Stanford prof fights efforts to make him pay at least $75,000 in legal fees after dropping defamation suit

Mark Jacobson

A Stanford University professor who tried to sue a critic and the journal that published an unfavorable view of his work is opposing a judge’s order that he pay $75,000 in legal fees generated in the case. 

In 2017, Mark Jacobson, an engineer who studies energy at the California institution, sued Christopher Clack and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) after the journal published an article which cast doubt on some of the conclusions in a 2015 paper Jacobson had written in PNAS. The amount of the defamation claim? $10 million from each of the two parties, plus punitive damages and “any and all relief.” 

Jacobson withdrew his lawsuit, which also demanded a retraction, in 2018, at which point Clack and the journal fired back. They filed their own suit grounded in the anti-SLAPP — short for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” — statute, in which they asked for Jacobson to pay their legal fees.

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Elsevier makes “sand, sun, sea and sex with strangers” paper disappear following criticism

An Elsevier journal has disappeared a paper claiming that gay men seeking sex on the beach is damaging dunes, after critics lambasted the work as terrible science and an “egregious” attack on gays and bisexuals. 

The article, “Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers, the “five S’s”. Characterizing “cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield [WebArchive link],” argues that the littoral lovemaking habits of some particularly enthusiastic mariners might be damaging key ecological species: 

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Co-author of paper claiming COVID-19 vaccines linked to miscarriage says he’s retracting it

Simon Thornley

A pair of researchers in New Zealand have asked for the retraction of a controversial article on the risk of miscarriage in pregnant women who receive a vaccination against Covid-19, according to one of the co-authors.

Simon Thornley, of the University of Auckland — and an outspoken critic of New Zealand’s efforts to contain the Covid-19 pandemic — and Aleisha Brock, of Whanganui, N.Z., published a reanalysis of a study in which they claimed to have found that as many as 91% of pregnant women miscarry after receiving a Covid jab. 

But after an onslaught of criticism — including a scathing email from an official at the University of Auckland — Thornley tells us he and Brock have decided to retract their paper, although he declined to tell us why. 

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‘I have zero complaints about the process’: Post-publication analysis earns perception paper a flag

Aaron Charlton

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a nine year old paper, which purported to find that people associate morality with brightness (that’s light, not smarts), after a data sleuth found problems with the results. 

The article, “Is It Light or Dark? Recalling Moral Behavior Changes Perception of Brightness,” appeared in Psychological Science in 2012 and was written by a group of marketing researchers at the Winston-Salem State University, in North Carolina, the University of Kansas and the University of Arizona. 

Aaron Charlton, a marketing researcher at Illinois State University who’s involved in replication efforts in his field, told us that he decided to take a closer look at the data in the paper, which he noted had been the subject of two previous attempts to replicate the key findings, after seeing this post on PubPeer. 

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PNAS retracts paper that contributed to lung cancer trial

National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center

A paper that was the subject of a four-page correction in 2018, and which helped inform a now-halted clinical trial of a drug for lung cancer, has been retracted following an institutional investigation concluded that one of the researchers had falsified the data in that article and at least four others. 

And we have learned that Springer Nature should be acting on a different article by the researcher shortly, and has just begun an investigation of yet another.

The PNAS article, which appeared in 2015, was written by Takashi Nojiri, formerly of Osaka University and the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Research Institute, in Japan. As we reported in June, an August 2020 report from National University Corporation Osaka University and National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Hospital concluded that Nojiri committed: 

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Publisher retracts nearly 80 articles over three days

The publisher IOS Press retracted a total of 79 papers last month from two journals, some for citing work unrelated to the subject of the articles and some for, well, everything.

The retraction notice in one of the titles, the Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems reads:

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Weekend reads, double edition: Scamming journals to publish gibberish; a whole issue with nothing but retractions; ‘the unbearable lightness of scientometric indices’

Welcome to another edition of Weekend Reads. Because our site was down for several days starting last Saturday morning, there was no Weekend Reads last week, and this is a double edition.

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 last two weeks at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 190. There are now more than 31,000 retractions in our database — which now powers retraction alerts in EndNote, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately?

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, double edition: Scamming journals to publish gibberish; a whole issue with nothing but retractions; ‘the unbearable lightness of scientometric indices’

IEEE retracts plagiarized paper after Retraction Watch inquiries

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers  (IEEE) has retracted a paper it published in 2006 that was identical to another paper it published that same year.

We learned of the two identical papers — both titled “Delay-dependent robust stability of uncertain discrete singular time-delay systems,” one published in the Proceedings of the 2006 American Control Conference, the other in the Proceedings of the 6th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation (WCICA) — from a reader in early October.

We alerted IEEE to the identical papers on October 7. The next day, a spokesperson said she was initiating an inquiry. And on November 10, the spokesperson sent us this statement:

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Exclusive: University of Glasgow seeking retraction of multiple papers after findings of image manipulation

Miles Houslay

The University of Glasgow is requesting the retraction of multiple papers by a pharmacology researcher who held various positions there for more than a quarter century.

The story begins in December 2016, when biostatistician Steven McKinney posted on PubPeer about a paper by the researcher, Miles Houslay, in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. That paper was eventually retracted in August 2020, but not before McKinney posted a comment on Retraction Watch that caught the eye of the pseudonymous Clare Francis.

Francis pointed us to comments about a total of eight of Houslay’s papers at that time. And in August 2020, when the JBC retraction appeared, Francis forwarded those to the King’s College, London, where Houslay is listed as having a faculty position, and the University of Glasgow, which he left in 2011.

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Behavioral ecologist Jonathan Pruitt’s PhD dissertation withdrawn

Jonathan Pruitt

Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist and Canada 150 Research Chair who has had a dozen papers retracted following allegations of data fraud, now appears to have had his doctoral dissertation withdrawn. 

The news, which was first noted by Nick DiRienzo, who co-authored papers with Pruitt but has been one of the scientists trying to cleanse the scientific record of Pruitt’s problematic work, suggests that Priutt now lacks a PhD, generally considered a requirement for professorships.

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