Weekend reads: It’s not all publish or perish?; plagiarism hunters; controls on ‘gain of function’ research weaken

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 week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 151.

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: It’s not all publish or perish?; plagiarism hunters; controls on ‘gain of function’ research weaken

Guest editor says journal will retract dozens of inappropriate papers after his email was hacked

Source

What do aerobics and dance training have to do with geology?

If that sounds like an odd question, take a look at more than 70 articles in a special collection of the Arabian Journal of Geosciences, published by Springer Nature, with titles such as:

Continue reading Guest editor says journal will retract dozens of inappropriate papers after his email was hacked

Biotech’s data supporting Alzheimer’s trials under scrutiny

A law firm known for filing shareholder suits says that data supporting a drug company’s plan for trials of its experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease show evidence of manipulation.

Stock in the company, Cassava Biosciences, tumbled yesterday after the FDA posted material from the firm, Labaton Sucharow, and a top research integrity expert tells Retraction Watch he sees near-certain signs of fabrication in the data.

Earlier this week, Labaton Sucharow submitted a “citizen’s petition” to the FDA regarding a regulatory filing from Cassava, and called on the agency to halt trials of Cassava’s drug simulfilam on the grounds that it had: 

Continue reading Biotech’s data supporting Alzheimer’s trials under scrutiny

Second time’s the charm: The author who requested a retraction twice

Cory Xian

As Jason Isbell sings, doing the right thing is the hardest thing to do. But sometimes it’s even harder than it needs to be. Ask Cory Xian. 

When Xian, a bone researcher at the University of South Australia, in Adelaide, and his colleagues found an error in their 2018 paper in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research — a top journal for the field — they notified the editors and asked for a retraction. But the journal demurred, instead issuing a correction for the article, titled “Release of CXCL12 From Apoptotic Skeletal Cells Contributes to Bone Growth Defects Following Dexamethasone Therapy in Rats.”

The correction states that “incorrect photos had been accidentally and mistakenly used by a staff person as representative photos”. 

Xian, the senior author of the article, told us: 

Continue reading Second time’s the charm: The author who requested a retraction twice

Journal retracts more articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

Eight months after a psychology journal retracted a pair of articles that were “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda,” the publication has pulled three more papers — all at least a quarter century old — for the same reason. 

All five papers were written by J. Philippe Rushton, formerly of the University of Western Ontario, who died in 2012.  As we wrote in December 2020, Rushton published dubious studies that promoted tropes of white supremacy, including that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and that:

Continue reading Journal retracts more articles for being “unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda”

Doing the right thing: Co-authors of researcher who covered up data fakery retract paper

via WCH

A group of researchers in Canada who’d collaborated with a one-time rising star in the bone field have retracted a 2014 article after determining that the data were unreliable.

They did so even though the paper was not a focus of the investigations into the work of Abida Sophina “Sophie” Jamal, whose once sparkling career in endocrinology crumbled after an investigation found that she had fabricated data and took elaborate steps to cover her deception — from doctoring patient records to changing the temperature of a freezer at a government blood facility to damage samples that might reveal the fraud. 

Continue reading Doing the right thing: Co-authors of researcher who covered up data fakery retract paper

Readers puzzle over marketing journal’s failures to retract

A marketing journal is taking heat on social media for issuing an expression of concern over a 2019 paper that many readers believe should have been retracted — and correcting another instead of retracting it.

The article now subject to an expression of concern, “Role of Ambient Temperature in Influencing Willingness to Pay in Auctions and Negotiations,” was written by Jayati Sinha, who holds the Macy’s Retailing Professorship at Florida International University and Rajesh Bagchi, of Virginia Tech University. 

According to the abstract:

Continue reading Readers puzzle over marketing journal’s failures to retract

Weekend reads: Fraud in a study of dishonesty; scrutiny of an open access publisher; HHMI prof fired for sexual harassment

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 week at Retraction Watch featured:

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 149.

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: Fraud in a study of dishonesty; scrutiny of an open access publisher; HHMI prof fired for sexual harassment

Meet the alleged brain surgeon who squats on domains, punks journals and listed Wolf Blitzer as a co-author

Wolf Blitzer, not a cardiology researcher

We have a confession right up front: You won’t meet the man — a man who claims to be a brain surgeon, no less — we refer to in the headline. 

That is because, dear reader, we were not able to contact the person who publishes under the name Michael George Zaki Ghali.

What we do know is that someone using Ghali’s name bought two fake web domains for the Karolinska Institutet to make it look as though he was affiliated with the world-famous medical center and published seven dozen papers in peer reviewed journals owned by Elsevier, IMR Press, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. So far, seven those articles have now been retracted, by our count, including recently a 2020 paper in Acta Cardiologica that included CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer as a co-author. [See an update on this post.]

Continue reading Meet the alleged brain surgeon who squats on domains, punks journals and listed Wolf Blitzer as a co-author

Authors crop estimate that was off by a factor of 60 — or $3 trillion

Source

A paper that tried to estimate the cost of invasive species to farming in Africa has been corrected because the researchers made a pair of errors that dramatically inflated their calculations. 

One mistake led the group, from Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Ghana and Kenya, to overstate the cost to African agricultural of invasive vegetation by roughly $3 trillion — yes, that’s trillion with a T. The second error pared their estimate for crop losses due to a single plant species from $11.4 billion to $4.1 billion. 

Now, we’re not suggesting that the corrections negate the overall importance of the research. But we do wonder how errors of this magnitude weren’t immediately obvious to not only the peer reviewers and editors of the article, but to the researchers themselves. After all, the gross domestic product of the entire continent of Africa was an estimated $2.6 trillion in 2019.  

The journal, CABI Agriculture and Bioscience — the official journal of CABI, a global nonprofit group focused on agriculture and the environment — has both a brief correction and a more detailed notice for the May 2021 paper, “Towards estimating the economic cost of invasive alien species to African crop and livestock production”. The short version reads: 

Continue reading Authors crop estimate that was off by a factor of 60 — or $3 trillion