Retracted studies and papers

Not the latest, but interesting via emphasis on the role of tortured phrases and other matters.

Meet a sleuth whose work has resulted in more than 850 retractions
https://retractionwatch.com/2022/10...ted-in-more-than-850-retractions/#more-125898

INTRO: Nick Wise had always been “slightly interested” in research integrity and fraud, just from working in science.

Then, last July, from following image sleuth Elisabeth Bik on Twitter, he learned about the work of Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, and Alexander Magazinov identifying “tortured phrases” in published papers.

Such phrases – such as “bosom peril,” meaning “breast cancer” – are computer-generated with translation or paraphrasing software, perhaps by authors seeking to fill out their manuscripts or avoid plagiarism detection.

Cabanac, Labbé, and Magazinov had started with tortured phrases in the field of computer science, so Wise decided to try his hand at finding them in his own field, fluid dynamics.

He got a thesaurus widget, started plugging in phrases like “heat transfer,” and Googled the results – “heat move,” “warmth exchange,” etc.

“Up popped a load of papers,” said Wise, age 30, who recently wrapped up his PhD in architectural fluid dynamics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and will be starting a postdoc there soon.

It was the beginning of a sleuthing hobby that has already resulted in more than 850 retractions... (MORE - details)
 
This is more in the category of science publishing continuing its descent into disrepute. Retraction not applicable since these "fashionable nonsense" editorials and opines paraded by various science publications were never legit science material to begin with.

If you've suspected occasionally that the "soft sciences" (social sciences slash psychological sciences and the gamut of human-focused disciplines) are sometimes little more than an apologetics apparatus[1] for justifying the philosophical (ethical) and political treatises outputted by humanities scholars (which become Bible-like quotes and mottos of activists years or decades later), then you will probably want to save these links.

DISPLACED FOOTNOTE: [1] But here dabbling in "motivated research" rather than the motivated reasoning [arguments] usually attributed to such defenders of a religion or political ideology.

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Scientific American goes defensive; tries to pretend that every social justice screed is a “science story”
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022...ery-social-justice-screed-is-a-science-story/

INTRO (Jerry Coyne): The old saying goes that “all science is political”, a saying that is true only if you stretch the meaning of either “science” or “political”. I’m baffled, for instance, to understand how my work on the genetics of hybrid sterility in Drosophila is political. But don’t worry: the ideologues will find a way to make it so. “You’re doing your work in the milieu of a culture,” they’ll babble, “and decisions about what to fund and publish are explicitly political.” Blah blah blah.

But this trope has just been taken up by the editors of Scientific American, which, as you know, has gone “progressive leftist” (aka “woke”) over the last couple of years. I’ve called them out on this a number of times (see all my posts here)—not only for littering a science magazine with politics that are irrelevant to the magazine’s original mission, but also for doing so in a silly way...

Several people have gone after the magazine for its transformation into an arm of wokeness. Besides me, they include Michael Shermer, who wrote over 200 columns for the magazine, but was given a pink slip because he was deemed ideologically impure (see his video on the issue here).

Now, apparently stung by the criticism, the editors of the magazine have written an editorial explaining their wokeness. The title below tells the tale. Every story, they claim, is a science story, including stories about social justice. (What they should have said is that “every social justice story is a science story.”) Either way, their defensiveness doesn’t address the fact that people read the magazine largely or entirely for the science, and can get social justice rants in a gazillion other places. And in response to the criticism of both inappropriateness and scientific accuracy, they promulgate still more scientific inaccuracy and then blame the criticism on—yes, you got it—”wealthy white men”... (MORE - details)

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Here's a smidgen from the Stuart Ritchie article that Coyne refers to in his update.

Science is political - and that's a bad thing
https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/science-is-political

People who say “science is political” usually aren’t just stating facts - they’re trying to push something on you. Don’t let them.

EXCERPTS: . . . Indeed, this phrase—“Science and Politics are Inseparable”—was the title of a Nature editorial in 2020, and it’s not hard to find other examples in popular-science publications:

* Science Has Always Been Inseparable From Politics (Scientific American)

* News Flash: Science Has Always Been Political (American Scientist)

* Science Is Political (Chemistry World)

* Yes, Science Is Political (Scientific American)

What does “science is political” mean? Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of what people might mean when they say “science is political”: [See the article for that list.]

[...] There’s no argument from me about any of those points. These are all absolutely true. I wrote a whole book about how biases, some of them political, can dramatically affect research in all sorts of ways. But these are just factual statements - and I don’t think the people who always tell you that “science is political” are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun of it. They want to make one of two points... (MORE - missing details)

See the article for the elaboration on those two points, along with the rest:

1. The argument from inevitability
2. The activist’s argument

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As an additional item not featured in the Coyne blog piece above, here's a recent climate change diatribe where the authors literally appeal to the Marxist pseudoscience offshoot "cultural hegemony", as if this conspiracy obsessed precursor/contributor to anti-Western postmodernist drivel was a valid component of science.

A technologically advanced society is choosing to destroy itself. It’s both fascinating and horrifying
https://theconversation.com/a-techn...th-fascinating-and-horrifying-to-watch-192939

Just because pop-marketed CRT fads and various amen! shouts of "privilege" are stylish affectations among the young crusader set is no excuse for careless failure to obscure what this stuff is intellectually descended from. We should never directly address items like "hegemony" or Gramsci by name. For Pete's sake, the relabeling of old inspirations and ultimate goals is part of Leftism Tactics 101. ;)

Note that climate change is indeed a real threat, but when even some of its proponents blatantly assimilate it into or affiliate it with left-wing agenda, then little wonder it has been met with skepticism over the years.

IOW, these publications overtly advertising (out of pride?) that science is globally political (the topic above) isn't doing humanity a favor. Even if it may be locally/contingently true with respect to certain administrators of institutions (their policies) and a bevy of scientists themselves (particularly their work in the "human sciences"). This in contrast to the naïve, idealized conceptions of science being marvelously impartial, unbiased (a vision sublimely, abstractly removed from the dirty world we concretely, particularly abide in).

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NOTE: You'll have to discern the in-line links below on your own. I'm not adding underline and bold tags to each one. In some cases, your browser may automatically underline them anyway, unless you've disabled that feature in settings, as I have (because I don't like reading a typical web page that would otherwise be cluttered with countless underlines).

I realize that 85% of those in here have one foot in the grave, and can barely see or hear at that stage, along with suffering cognitive deficits. ;)

But enough is enough, when it comes to compensating for this forum's tech management laziness of not providing color-highlighted links. Of literally going the opposite direction and obscuring them with a faded grey.

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Who Is Responsible For Research Fraud Anyway?
https://goodscience.substack.com/p/who-is-responsible-for-research-fraud

EXCERPTS: The President of Stanford (Marc Tessier-Lavigne) has recently come under investigation for a series of neuroscience papers that apparently had fake imagery in them. It remains to be seen how it will all play out.

[...] This is a well-known phenomenon in biomedicine, if not other fields as well, and it seems problematic at best. It’s how you end up with absurdities like the discredited French scholar Didier Raoult, who is listed as an author on 2,113 papers that came out of his lab. Obviously, no one has that many papers—that’s one paper a week for 40 years—unless other people are doing most of the actual work.

So, was Tessier-Lavigne actually responsible for creating any alleged fraud? I’m guessing not. It was probably other people far below him who were responsible. And that’s often the excuse in such situations... (MORE - details)
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Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that's a great thing
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

INTRO (excerpts): For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

[...] Maybe nobody objected because the hypothesis seemed so obviously true: science will be better off if we have someone check every paper and reject the ones that don’t pass muster. They called it “peer review.”

This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church...

[...] That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals...

[...] Now pretty much every journal uses outside experts to vet papers, and papers that don’t please reviewers get rejected...

[...] This is the grand experiment we’ve been running for six decades. The results are in. It failed... (MORE - missing details)
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A once respected biology journal indicts evolutionary biology for ableism
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2022...nal-indicts-evolutionary-biology-for-ableism/

INTRO (Jerry Coyne): It’s one thing when magazines like Scientific American go all catawampus on science, but another entirely when a good scientific journal itself succumbs to wokeness. Sadly, this is happening, and nowhere more pervasively than in biology, especially evolutionary biology, where one is able to indict famous biologists of the past (including Mendel!), for both eugenics and racism. Now, however, we’re also being indicted for ableism.

The article below, from July’s American Naturalist (one of the major journals in ecology and evolutionary biology) shows two things. First, it’s one of the more ludicrous examples of science policing I’ve seen. Second, it shows how the American Society of Naturalists, which publishes the journal, has gone down the same woke road as the other ecology and evolution societies... (MORE - details)
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Paleontologist accused of making up data on dinosaur-killing asteroid impact
https://gizmodo.com/robert-depalma-accused-faking-data-tanis-fossils-1849899876

INTRO: In December 2021, a team of paleontologists published data suggesting that the asteroid impact that ended the reign of dinosaurs could be pinned down to a season—springtime, 66 million years ago—thanks to an analysis of fossilized fish remains at a famous site in North Dakota. Now, a different group of researchers is accusing the former group of faking their data; the journal that published the research has added an editor’s note to the paper saying the data is under review... (MORE - details)
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Stanford University’s fickle commitment to science (Part 1)
https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/01/09/stanford-university’s-fickle-commitment-science-part-1-16754

EXCERPTS: Stanford University [...] is one of the great research institutions in the world ... superb science in academic departments but often uncritically embracing trendy notions that contradict its well-earned reputation as a cutting-edge, science-grounded institution.

[...] a few Stanford professors have not distinguished themselves well during the COVID-19 pandemic...

[...] Several scientific articles coauthored by its president, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne, in prestigious journals are being reviewed for possible professional misconduct...

[...] And then there is the Orwellian "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative," which Stanford's political correctness mavens published last year.

[...] there are systematic, long-standing, anti-scientific tendencies at Stanford that receive little attention. Often, the university allows its relentless virtue signaling to overwhelm rationality and a commitment to science...

[...] Stanford embraces a view of agricultural sustainability that came into fashion in the 1980s and 1990s, was flawed then, and is even more obviously so now... (MORE - missing details)
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Ideology stomps all over chemistry in a new paper
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/01/15/ideology-stomps-all-over-chemistry-in-a-new-paper/

INTRO: There are two ways I can criticize the uber-woke paper below that was published in from The Journal of Chemical Education (an organ of the American Chemical Society). I could go through it in detail and point out the fallacies and undocumented claims, and note where “progressive” ideology simply overwhelms the science. I could highlight why it’s a bit of hyper-Left propaganda, designed to force students in a Chemistry, Feminism and STEM course to think in a certain way.

Or I could simply mock it as an example of politicized science that is so over the top that it could appear without change in The Onion.

Way #1 would waste a lot of my time, and I’ve gone through this kind of exegesis many times before. Way #2 would bring out the splenetic readers who say that I shouldn’t make fun of dumb papers like this but instead take them apart line by line—that mockery is not an effective weapon. But it is. Why else would Stanford have remove its list if disapproved words and phrases had not the Wall Street Journal mocked the list? “Mockery makes you look bad,” these jokers would say, “and it’s unintellectual.”

I’m rejecting both ways today in favor of The Third Way: let the paper reveal its own ideology, postmodern craziness, and authoritarianism by just giving quotes. In other words, I’ll let it mock itself.

You can access the paper for free... (MORE - details)

PAPER: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.jchemed.2c00293
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Berkeley to change biology courses into social-justice courses
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023...-biology-courses-into-social-justice-courses/

EXCERPTS (Jerry Coyne): Well, here we go again. Unsurprisingly, the University of California at Berkeley has revamped its biology curriculum, turning courses in three departments into propaganda mills as well as vehicles for learning biology. This initiative was announced by Berkeley itself at the website below (click to read).

Here’s some of the announcement, showing that the revamping was at the request of the graduate diversity council of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Note that the courses are in three departments, and have large enrollments.

[...] Now one could question the wisdom of infusing ideology into biology (as I do)—even anti-racist ideology. While of course I oppose racism, I am not on board with every bit of antiracist philosophy (I diverge from Kendi’s claim, for example, that if you or your program is not explicitly infused with antiracist activism, it is itself racist). More important, the brand of anti-racism suggested for these courses (have a look at the “Advancing Inclusion” booklet) is extreme authoritarian Leftist, and brooks no dissent.

But the biology class is not the place to propagandize students. It is a place to learn biology... (MORE - missing details)
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Influential paper linking recessions and left-wing voting patterns retracted
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...t-wing-voting-patterns-retracted/#more-126415

EXCERPTS: A highly cited economics paper that suggested people raised during recessions were more likely to vote for left-leaning political parties has been retracted, apparently due to a coding error that rendered the results invalid.

[...] The paper, “Growing up in a Recession,” was published in November 2013. It has been cited 222 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Working papers from the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have also cited the article... (MORE - missing details)
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Look at all of these examples of retractions! And here we thought retractions were ''rare.'' Well, maybe they're rare in terms of malice and intentional publishing of erroneous information. But, still.

So, why aren't these articles being properly vetted by their respective publishers? Mistakes happen, even in the science community, but it just seems like these errors should have been caught before publishing. I can understand retractions that are from studies decades old, because as new research findings come to light on different topics, corrections and updates need to be made.
 
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[...] So, why aren't these articles being properly vetted by their respective publishers?

Invalid science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invalid_science

Even that probably doesn't list or address all the factors afflicting the culture of the enterprise. Like the wave of [institutional] administrative policies kowtowing to the political offshoots of Continental philosophy.
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Urologist blames Big Pharma as concerns mount over his research
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...concerns-mount-over-his-research/#more-126427

INTRO: With retractions piling up and more than a dozen expressions of concern now added to the list of his publishing woes, a urologist in Iran claims his research is being targeted by American drugmaker Johnson & Johnson... (MORE - details)
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Utilization of systemic oppression conspiracies can be an opportunistic tool for all thought orientation and cultural ilks (not just Leftangelicals), whether to deflect damage or advance career.
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Look at all of these examples of retractions! And here we thought retractions were ''rare.'' Well, maybe they're rare in terms of malice and intentional publishing of erroneous information. But, still.

So, why aren't these articles being properly vetted by their respective publishers? Mistakes happen, even in the science community, but it just seems like these errors should have been caught before publishing. I can understand retractions that are from studies decades old, because as new research findings come to light on different topics, corrections and updates need to be made.
I'm not sure publications of erroneous papers is scandalous or not. Quite a lot of papers must be published whose research is subsequently found to be flawed, or not reproducible. That's to be expected in science. The retractions will be those in which flaws are found and acknowledged by the authors.

Retractions due to fraud are something else. Fraud may well be impossible to spot in peer review. The pressure today to publish papers all the time, to show the researcher is being productive, is bound to lead to a decline in quality - and in some cases a temptation to make stuff up. It's a sad development, reflecting the difficulty the science community has in distinguishing quality from quantity. It's good that some people devote time to uncovering fraud, as the only way to stop it is to make people fear that fraud will be fond out and will end their career.

I did find the idea of white supremacy in chemistry pretty funny. That's just bonkers.
 
I Wrote a Viral Screed Against Peer Review. I Got Some Emails.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/01/peer-review-critique-scientists-controversy.html

INTRO (Adam Mastroianni): In November, I published a scientific paper by uploading a PDF to the internet, and people were like, “Nice paper, here are some thoughts!”

A month ago, I wrote what became my young newsletter’s most popular post, saying peer review is a failed experiment and that one alternative is to upload PDFs to the internet, and some people were like “Hold on there, buster!”

A tenured professor hinted she might try to get me fired. A person with a Ph.D. accused me of “cynical metacognitive polywaffle,” which a good name for a postmodern noise band. I got some weird and vaguely threatening emails, including one that had a screenshot of my personal website with my improv experience highlighted as proof that I am literally a clown. Which is, I guess, true.

To recap, I argued in that post about peer review that... (MORE - details)
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Springer Nature retracts chapter on sign language deaf scholars called “extremely offensive”
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...olars-called-extremely-offensive/#more-126431

INTRO: Springer Nature has retracted a book chapter which critics say was plagued with “extremely offensive and outdated” statements about the deaf community.

The chapter, “Literature Review on Sign Language Generation,” was published in September 2022 as part of Data Management, Analytics and Innovation: Proceedings of ICDMAI 2022 (International Conference on Data Management, Analytics and Innovation). The authors, five researchers at the Cummins College of Engineering for Women in Pune, India, attempted to review work on sign language translation – specifically with artificial intelligence and machine learning... (MORE - details)


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ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00107-z

EXCERPT: . . . Publishers and preprint servers contacted by Nature’s news team agree that AIs such as ChatGPT do not fulfil the criteria for a study author, because they cannot take responsibility for the content and integrity of scientific papers. But some publishers say that an AI’s contribution to writing papers can be acknowledged in sections other than the author list. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journal team and its publisher, Springer Nature.)

In one case, an editor told Nature that ChatGPT had been cited as a co-author in error, and that the journal would correct this.

ChatGPT is one of 12 authors on a preprint about using the tool for medical education, posted on the medical repository medRxiv in December last year.

The team behind the repository and its sister site, bioRxiv, are discussing whether it’s appropriate to use and credit AI tools such as ChatGPT when writing studies, says co-founder Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory press in New York. Conventions might change, he adds... (MORE - missing details)
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J&J subsidiary alleges fraud in paper that linked cosmetic talc with mesothelioma
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...-cosmetic-talc-with-mesothelioma/#more-126445

EXCERPTS: A key paper linking use of talc-based baby powder to cancer contains fraudulent information, according to a new complaint against an author of the article who has testified on behalf of plaintiffs.

[...] The paper, “Mesothelioma Associated With the Use of Cosmetic Talc,” was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in January 2020. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Corresponding author Jacqueline Moline of Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y., has also referenced the article in expert testimony for plaintiffs in talc litigation, as well as in remarks before Congress... (MORE - missing details)
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J&J subsidiary alleges fraud in paper that linked cosmetic talc with mesothelioma
https://retractionwatch.com/2023/01...-cosmetic-talc-with-mesothelioma/#more-126445

EXCERPTS: A key paper linking use of talc-based baby powder to cancer contains fraudulent information, according to a new complaint against an author of the article who has testified on behalf of plaintiffs.

[...] The paper, “Mesothelioma Associated With the Use of Cosmetic Talc,” was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine in January 2020. It has been cited 22 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Corresponding author Jacqueline Moline of Northwell Health in Great Neck, N.Y., has also referenced the article in expert testimony for plaintiffs in talc litigation, as well as in remarks before Congress... (MORE - missing details)
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I remember reading about this story and J&J filed bankruptcy to hold up the settlements in court. There were many studies performed showing no asbestos present in the J&J talc products, so this is a case of being found guilty in the court of public opinion, but not on the basis of scientific evidence.
 
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I'm not sure publications of erroneous papers is scandalous or not. Quite a lot of papers must be published whose research is subsequently found to be flawed, or not reproducible. That's to be expected in science. The retractions will be those in which flaws are found and acknowledged by the authors.
Yes, it's to be expected, although it is thought to be rare, but this thread is showing me that it's not rare. However, it's probably safe to assume that there are far more published papers that won't be retracted, as opposed to those that are. Law of large numbers and all that...

Retractions due to fraud are something else. Fraud may well be impossible to spot in peer review. The pressure today to publish papers all the time, to show the researcher is being productive, is bound to lead to a decline in quality - and in some cases a temptation to make stuff up. It's a sad development, reflecting the difficulty the science community has in distinguishing quality from quantity. It's good that some people devote time to uncovering fraud, as the only way to stop it is to make people fear that fraud will be fond out and will end their career.
Agreed, like any other industry, fraud needs to be stopped. CC just posted an article about how fraudulent claims (now retracted) led to lawsuits against J&J. It's an interesting read - take a look if you haven't, already.
 
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