Dong-ta-ra-con-ching! An insane paper, accepted by a Springer-Verlag journal, is now retracted

July 26, 2019 • 8:45 am

Reader Jonathan called my attention to post on the website Symptoms of the Universe by a physicist named Philip Moriarty. It points out what may be the craziest paper ever accepted by a decent mainstream science journal—at least in the last few decades. (I’m assuming that the journal Parasitology Research is reputable, though I may be wrong.)

Click on the screenshot to see Moriarty’s piece:

According to the article’s abstract, the authors, eight scientists from Korea, tested a “remediated” drug, mebendazole, against a ciliate parasite that infected a farmed food fish. They thought that by treating the drug in a weird way (read on), they might increase its efficacy and thus the production of fish. The results showed a marginal increase in efficacy and a reduction of deleterious side effects. The problem was how they “remediated” the drug:

Click on the page below to see the now-retracted paper:

The issue, as Moriarty notes with some screen captures, is the way the drug was treated. Read and weep (or laugh loudly):

What? Did the scientists wear tinfoil hats when they did the experiment? And what were the reviewers thinking when they read this? But wait! There’s more: a nice diagram of how they focused “Dong-ta-ra-con-ching” on the drug. I don’t see any trees here, and I have no idea what a “putor program” is, nor do I want to read enough to find out.

The authors conclude this:

The present study is the first study to demonstrate that the toxicity of MBZ could be reduced by remediation of component elements using the FOGF energy that is present in nature. Regardless of the fact that this new approach was initially examined in the marine environment, it has considerable potential for future application to reduce side effects that can occur in medical products applied in both veterinary and human medicines, and also the side effects that can occur during development of numerous new drugs, consequently resulting in the suspension of development.

Yeah, right. Perhaps chemotherapy drugs should now be treated by focusing energy using silkworm poop. . . .

An article at Retraction Watch that discusses this paper reports that the paper was in review for four months before it was accepted. Here’s the journal’s retraction notice (click on screenshot):

Trying to find out how the deuce this paper got accepted, Retraction Watch wrote the editors of the journal, who didn’t respond. Springer Nature (the relevant division of Springer) did, but their response was less than satisfying:

We asked the journal’s editors, Una Ryan of Murdoch University in Australia and Julia Walochnik of the Medical University of Vienna, why it took post-publication peer review to determine that the paper was nonsense. In other words, what exactly were the peer reviewers, editors, and publisher — that’s Springer Nature — doing between March 5, 2018, when the paper was submitted, and July 6, 2018, when it was accepted?

The editors did not respond, but apparently forwarded our email to Springer Nature. A spokesperson for the publisher responded:

In the interests of being fair and following due process, the paper was sent for a post publication peer review, following which all authors agreed to retract the paper as stated in the retraction note.  We treat all correspondence on integrity matters as confidential and cannot comment on details of the peer review process.

Seriously? What they’re doing here is trying to hide their big mistake. Sure the reviewers and details of the correspondence could be kept confidential, but the outline of what happened can certainly be revealed, like “the reviewers didn’t see this procedure” or “the scientists admitted they made it up.” As it is, everyone gets exculpated—who would see this retraction were it not for Retraction Watch and Moriarty?—and the scientists, who should be laughed out of the field, go blithely along exposing other stuff to dong-ta-ra-con-ching. Oy!

Do note that I’ve had my own run-ins with Springer involving retraction, as a while back the firm published an equally bonkers creationist paper in its journal International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, and, when I reported it to Springer, the firm at first defended it. But I persisted, and eventually the paper was retracted, though it’s still on the website. (I once thought it should be taken down, but perhaps it should stand as a monument to blinkered religiously-based dismissing of evolution.)

I add that Springer’s operating profit is enormous: 34%, and that’s not even the highest profit among gouging scientific publishers (Elsevier makes 36% and Wiley 40%).  Because of this, I have signed petitions and personally vowed not to work for Elsevier and Springer (I haven’t received requests from Wiley but won’t work for them, either). I found this out after Springer asked me to review a book proposal for them, an onerous task, and then offered me an e-book as payment. Using scientists to do their reviewing and editing for them, either for free or for trifles like e-books, which cost them nothing, is of course the way companies like Elsevier and Springer make their bloated profits, which are further inflated by charging libraries enormous amounts of money to carry their journals.

This is one reason I’m glad I retired, as I don’t have to deal with importuning from companies like this. And, as you see, Springer does everything it can to keep its retractions under wraps.

45 thoughts on “Dong-ta-ra-con-ching! An insane paper, accepted by a Springer-Verlag journal, is now retracted”

  1. Springer, in the distant past had far better standards. Reputable scientists should boycott journals like this one. Apparently they use profits as the metric of their success.

      1. Oh god, yes. What a crank.

        I’ve always wondered whether that inspired Sleeper’s Orgasmatron…

          1. Never heard that before – even though I was heavily into space-rock I always avoided Hawkwind’s stuff growing up because they gave off too much of a Vivian from Young Ones vibe.

            I usually have a rule about saxophones and saxophonists, which is that they should both be melted down, but that was fun.

  3. This is one reason I’m glad I retired, as I don’t have to deal with importuning from companies like this.

    I’m shocked – shocked, I tell you! The idea that they’d stop hassling you merely because you’re an emeritus is incredible. Normally they won’t stop hassling you even if you’re dead. Maybe your spam mail filter is too efficient?

  5. Interesting. I wonder if they’d be interested in a recent theory of mine; that we can change(or ‘transmute’ as I like to say) basic metals(or ‘base metals’ as I call them) into valuable substances like gold and platinum.

    1. I’ve got a paper on a device that perpetually moves back and forth with no energy source!

      1. I’m just finishing up a paper proving
        psychokinesis. I’ve completed most of the last paragraph without physically contacting the keyboard. All experiments were done by me in a dark room with blindfold on (double-blind).

    2. And how about my theory that I can transubstantiate bread and wine into meat and gore.

  6. In a related matter, it has come to my attention that in the publishing industry there seems to be little or no fact checking. Publishers seem to assume that authors, particularly if they are respected academics, will submit manuscripts that have already been fact checked by somebody. This seems to be far from the truth. As an example, I have read a history of the United States by Jill Lepore, a prominent Harvard historian and frequent contributor to the New Yorker. I have found some incontestable factual errors, not controversial interpretations of historical events, which astonished me. No historian should have made them. They indicate an extraordinary sloppiness in her research. There are probably more errors that I missed. These errors perhaps did not alter the thesis of her book, but I cannot help to question her reliability as an historian. Although it would cost them money, publishers need to hire fact checkers. Otherwise, they will be subject to great embarrassment.

  7. “I add that Springer’s operating profit is enormous: 34%, and that’s not even the highest profit among gouging scientific publishers (Elsevier makes 36% and Wiley 40%).”

    I don’t know what’s crazier, the paper or these profit margins. Utter insanity. The business of academic publishing has heinously corrupted the practices of research, science, and teaching. The big textbook sellers also operate with enormous profit margins, having created a racket in tandem with the universities to bilk students out of as much money as they can.

    It seems like the method used by these “researchers” is an example of “other ways of knowing.” Oh, what fun it will be when science classes are finally decolonized and include things like this, voodoo, and other “ways of knowing.”

    1. When reading the ‘treatment’ method, I had exactly the same thought.
      However, it appears now -no hoax claimed- that it is more in the vein of Benveniste’s ‘water memory’: about as ridiculous as a hoax, but the authors apparently being serious about it (seriously?).

  9. Dong-ta-ra-con-chingology: study of the properties of substances secreted by the caudal side of diverse animals. Can be see either as a science or as an art. (Syn. s**tology.)

  10. That’s the funniest thing I’ve read in many years!!! Although it looks hoax-like, I have met people with beliefs stranger than those.

    “I found this out after Springer asked me to review a book proposal for them, an onerous task, and then offered me an e-book as payment.”

    Probably lots of scientists have complained or ignored these requests, and this may have had an effect. Last month Elsevier asked me to review a book proposal and they offered payment in actual cash ($100)!

    1. I initially thought this was too funny to be real, but now I think it is not a hoax. One of the authors has a natural healing clinic, and here are some excepts from its website:

      “acupuncture treatment charged with the full overlapped gravity energy and improve one´s physical constitution with it”

      “These Gongtoridaebang introduced high-level technic(the full overlapped gravitational field) of the Ministry of Environment affiliated Institute of Asia-Pacific Earth-Life Environment Remediation Association that restore contaminated seed or food from radiation, agrichemicals and herbicide”

      “The Gongtoridaebang was composed with ten rooms, the same number , as if the person were born out of the mother’s womb after ten months. so It is called ” Mutangtuna system(A womb construction)”

      The Gongtoridaebang had the frame made with the best quality’s yellow soil, also decorated with a Yongeong celadon porcelain hexagon tile, which is the core know-how of the genuine Goryeo celadon procelain.

      The Yongeong celadon porcelain clarifies the water, It is distinguished as an antidote against the toxicity. It converts the bad energy such like the electrowaveforms, a water vein waveforms to good energy, and neutralizes them.
      It raises the immunity by utilizing Jungcheopjungryeokjang(HJ-technology, Full overlapping gravitational field energy).”

      1. This is drop-dead funny. To think that they studied silkworm shit for 15 years! What dedication. I’m also inclined to think it’s genuine, too,if only because nutty amalgamations of New/Old Age and Old/New World “science” abound. Plenty of people believe such stuff, and postmodernism relativism applied to science confers ‘validity’ on such idiocies.

        The insane sounding words could well be creative transliterations of Chinese by the authors of the paper. But maybe they are from old Doo-Wop songs. It’s extremely un-PC to remark that many translations and transliterations of Chinese into English are hilarious to native English speakers (and vice versa); and as translations vary and transliteration styles change, so does the hilarity quotient.

        Recently, in the PubMed database I’ve come across several wacky papers mixing Western and Eastern medical theories and practices,with contributors from ‘non-traditional’ institutions of higher learning, here and in foreign countries; not as completely over the top as this one but strange and suspect nonetheless.

  11. Would this be the same scientist who had a public feud on Youtube with another scientist by the name of Thuderf00t ???

    1. Yes, it will be.
      Prof Moriarty has a bit of an SJW bent but also quite an anti pseudo-science bent.

  12. There’s some stiff competition for this title. Including, of course, the infamous PNAS paper with the abstract that begins “I reject the Darwinian assumption that larvae and their adults evolved from a single common ancestor.” (never retracted, as far as I know)

  13. “Dong-ta-ra-con-ching!” — Wait, you sure that’s not the chorus to The Marcels’ “Blue Moon”?

    1. My dad used to sing that ‘bom-ba-ba-bom…’ line when I was a kid, often quite suddenly and at high volume, just as I came into a room that I thought was empty, or just as I left the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel.

      I had no idea where it came from until now.

      1. “Blue Moon” is actually an old tune from a Rogers & Hart musical back in the Thirties. The cover by American teen-idol crooner Bobby Vinton was used over the opening scene of An American Werewolf in London (all the songs on the soundtrack of which have the word “moon” in their title).

        Those Yanks in the movie should’ve listened when the locals who told them to keep off the moors and stay on the roads. 🙂

        1. My dad loved American Werewolf, and tried to get me to watch it at least once, although I was six or something so I was too scared. I reckon that must be where he got it from…very strange to see childhood pieces slot into place almost thirty years after the events.

        2. According to Wikipedia, the Marcels took their name from the old Marcel hairstyle, popular during the Roaring ’20s — Egad! that was 100 years ago (in a few months)! Tempus fugit.

          2. Either way you spell it, it’s fucked, tempus, that is.

            I hadn’t known of Green’s Dictionary of Slang. An excellent reference.

      2. The moon turns to gold in this song so you should be able to turn basic metals to gold also.

  14. Re: Entry # 12

    In 2009, an evolutionary biologist we all hold in high regard described it as the worst paper published in 2009 and on this very website.

    The paper was published at the time when a paper could be recommended for publication without peer review. The scientist was Lynn Margulis.

    Hope I have some of this right.

    1. “In August, retired biologist Donald Williamson of the University of Liverpool in England posited in an online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) paper that the metamorphosis between caterpillars and butterflies stems from a past cross-breeding between butterfly ancestors and those of velvet worms. “I reject the Darwinian assumption that larvae and their adults evolved from a single common ancestor,” Williamson wrote.

      The paper drew a great deal of fire, both for its assertions (which one developmental biologist said were better suited to the “National Enquirer than the National Academy”) and for its backdoor acceptance for publication. Williamson’s study arrived in PNAS as a “communicated submission,” in which a member of the National Academy of Sciences submits the paper on the author’s behalf and handpicks its peer reviewers. A high-placed advocate, then, can essentially knock down for an ally some of the tallest hurdles in peer-reviewed publishing. In Williamson’s case, academy member Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts Amherst had ushered the research into the journal.”

      [ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/controversial-caterpillar-evolution-study-formally-rebutted/ ]

  15. I think “Dong-ta-ra-con-ching” would be wonderful as a song in the next blockbuster Disney animated film. Alas, this paper’s retraction means that we cannot award classic status in the Scientific Papers Hall of Fame to: “Silkworm excrement was the most appropriate because it is not denatured easily”. The current top, classic sentence, from a perfectly reputable 1960s review article, is the following: “Botulinum toxin is a white, crystalline material of unknown taste.”

    1. The dong-ta-ra-con-ching article is a good candidate for an IgNobel. If it wins, the reviewers should be added to the authors in the list of nominees.

  16. Who put the dong in the dong-ta-ra-con?
    Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding dong?
    Who put the bop in the bop-shoo-bop-shoo-bop?
    Who put the dip in the dip-da-dip-da-dip?
    Who pulled that scam?
    I’d like to shake his hand
    He made my Nap-cha fall in love with me.

    1. When my Nap-cha heard
      “Dong ta ra con cha dong ta dong chong”
      Every word went right into her heart
      And when she heard them singin’
      “Rama, lama lama, rama ho-ho-ding-nong”
      She said we’d never have to part
      So…

  19. Those evil Springers! Censoring a revolutionary paper! The authors may be heart-broken now, but they should not give up!

    Here in the US we have a fearless think tank, the Center for Science and Culture, which publishes the prestigious journal BIO-Complexity. It is the perfect place to publish the author’s discovery of “full-overlapped gravitational field energy” and the amazing “putor”, apparently a highly advanced computer. The portal to this journal is “http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main”

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