A gastroenterology journal has issued expressions of concern for forty articles about a probiotic formulation that has been at the center of a long-running legal saga in the United States and Europe.
The articles appeared in the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis, the official journal of the European Crohn’s and Colitis Organisation (ECCO) and date back to 2007. All mention a proprietary formulation of probiotics – and therein lies the tale.
A group of heart researchers in China now have four expressions of concern, along with a retraction, for questions about the reliability of their data.
The latest expressions of concern for the team, led by Bu Lang Gao, of Shijiazhuang First Hospital of Hebei Medical University, involves a 2019 paper in Springer Nature’s Scientific Reports titled “Asymmetrical middle cerebral artery bifurcations are more vulnerable to aneurysm formation.”
Here’s the notice for the article, which has been cited 4 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science:
Through no fault of his own, Martin Bordewieck is oh-for-one in his publishing career.
The psychology researcher at Ruhr-University Bochum, in Germany, published his very first paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology in August 2020 – only to lose the article to retraction because of a screw-up by the journal.
Malte Elson, Bordewieck’s co-author – whose name might be familiar to readers of Retraction Watch for his work as a data sleuth – called the situation “a weird one”:
A group of heart researchers have lost two meeting abstracts after, according to one of the authors, companies said the data were proprietary and couldn’t be published. But it’s not clear the companies did so.
The studies appeared in the journal Heart Rhythm, the official journal of the Heart Rhythm Society, and were presented at the group’s 2021 annual meeting.
The first author on both abstracts was Andrea Natale, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Texas Cardiac Arrhythmia Institute at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin. We wrote about Natale in 2016, after the researcher lost a paper in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology – again based on work he presented at the Heart Rhythm Society conference about which he raised concerns over industry meddling. (Natale disputes that he was the first author on the now-retracted posters, for reasons that aren’t clear to us.)
Last year, our group noticed an improper analysis of a purported cluster randomized trial (cRCT) in eClinicalMedicine, a Lancet journal, and requested deidentified raw data from the authors to conduct a proper analysis for the study design.
Things were off to a good start. The authors shared their data immediately – which is commendable and, in our experience, rare. We reanalyzed the data using valid statistical procedures, which overturned the published conclusions. We subsequently submitted a manuscript describing our findings to the journal where the original paper was published.
The editor of a Science family journal waited three years before beginning the process of retracting a paper after learning that the University of Wisconsin at Madison had found duplication and mislabeling but no misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.
That prompted us to submit a public records request on November 12 for the investigation as well as any correspondence between the university and the journal. In a response on January 12, the university denied our request for the report of the investigation, saying that “There is a review still underway at the federal level regarding this issue.” (That is a good reminder of how long the U.S. Office of Research Integrity can take to review such investigations.)
But the university released correspondence between Deric Wheeler, the corresponding author of the paper, and John Foley, the editor of the journal, which we’ve made available here. The thread begins on July 6, 2021 – just one month shy of three years after Foley learned of an investigation into the research – with an email from Foley in which the editor acknowledged “an egregious delay”:
A PLOS journal has issued an expression of concern for a 2018 paper which claimed that ivermectin could be useful as a way to control dengue fever.
In fact, the reason the journal re-examined the article was because the hype about the use of ivermectin for Covid-19 led at least one skeptic to take a closer look at the study – and he didn’t like what he saw.
The article, “Antivirus effectiveness of ivermectin on dengue virus type 2 in Aedes albopictus,” was written by a group in China led by Tie-Long Xu, of the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the study, which appeared on PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases:
The ‘publish or perish’ culture is no longer reserved for academic faculty and post-doctoral fellows. The paradigm has spilled over (or bled into) medical training, aided by the digital revolution. The widespread availability of online library catalogs and referencing software has enabled the mass production of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
With all of that in mind, the orthopaedic surgery residents at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, gathered virtually for their annual research day to debate whether they supported or rejected the status quo that residents be encouraged to publish systematic reviews and meta-analyses. At the start of the debate, following an opening Visiting Professor Presentation on trends in retractions by Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky, 58% of the residents opposed the status quo, while 42% supported it.
