Retraction Watch

Author denies Chinese censorship prompted COVID-19 retraction

The corresponding author of a recently published – and then quickly retracted – letter in The Lancet decrying the failure of the Chinese Ministry of Health to pay doctors and other health care workers says authorities did not pressure him to withdraw the piece.

The letter begins:

As the COVID-19 pandemic comes to an end in China, medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to fight the omicron (B.1.1.529) variant are now facing a new challenge. Despite their heroic efforts, many of them are now struggling to receive the financial compensation they deserve.

The second sentence cites a blog post on Weixin.

Journal hasn’t retracted ‘Super Size Me’ paper six months after authors’ request

Six months after the authors of a 2012 paper requested its retraction, a marketing journal is still investigating the concerns, Retraction Watch has learned. Other researchers had failed to replicate the findings – that consumers choose portion sizes based on their desire to signal higher social status – and discovered anomalies in the data.

The paper, “Super Size Me: Product Size as a Signal of Status,” appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research and attracted media attention from The New York Times and NPR, among other outlets. The lay media interpreted the findings as helping to explain the rise in obesity in the United States. The article has been cited 180 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The same authors requested the retraction of another paper, “Dynamics of Communicator and Audience Power: The Persuasiveness of Competence versus Warmth, published in 2016 and cited 61 times, which the journal is also still investigating.

Former Yale prof faked data, says Federal watchdog

A liver researcher who worked at Yale University for 15 years faked data in multiple papers and grant applications, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Carlo Spirli, who rose to the rank of associate professor before leaving Yale in 2020, “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in four published papers, two presentations, and three NIH grant applications, the ORI said in announcing its findings today.

Spirli, according to the ORI:

Weekend reads: Drug company loses defamation suit against journal; Canada a whistleblower wasteland?; UT-Austin can revoke degrees after all

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are more than 39,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here’s what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

“Unapproved euthanasia” of rats in neuroscience study leads to retraction

A 2017 paper describing neuroscience research with rats has been retracted after “data mis-management,” including the mistreatment of the animals, came to light.

The retracted paper was the second by Subimal Datta, a professor of psychology and anesthesiology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to receive a flag for data problems.

The article, “BNDF heterozygosity is associated with memory deficits and alterations in cortical and hippocampal EEG power,” was published in Behavioural Brain Research and has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, published March 31, stated:

High-profile paper that used AI to identify suicide risk from brain scans retracted for flawed methods

In 2017, a paper published in Nature Human Behavior made international headlines for the authors’ claim they had developed a way to analyze brain scans using machine learning to identify youth at risk for suicide.

“It was a big, splashy finding,” said Timothy Verstynen, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the research. But at a neuroimaging conference soon after the publication, other researchers discussed the study “in kind of a sense of disbelief,” he said.

The 91% accuracy for identifying suicidality that the researchers reported, from a sample size of just a few dozen participants, he said, “kind of went against what we as a field were starting to understand about the nature of these brain phenotype markers based off of neuroimaging data.”

After six years of scrutiny, during which Verstynen attempted to replicate the work but found a key problem, the authors of the 2017 paper have retracted the article.

Wiley and Hindawi to retract 1,200 more papers for compromised peer review

Hindawi and Wiley, its parent company, have identified approximately 1,200 articles with compromised peer review that the publishers will begin retracting this month.

Jay Flynn, executive vice president and general manager of the research division at Wiley, which acquired Hindawi in 2021, wrote about the forthcoming retractions in a blog post at Scholarly Kitchen yesterday.

The plan to retract 1,200 articles, which the publisher expects to take a few months, follows Hindawi’s announcement last September that it would retract 511 articles across 16 journals for manipulated peer review. (We’ve tracked 501 retractions from 23 Hindawi journals since the announcement.)

Five years after saying it won’t retract Macchiarini paper, journal does so

In 2018, the journal Respiration was adamant that it wouldn’t retract a 2015 paper co-authored by once-respected transplant surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. Now, the editors at Respiration seem to have changed their mind.

Macchiarini is most well known for his controversial artificial windpipe implants. Seven out of the eight patients who had artificial windpipes implanted from Macchiarini suffered complications after the surgery.

Five years ago, the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden found that Macchiarini and three co-authors of his were guilty of misconduct in the 2015 study, and recommended that it should be pulled.

Thomas Nold, then the editor-in-chief of Respiration, previously told Retraction Watch, however, that the journal decided against retraction:

A high-quality cloned journal has duped hundreds of scholars, and has no reason to stop

Have you heard about hijacked journals, which take over legitimate publications’ titles, ISSNs, and other metadata without their permission? We recently launched the Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker, and will be publishing regular posts like this one to tell the stories of some of those cases.

In 2021, I created an alert on Scopus to keep me updated about new publications in the Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences, which had been hijacked by fraudulent publishers. I wanted to know if unauthorized content from this hijacked journal ended up in the index.

However, I forgot about the alert until last month, when I received three notifications from Scopus regarding new publications in the journal.

These notifications included lists of a dozen papers indexed in Scopus, all of them originating from the hijacked version of the journal. Inspecting the profile of the journal showed that probably more than 55 papers from the hijackers are currently indexed in Scopus:

‘Sad but necessary’: Ant researchers pull fossil paper over errant claim

An army ant, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorylus#/media/File:Dorylus_gribodoi_casent0172627_dorsal_1.jpg

A group of insectologists is receiving praise on social media for retracting a 2022 paper in which they claimed, erroneously, it turns out, to have discovered a novel ant fossil.

The paper, “An Eocene army ant,” appeared in November in Biology Letters, a Royal Society title. The authors were led by Christine Sosiak, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. The paper has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to Sosiak and her colleagues:

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