Retraction Watch

Psych journal in revolt as it publishes paper saying masturbation and gay sex are harmful

Several psychiatry researchers have been unsuccessfully seeking distance from a dodgy journal with which they’re affiliated – and which has now published an article claiming homosexuality and masturbation deserve to be considered (or reconsidered, as the case may be) mental illnesses.

The 2021 paper, “Review of Removing Homosexuality and Masturbation from the List of Sexual Dysfunctions in DSM,” was written by Sayed Ali Marashi, of the Department of Psychology at Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in Iran It appeared in Clinical Schizophrenia & Related Psychoses.

Oddly, the header text on the paper reads “Metallurgical Investigation of Tie Rod used for lifting Ferro-Alloy during Steel Making: A Safety Issues.”

According to the article:

Study of cryotherapy for COVID-19 anosmia fails the sniff test

The authors of a study suggesting that a deep freeze might help reverse one of the curious complications of COVID-19 have put their paper on ice after determining that they lacked adequate ethics approval for the research.

“Whole-Body Cryotherapy as an Innovative Treatment for COVID 19-Induced Anosmia-Hyposmia: A Feasibility Study,” was written by a group in France led by Fabien D. Legrand, of the University of Reims. The article appeared online this January in the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine.

The randomized study looked at the effect of cryotherapy in 45 people whose sense of smell had been disrupted by COVID. Two-thirds received either high- or low-dose cryotherapy – which Legrand’s team defined as exposure to “extremely low temperatures (−60°C to −110°C) in a double Cryoair chamber (MECOTEC, Pforzheim, Germany) for 3 min” – while a third were assigned to a control group.

According to the investigators, whose affiliations included the French Society of Whole-Body Cryotherapy — and who nonetheless registered their protocol in the Iranian Registry of Clinical Trials:

Weekend reads: Journals’ Russia bans; a chronic fatigue syndrome retraction; a Twitter retraction notice feature?

Would you consider a donation to support Weekend Reads, and our daily work? Thanks in advance.

The week at Retraction Watch featured:

Authors request retraction of study in Nature journal and look into four more papers
Study on teen pot use goes up in smoke, then reappears
UNC-Chapel Hill vice chancellor resigns post after admitting to plagiarism
Lancet journal retracts, replaces paper on treatment for pancreatic cancer
UNC-Chapel Hill vice chancellor admits to plagiarism
Often, retractions take years. This one took three days.
Engineers’ research starts to look shaky as retractions mount

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to 214. There are now more than 32,000 retractions in our database — which now 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):

Authors request retraction of study in Nature journal and look into four more papers

A group of researchers at the University of Chicago has asked a Nature journal to retract a paper after PubPeer commenters pointed out numerous duplicated images in the article.

The paper, “Synergistic checkpoint-blockade and radiotherapy–radiodynamic therapy via an immunomodulatory nanoscale metal–organic framework,” was published last month in Nature Biomedical Engineering. According to its senior author, Wenbin Lin, the technology is already in a human trial.

After five different comments on PubPeer, Lin at first said he and his colleagues would correct the paper:

Study on teen pot use goes up in smoke, then reappears

A JAMA journal has retracted and replaced a widely circulated 2021 paper which purported to find that pot use among adolescents drops when states make the drug legal.

The article, “Association of Marijuana Legalization With Marijuana Use Among US High School Students, 1993-2019,” appeared in JAMA Network Open and received a bale of attention in mainstream and social media. As GreenEntrepreneur reported:

A September 2021 study of high school use between 1993 and 2019 used the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) to determine that adult-use laws did not increase teen use. After two years, states with adult-use laws saw decreases in usage.

But as readers soon pointed out, the findings were schwag. According to the notice:

UNC-Chapel Hill vice chancellor resigns post after admitting to plagiarism

Terry Magnuson, the vice chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s medical school, has resigned from that post two days after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity said that he had admitted to plagiarizing text in an NIH grant application.

As we reported March 8, Magnuson

“engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarizing text” from two guides, material from a company that makes sequencing kits, and a review article, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Magnuson did not respond to our requests for comment earlier this week about whether the finding would have any effect on his positions at UNC. But in a letter today to the “Carolina Community,” chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz and provost and chief academic officer J. Christopher Clemens wrote:

Lancet journal retracts, replaces paper on treatment for pancreatic cancer

A Lancet journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 paper on the treatment of pancreatic cancer over an error that prompted an institutional investigation.

The article, “Stereotactic body radiotherapy plus pembrolizumab and trametinib versus stereotactic body radiotherapy plus gemcitabine for locally recurrent pancreatic cancer after surgical resection: an open-label, randomised, controlled, phase 2 trial,” appeared last July in Lancet Oncology and received a significant amount of attention on social media. It has already been cited seven times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

According to the journal, after publication readers notified the editors about potential problems with the data – in particular, apparent issues with the survival curves in study. In October 2021, the journal published a letter to the editor by a group in Japan detailing the concerns and stating that:

UNC-Chapel Hill vice chancellor admits to plagiarism

The vice chancellor for research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s medical school has admitted to plagiarizing text in an NIH grant application, according to a U.S. federal watchdog.

Terry Magnuson, who serves as the Kay M. & Van L. Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of Genetics at UNC-Chapel Hill as well as vice chancellor for research, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly plagiarizing text” from two guides, material from a company that makes sequencing kits, and a review article, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

[See an update on this post.]

Magnuson submitted the plagiarizing grant application on March 1, 2021. He has received NIH funding as recently as August, and over his career has been a principal investigator on more than $50 million in grants from the agency.

Often, retractions take years. This one took three days.

“The retraction that took years” is a common enough refrain on Retraction Watch that it might as be its own genre. Here’s one that didn’t.

A journal wasted no time pouncing on a suspect paper, retracting the 2016 article just three days after a commenter flagged concerns about the images in the work on PubPeer.

As the commenter, Actinopolyspora biskrensis, wrote:

Engineers’ research starts to look shaky as retractions mount

A group of structural engineering researchers based in Iran has lost at least five papers for problems with the data – and a data sleuth says more look shaky, too.

Four of the articles appeared in Construction and Building Materials between 2018 and 2020 and were written by a changing cast of characters with two constants: Mansour Ghalehnovi and Arash Karimipour, both of the Department of Civil Engineering at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. Karimipour’s LinkedIn profile lists an affiliation with the University of Texas at El Paso from 2019 to January of this year.

The journal, an Elsevier title, says it began investigating the papers after a whistleblower raised questions about the integrity of the data. In some cases, for example, data in one article were found in other papers but were represented as demonstrating different materials. The authors also used images from other researchers or the internet without proper attribution.

Here’s the notice for “Experimental study on the flexural behaviour and ductility ratio of steel fibres coarse recycled aggregate concrete beams,” from 2018:

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