You want to do what? Paper on anal swabs for COVID-19 retracted for ethical issues

An article claiming that anal swabs can be used to detect SARS-CoV-2 in patients cured of Covid-19 has been retracted after the journal found that the authors failed to get permission from the patients to conduct the study.  To be clear: We’re not sure if the researchers — from Weihai Municipal Hospital, in Shandong, China … Continue reading You want to do what? Paper on anal swabs for COVID-19 retracted for ethical issues

Caught Our Notice: A paper mistakenly ID’d a patient. Its retraction notice did, too. (Oops!)

What Caught Our Attention: Last year, a journal retracted a paper about a child who developed a rare complication related to the inherited disorder Gaucher Disease, after realizing it had inadvertently identified the child. It wasn’t an immediately obvious mistake — the authors listed the drugs the patient was taking, and in the case of … Continue reading Caught Our Notice: A paper mistakenly ID’d a patient. Its retraction notice did, too. (Oops!)

Ethics, authorship concerns sink homeopathy paper by researchers arrested last year

For a host of reasons, a journal has retracted a paper co-authored by a researcher who reportedly once faced charges of practicing medicine without proper qualifications. According to the retraction notice for “Psorinum Therapy in Treating Stomach, Gall Bladder, Pancreatic, and Liver Cancers: A Prospective Clinical Study,” published Dec. 8, 2010 in Evidence-Based Complementary and … Continue reading Ethics, authorship concerns sink homeopathy paper by researchers arrested last year

Journal bans author for three years after retracting paper with “serious ethical” problems

An anatomy journal has banned a researcher from submitting papers for three years after determining one of his recently published papers suffered from “serious ethical” issues. According to Jae Seung Kang, associate editor at the journal Anatomy and Cell Biology (ACB), the paper’s sole author—Jae Chul Lee—falsified both his affiliation and approval for conducting animal […]

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Caught Our Notice: Reporter’s inquiry prompts financial disclosure in autism paper

Title: Promoting child-initiated social-communication in children with autism: Son-Rise Program intervention effects What caught our attention: When journalist Brendan Borrell was investigating a controversial autism treatment program for Spectrum, he came across a study where lead author Kat Houghton failed to disclose a prior relationship with the treatment center that taught the program, called Son-Rise. The Spectrum article notes: […]

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Ethical concerns arise for head of controversial stem cell clinic

Journals are raising ethical concerns about the research of a doctor who offers controversial embryonic stem cell treatments. Two journals have issued expressions of concern for three papers by Geeta Shroff, who was the subject of a 2012 CNN investigative documentary. All cite ethical concerns; one mentions the potential link between the procedure the authors […]

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Uni dings schizophrenia studies for problems with informed consent, other flaws

Psychiatry journals have retracted two papers evaluating a schizophrenia drug after a university in Japan flagged issues, such as a lack of written informed consent. The papers—published in Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical & Experimental in 2012 and Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences in 2014—examined the safety and effectiveness of an antipsychotic drug in patients with schizophrenia. According […]

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Nightmare scenario: Text stolen from manuscript during review

A food science journal has retracted a paper over “a breach of reviewer confidentiality,” after editors learned it contained text from an unpublished manuscript — which one of the authors appears to have reviewed for another journal. The publisher and editors-in-chief of the Journal of Food Process Engineering became aware of the breach when the author of […]

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Author says he lied about approval for animal research

A researcher in South Korea has retracted a 2015 paper after telling the journal he falsified the institutional approval required to conduct the animal experiments. In the article, the author explicitly says that the Animal Experiment Review Board of a university based in Seoul, South Korea approved the experiments, but according to the journal, “the […]

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Does a paywall protect patient privacy?

A psychoanalyst has retracted an award-winning 2016 paper over concerns that it contained “sensitive” patient information. On July 15, Judith L. Mitrani, a psychoanalyst based in California, published an article that included “sensitive clinical material” about a patient. Although we do not know what prompted the concerns, on November 21, Mitrani, in agreement with the journal’s editor-in-chief and publisher, […]

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