Retraction Watch

Weekend reads: ‘Breakthroughs’ slowing down?; self-publishing among editors; data tampering in space science

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Reddit post prompts retraction of article that called Trump ‘the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter’
Ob-gyn who called criticism ‘racist’ and ‘hate speech’ earns retraction, several expressions of concern
Influential paper linking recessions and left-wing voting patterns retracted
Urologist blames Big Pharma as concerns mount over his research

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 286. There are more than 38,000 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):

Urologist blames Big Pharma as concerns mount over his research

With retractions piling up and more than a dozen expressions of concern now added to the list of his publishing woes, a urologist in Iran claims his research is being targeted by American drugmaker Johnson & Johnson.

Mohammad Reza Safarinejad, who offered no evidence for his allegations, says he retired from academia about 10 years ago and now runs a private clinic in Tehran. He has published scores of studies on topics ranging from treatments for premature ejaculation to saffron’s effect on semen, some of which have garnered hundreds of citations.

Starting in 2011, however, journals began pulling his papers over such issues as failure to verify data and inappropriate statistical analyses. The latest retraction, from August 2022, brings the tally up to 15, according to the Retraction Watch Database. And on January 10, The Journal of Urology issued expressions of concern for 14 of his papers, which have been cited a total of nearly 800 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The journal states:

Influential paper linking recessions and left-wing voting patterns retracted

A highly cited economics paper that suggested people raised during recessions were more likely to vote for left-leaning political parties has been retracted, apparently due to a coding error that rendered the results invalid.

The retraction marks a rarity among economics papers, which research has shown are infrequently retracted compared to papers on other subjects. The article appears to be the first in The Review of Economic Studies to have been retracted for a reason other than publisher error.

The study’s authors, Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, are economists at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the International Monetary Fund, respectively. Giuliano is also the Chauncey J. Medberry Chair in Management at UCLA.

The paper, “Growing up in a Recession,” was published in November 2013. It has been cited 222 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Working papers from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have also cited the article.

Ob-gyn who called criticism ‘racist’ and ‘hate speech’ earns retraction, several expressions of concern

There shouldn’t have been many differences between the women recruited for the three clinical trials: All of them gave birth at the same two Cairo hospitals over a period of less than three years, and all of them were treated to prevent or manage postpartum bleeding. Three samples from this pool of patients, Ben Mol felt, should have had largely similar baseline characteristics.

Yet, mysteriously, the women’s mean age and BMI varied markedly across the studies—from 25 to 34 years and from 25 to 29 kg/m2, respectively—as did the birthweight of their babies.

So the researcher turned data sleuth began digging. His worries only grew. Eventually, he would come to question the integrity of nearly two dozen randomized controlled trials led by Ahmed Maged, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Egypt’s top medical school, Kasr AlAiny at Cairo University.

Now, based in part on Mol’s findings, two journals published by Taylor & Francis have issued a retraction and nine expressions of concern for the following papers:

Reddit post prompts retraction of article that called Trump ‘the main driver of vaccine misinformation on Twitter’

In October 2021, a Reddit user on the r/badscience subforum posted a long critique of an article published in PLOS ONE earlier that year that had analyzed the “anti-vaccination infodemic” on Twitter and concluded that former U.S. president Donald Trump was “the main driver of vaccine misinformation” on the platform before his account was suspended.

The critique, titled “Terrible PlosOne Paper Dissected,” listed concerns about the sample size (50 pro-vaccine and 50 anti-vaccine accounts), method of selecting the sample and control groups, and data analysis. The Redditor also looked at the reviews of the article which PLOS ONE made available, and concluded that “clearly neither reviewer actually read it in any detail.”

The day after the comment was posted, an account for PLOS Communications responded, thanking the user “for your post publication peer review” and saying that PLOS ONE was looking into the article.

Weekend reads: ChatGPT fools scientists; did COVID-19 trials cut corners?; do scientific societies need journals?

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work?

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 285. There are more than 38,000 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):

Was a paper from Taiwan retracted because of a geopolitical dispute?

A study in the journal Smart Materials in Medicine has earned a retraction, seemingly not because of scholarly malfeasance or an inadvertent oversight, but because of a “lack of agreement on affiliation format.”

The crucial fact seems to be that almost all of the article’s authors, including its two senior authors, list affiliations in Taiwan, raising the question if the retraction is based on the geopolitical dispute about whether Taiwan is an independent nation or part of China.

The article, “Anti-microbial/oxidative/inflammatory nanogels accelerate chronic wound healing,” was published online in late 2021. The journal is not indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science, although there are 10 citations of the article listed on the article’s web page as of January 12. There is no Twitter chatter indicating anything amiss with the article’s conclusions or methods, and no discussion about it on PubPeer.

It’s unclear when exactly the paper was retracted. Its cryptic retraction notice states:

Russian publishing watchdog decries ‘retraction misuse’ following ban on ‘LGBT propaganda’

In the wake of a new law that bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and (or) preferences” in Russia, some journals have retracted articles they fear could attract state attention, a move a publishing watchdog in the country has called “self-censorship.”

As we reported in December, the Russian philosophy journal Logos retracted an article about lesbian fashion magazines for being “in violation of standards,” citing the new ban.

More journals have followed suit, according to the Russian Council on Publication Ethics, which issued a statement decrying “retraction misuse” by journals in response to the law, though it also expressed concern for the safety of journal staff and authors if they ignored it. The statement began:

Japanese university asks surgeon to retract eight ‘fraudulent’ papers

An oral surgeon in Japan falsified images in several papers, granted authorship to whomever he saw fit and stored experimental data sloppily, according to an investigation by Showa University in Tokyo, where the physician was a lecturer at the time of the misconduct.

As a result of the findings, the university has recommended retracting eight papers by the surgeon, Masayasu Iwase, according to a translation commissioned by Retraction Watch of a December report from the committee that investigated the case.

The university also is discussing revoking the graduate degrees of two of Iwase’s former students whose dissertations were based on the “fraudulent” papers, the report explains.

Tadashi Hisamitsu, Showa’s president, wrote on the university’s website:

Judge orders OSU cancer researcher to pay $1 million to lawyers from failed libel suit

Lawyers who represented Carlo Croce, a cancer researcher at The Ohio State University in Columbus, in failed libel and defamation suits – and who later sued him for not paying his tab – have won a judgment for $1 million against the scientist.

The judgment, dated Dec. 8, 2022, orders Croce to pay just shy of $1.1 million plus interest to Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter, of Columbus, one of the firms that represented him in his libel lawsuit against the New York Times and his defamation case against David Sanders, a researcher at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., both of which he lost.

The firm sued Croce in 2020, seeking more than $920,000 in unpaid fees. After the case went to trial, a jury awarded the full amount to the firm in damages, and the judge ruled that the lawyers were entitled to prejudgment interest at a rate of 4%, totaling an additional $175,000. The judgment amount can continue accruing interest, and Croce is responsible for the court costs.

In his post-trial decision, judge Richard A. Frye wrote:

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