Piero Anversa, a former star researcher at Harvard Medical School who left the institution under a cloud, is up to 18 retractions. But that’s barely half of the 31 papers by Anversa’s group that Harvard has requested journals pull over concerns about the integrity of the findings. The two articles, published in the Proceedings of … Continue reading Drip, drip: Former Harvard stem cell researcher up to 18 retractions
An influential group that studies the economic burden of medical care has temporarily removed from its website a draft report about the cost-effectiveness of drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis amid questions about the modeling researchers used in their analysis. The group initially did little to explain the move, despite having issued a press release for … Continue reading Health care group withdraws rheumatoid arthritis drug report
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 lots of news involving Nature, including the retraction of a … Continue reading Weekend reads: Jailed for publishing a paper; pushing back on vaping research; “sugar daddy science”
A pair of perfume researchers in England have lost a 2019 paper on what makes a scent appealing because, ahem, something about the data didn’t smell quite right. The article was titled “Social success of perfumes,” and it appeared in July in PLOS ONE. There was a press release and a university writeup about the … Continue reading PLOS ONE retracts perfume study when data don’t pass the sniff test
A highly controversial 2018 paper suggesting that too much bent-neck staring at your cell phone could sprout, in the words of one of the authors, a “horn” on the back of your head is — perhaps unsurprisingly — getting corrected. The article, “Prominent exostosis projecting from the occipital squama more substantial and prevalent in young … Continue reading ‘Text neck’ — aka ‘horns’ — paper earns corrections
A tenured professor of history at Columbia University will be stepping down at the end of next year after an investigating committee at the school found “incontrovertible evidence of research misconduct” in his controversial 2013 book. Charles King Armstrong, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, was found to have “cited … Continue reading Columbia historian stepping down after plagiarism finding
A group of ophthalmology researchers in China got caught trying to pull the wool over the eyes of readers by falsely claiming to have used a therapy that doesn’t exist. As its title would indicate, the article, “Anti-angiogenic effect of Interleukin-26 in oxygen-induced retinopathy mice via inhibiting NFATc1-VEGF pathway,” by a team from Jinhua Municipal … Continue reading ‘The problem is that there is no IL-26 gene in the mouse’ — an exasperated letter leads to a retraction
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 claimed that scientists were … Continue reading Weekend reads: Citation manipulation gone wild; astrology meets research; a classic mistake in a study of free will
It’s no secret that retractions have a stigma, which is very likely part of why authors often resist the move — even when honest error is involved. There have been at least a few proposals to change the nomenclature for some retractions over the years, from turning them into “amendments” to a new taxonomy. Erica … Continue reading A publisher wants to destigmatize retractions. Here’s how.
Is it possible for just one researcher to perform a clinical trial of more than 200 participants? According to the editorial board of the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, an Elsevier title, the answer would seem to be no. The journal has decided to retract a 2016 paper in which the … Continue reading “Questioned as implausible:” Journal retracts paper because a researcher claimed to perform a large clinical trial single-handedly