientist up to nine retractions
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
Science Translational Medicine has issued an expression of concern about a 2020 paper on the genetics of colorectal cancer by a group in China whose results were pegged on a test that couldn’t have produced the findings. The article, “Circulating tumor DNA methylation profiles enable early diagnosis, prognosis prediction, and screening for colorectal cancer,” appeared … Continue reading Former UCSD prof who resigned amid investigation into China ties has paper flagged for using the wrong test