Retraction Watch

Russian philosophy journal cites law banning “LGBT propaganda” in retraction

A Russian philosophy journal has retracted a paper about lesbian fashion magazines, citing a newly passed law that bans “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and (or) preferences.”

The journal Logos, which describes itself as “the leading Russian-language journal in the fields of philosophy, social sciences, humanities and cultural studies” and counts the philosopher Slavoj Žižek as a member of its editorial council, earlier this month retracted a paper titled “Looking good: The lesbian gaze and fashion imagery.”

The paper, by Reina Lewis of the London College of Fashion, still appears online, but an entry on the Russian database eLIBRARY indicates it was retracted for being “in violation of standards.” The notice continued:

Nearing 5,000 retractions: A review of 2022

Retractions of a given year’s publications as a percentage of papers published in science and engineering. Retraction data from Retraction Watch Database, overall publication figures via U.S. NSF.

In 2002, journals retracted 119 papers from the scientific literature.

What a difference two decades make.

On several occasions this year, publishers announced they were retracting several times that number, all at once. (For some of the stories among 2022’s retractions that captured the most attention, see our 10th annual roundup for The Scientist.)

This year’s 4,600-plus retractions bring the total in the Retraction Watch Database to more than 37,000 at the time of this writing.

Weekend reads: UCSF apologizes for prison research; top judge in Mexico accused of plagiarism; peer review under scrutiny

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Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 280. 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):

That paper with the ‘T’ error bars was just retracted

Remember the paper that made the rounds on Twitter after readers discovered that the error bars in one of its figures were really just capital Ts?

Well, it’s now been retracted, with the notice citing “concerns about the article’s scientific reliability.”

Error bars are supposed to express the statistical uncertainty of a measurement depicted in a graph, but the ones in this paper appeared to be capital letter Ts pasted on for looks.

As we mentioned in a previous post, the error bars were just the most obvious strange thing about the paper, “Monitoring of Sports Health Indicators Based on Wearable Nanobiosensors,” which was published earlier this year in a special issue of the Hindawi journal Advances in Materials Science and Engineering.

Retraction Watch grows again, thanks to a $250,000 grant from the WoodNext Foundation

Dear Retraction Watch readers, we have some exciting news to share.

The WoodNext Foundation has awarded The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent 501(c)3 nonprofit, a two-year $250,000 grant that will allow us to add another editor.

The WoodNext Foundation is the philanthropy of tech innovator and Roku CEO/founder Anthony Wood and his wife Susan, and its mission is “to advance human progress and remove obstacles to a fulfilling life.”

With the grant, we have hired Frederik Joelving, an experienced investigative reporter focused on health and science, and added to our freelance budget. Joelving, who is based in Copenhagen, will start on January 3. His award-winning work has had a big impact, including a ban by the Indian government on lucrative but troubling sales practices by drugmakers.

The top 10 retraction stories of 2022

What retractions grabbed the most attention in 2022?

As we’ve now done for a decade, we took a look through the year’s stories about retractions for our friends at The Scientist and gathered the ten that seemed to most capture the limelight. As we write there, the cases ranged from “typo-laden code in psychedelics research to paper mills and plagiarism.”

Contamination leads to swift retraction for Science paper on the origins of Omicron in Africa

The authors of a paper that proposed the Omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 had evolved in Western Africa months before it was first detected in South Africa have retracted their study after discovering contamination in their samples, as several scientists had suggested on Twitter was the case.

The article, “Gradual emergence followed by exponential spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Africa,” was published in Science on December 1 by a team led by Jan Felix Drexler of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Soon after publication, many geneticists expressed skepticism on social media about the study, including questioning whether the results came from contamination during the sequencing process.

Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tweeted on December 4 about “weaknesses” in the study, including that “the quality of the sequences seems problematic”:

Contempt judgment in penile implant spat leads to retraction

The authors of a 2021 paper on a method of male enhancement have been forced to retract the paper after losing a legal battle over the technology.

At the heart (er, groin?) of the matter is a dispute over the ownership of a penile implant. According to court documents, James Elist, a urologist in Beverly Hills, Calif., developed the device, which he commercialized as Penuma for men who want a bit more than nature provided.

Penuma received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2004, becoming the first such product to reach the market. (As Elist told GQ in 2016, the surgically-implanted devices come only in large sizes because “nobody wants a small.”)

Elist alleges in a lawsuit that in 2018, a urologist in Texas named Robert Cornell contacted him with questions about how to use the Penuma in practice – questions the California physician claims were really efforts at corporate espionage:

Article on sexual orientation and psych disorders retracted – without the author’s knowledge, he says

A paper about the potential influence of neurotransmitters on the development of sexual orientation and psychiatric disorders that caught flack on social media a year ago has now been retracted – so recently that the corresponding author said he didn’t know about the retraction until we asked him about it.

Late last year, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, an Elsevier journal, published an expression of concern for the article “Sexual orientation, neuropsychiatric disorders and the neurotransmitters involved.” It was published online in September 2021 and has not been cited, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The notice said only that “some readers have raised concerns” about the article, which the journal was discussing the the authors, a group led by Dick Swaab of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam.

Weekend reads: Fringe race science and journals; flags for Stanford president’s papers; rise and fall of peer review

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 279. 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):

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