Retraction Watch

Psychologists want to retract old papers about conversion therapy. Elsevier says no.

Over the past year, a professional society for cognitive therapists has been pondering what to do with dozens of decades-old articles about conversion therapy – the practice of trying to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity – in the archives of the journals it publishes.

The society, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), was considering a variety of options, including retraction.

But in a statement the group published earlier this month, ABCT said Elsevier, the journals’ publisher, would not allow retraction of the articles.

‘Just some eccentric guy in Australia’: The story of a non-retraction for plagiarism

After reading a paper published in The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England last March, Andrew Thomas, an orthopedic surgeon in the UK, noticed that it was very similar to an article published the previous December in another journal.

He wrote a letter to the editor of Annals, notifying the journal of the similarity between its paper, “The possible effect of different types of ventilation on reducing operation theatre infections: a meta-analysis,” and “The effect of type of ventilation used in the operating room and surgical site infection: A meta-analysis,” published in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

In his letter, Thomas pointed out several apparent mistakes in the analyses, and also noted similarities between both papers and a 2017 article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, which has been cited 93 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

Despite the similarities Thomas noted, which another surgeon verified with anti-plagiarism software, the journal has not retracted the paper, but flagged it with an expression of concern so readers can “draw their own conclusions.” At the same time, the journal retracted an unrelated article that was also found to be similar to one published elsewhere, then the retraction was changed to an expression of concern, and now neither notice appears online.

This Giving Tuesday, please consider supporting Retraction Watch

Dear Retraction Watch reader:

Sometime this week or early next week, we will publish our 6,000th post. That means we’ve averaged nearly 500 per year since we launched a bit more than 12 years ago.

Wow.

And yet that’s not nearly all we do here at Retraction Watch. We — and by that I mean our researcher Alison Abritis and a small but very merry band of freelancers — maintain the most comprehensive database of retractions available. That database, which at last count contains more than 37,000 retractions, is now used by three leading reference managers — EndNote, Papers, and Zotero — to power their retraction alerts, and has been the basis of scores of scholarly papers.

‘Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate’ paper gets lengthy expression of concern

An article from 2019 that caught some media buzz – including from the New York Times – for its analysis of political speeches now bears an expression of concern that’s almost as long as the original paper.

In “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches,” published in PLOS ONE, the authors concluded that “speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties,” as they stated in their abstract.

But after reading the article, linguist Joe McVeigh, a university teacher at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, wrote an online comment on the article detailing “several fundamental and critical flaws in its methodology.” A key issue: applying the Flesh-Kincaid test, which was developed for assessing the readability of a written text, to political speeches. As McVeigh told us:

Weekend reads: What should happen to a paper by Theranos?; Diederik Stapel continues to be cited; a scientist accused of hiding China ties wins $2 million

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 276. There are more than 37,000 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):

Biotech exec stole an image and reused others while in academia, US federal watchdog says

A pioneer in the field of exosome biology engaged in research misconduct by reusing images he had falsely relabeled in two published papers and several grant applications, according to a U.S. government research watchdog.

The case goes back several years, as the scientist’s former institution seems to have been investigating his work for nearly a decade.

Douglas Taylor, who in the 1970s discovered that tumor cells release exosomes, “used falsely labeled images to falsely report data in figures, and in one finding, intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarized, reused, and falsely labeled an image to falsely report data in a figure,” according to the published finding from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Science paper on sense of taste gets expression of concern as university investigates

Science has published an expression of concern for a recent article on a receptor for bitter taste while the authors’ institution investigates “potential discrepancies” with a figure.

The article, “Structural basis for strychnine activation of human bitter taste receptor TAS2R46,” was published in September of this year.

According to the abstract:

Scientist goes to court to clear his name after fake peer review retractions

A scientist who lost 11 papers for fake peer review and other reasons went to court to pin the misconduct on a coauthor – and received a favorable judgment.

The retractions for Aram Mokarizadeh, a biomedical researcher previously affiliated with the Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences in Iran, were part of a batch of 58 papers in seven journals that Springer and BioMed Central pulled in 2016 after an investigation found “evidence of plagiarism, peer review and authorship manipulation, suggestive of attempts to subvert the peer review and publication system to inappropriately obtain or allocate authorship.”

After our story on the case appeared, Mokarizadeh told us that a coauthor was “responsible for all problems associated with retraction,” and that he had brought a case to court in Iran to prove it.

Weekend reads: ‘Illegal practices in palaeontology’; ‘a fake badge of integrity’; researcher jailed

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 270. There are more than 36,000 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):

Mathematician requests two retractions for “subtle inaccuracies”

A mathematician has requested the retraction of two recently published articles “claiming proofs of big results in number theory,” as one observer put it.

After publication, the author said he “found some subtle inaccuracies” in the work.

The editor-in-chief of the mathematics journal Studia Logica, where the papers were published, posted a notice to the publication’s website weeks ago stating that it had retracted the two articles.

But the online versions of the papers still show no signs of having been retracted, as the editors wait on their publisher, Springer Nature, to process the retractions.

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