Weekend reads: Russian co-authorship ban; predatory conferences; ‘Does peer review improve the statistical content of manuscripts?’

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 260. There are more than 35,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Russian co-authorship ban; predatory conferences; ‘Does peer review improve the statistical content of manuscripts?’

One chiropractic manipulation patient injury. Two case reports. Two editor’s notes.

via Neurology

What happens when two different groups from two different medical specialties see a patient, and then write up separate case reports?

Ask teams of doctors in the neurology and rheumatology departments of the Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil. They both published case reports about a patient was injured after undergoing chiropractic spinal cord manipulation. And now both journals have editor’s notes acknowledging dual publication.

The patient’s case appeared in Neurology as “Spinal Cord Injury, Vertebral Artery Dissection, and Cerebellar Strokes After Chiropractic Manipulation” and as “Breaking the diagnosis: ankylosing spondylitis evidenced by cervical fracture following spine manipulation” in the journal Internal and Emergency Medicine. The two publications included the same figure and reported many of the same details about the patient with undiagnosed ankylosing spondylitis who experienced spinal cord injury and cerebellar strokes after experiencing  spinal cord manipulation.

The editors of both journals published notes flagging the cases, an expression of concern in Internal and Emergency Medicine and a “notice of dual publication” in Neurology. 

The notices are nearly identical, and state, in part:

Continue reading One chiropractic manipulation patient injury. Two case reports. Two editor’s notes.

How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions

John Carlisle

In July of 2017, Mohamed Rezk, of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Menoufia University in Egypt, submitted a manuscript to the journal Anesthesia with a colleague. 

The manuscript, “Analgesic and antiemetic effect of Intraperitoneal magnesium sulfate in laparoscopic salpingectomy: a randomized controlled trial,” caught the attention of John Carlisle, an editor at the journal whose name will be familiar to Retraction Watch readers as the sleuth whose statistical analyses have identified hundreds of papers with implausible clinical trial data. 

The baseline data appeared unremarkable, Carlisle told us, but the same wasn’t true of the outcomes data. Of 24 values that could have been odd or even numbers, all of them were even. 

The probability of that was “​​0.000000000000000000000 something,” Carlisle said. 

Continue reading How journal editors kept questionable data about women’s health out of the literature years before retractions

Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids

StellaLife’s Vega Oral Care Recovery Kit

Stephen Barrett, a U.S. physician and founder of Quackwatch, makes a point of calling out homeopathy and other health products and practices that lack evidence. 

In that vein, earlier this year he emailed the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery to critique a 2019 article by Walter Tatch titled “Opioid Prescribing Can Be Reduced in Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Practice,” which has been cited five times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Continue reading Journal sends cease-and-desist letter to a company marketing a homeopathic alternative to opioids

Stanford prof appeals order to pay $428K in legal fees after dropping defamation suit

Mark Jacobson

Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who sued a critic and a scientific journal for $10 million but then dropped the case, is appealing a recent court order that he pay the journal’s publisher more than $400,000 in legal fees. Those fees are based on an anti-SLAPP statute, “designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits filed against people for the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

As we have previously reported, Jacobson:

Continue reading Stanford prof appeals order to pay $428K in legal fees after dropping defamation suit

Weekend reads: Fake reproductive health data alleged; ‘bad brains;’ ‘heinous’ misconduct

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 258. There are more than 35,000 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):

Continue reading Weekend reads: Fake reproductive health data alleged; ‘bad brains;’ ‘heinous’ misconduct

Physics publisher retracting nearly 500 likely paper mill papers

A physics publisher is retracting 494 papers after an investigation “indicated that some papers may have been created, manipulated, and/or sold by a commercial entity” – aka a paper mill.

The vast majority – 463 articles – are from the Journal of Physics: Conference Series, while 21 are from IOP Conference Series: Materials Science & Engineering, and 10 are from IOP Conference Series: Earth & Environmental Science. A bit less than a third – 142 – are appearing today.

In a statement, Kim Eggleton, Head of Peer Review and Research Integrity at IOP Publishing, tells Retraction Watch:

Continue reading Physics publisher retracting nearly 500 likely paper mill papers

Exclusive: NIH researcher resigned amid retractions, including Nature paper

A tenure-track investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a division of the National Institutes of Health, resigned in March, as questions mounted about her work, Retraction Watch has learned. 

Jennifer Martinez has retracted at least two papers, including a 2016 Nature paper with the chair of the immunology department at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., and has another marked with an expression of concern.  

The retraction is the first for Douglas R. Green of St. Jude, although he’s had a handful of corrections and two other papers he published in Nature have been questioned by scientists who couldn’t replicate the results. 

After a postdoc at St. Jude, Martinez led an independent research program at NIEHS in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina since 2015, according to an online CV. She resigned from NIEHS in March and a federal research watchdog is looking into her work, a spokesperson told us:

Continue reading Exclusive: NIH researcher resigned amid retractions, including Nature paper

Didier Raoult papers earn expressions of concern as criminal investigation gets underway

Didier Raoult

A leading microbiology society has issued expressions of concern for four six papers from a group in France led by the controversial scientist Didier Raoult, whose lab is under investigation by the  University of Aix Marseille for “serious malfunctions.” 

The move follows the release last month of a 157-page report by investigators related to France’s Health Ministry the university into Raoult’s research and news that a criminal investigation is underway. 

As we and others have reported, Raoult was among the most prominent floggers of the notion that hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. But while his studies of the drug might have influenced certain American politicians, they and other research from his group haven’t withstood the scrutiny of his peers. 

He also has attempted to silence critics of his work, notably Elisabeth Bik, using legal threats and harassment. 

Continue reading Didier Raoult papers earn expressions of concern as criminal investigation gets underway

Brain tumor researchers retract paper from Science journal

A detail from Fig. 6 of the now-retracted paper

A brain tumor researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has retracted a paper from Science Translational Medicine, and is a co-author on an article that another journal is examining. 

The problems in both papers, and several others with shared authors, came to light via comments on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik and a pseudonymous commenter. 

The Science Translational Medicine paper, “A subset of PARP inhibitors induces lethal telomere fusion in ALT-dependent tumor cells,” was published last May by a group led by Russell O. Pieper, director of basic science in the UCSF Brain Tumor Center and vice-chairman of the UCSF department of neurological surgery. The paper has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Continue reading Brain tumor researchers retract paper from Science journal