O-095 Is the process to retract fabricated randomised clinical trials in reproductive medicine working sufficiently?

Study question How do journal editors and publishers respond on randomised clinical trials in reproductive medicine that have been identified as fabricated? Summary answer Despite clear proof of fabrication, only a small minority of fabricated RCTs is retracted within 12 months. What is known already Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are recognised as scientific investigations that have the least potential for bias and are therefore widely used to direct clinical practice. The validity of data in RCTs matters to the accountability of medical practice and the wellbeing of patients. Detection of integrity problems and subsequent action is therefore of imminent importance. Across all fields of medicine, it takes on average 4 years for papers labelled with research misconduct to be retracted. While this is partially explained by the time needed to detect the misconduct, the process of investigation and retraction is also slow and bureaucratic. Study design, size, duration We studied the articles of 4 authors who have published 52 clearly fabricated RCTs in obstetrics/gynaecology. Data fabrication was clear from duplicate baseline and outcome tables in studies on different interventions done in different patients in different periods. The duplications could be from the author themselves, or from other articles. Our findings were published in the public domain for 3 of the 4 authors, with an article on the fourth author being submitted. Participants/materials, setting, methods After detection of the fabrication, we approached authors and their institutes for an explanation. As a satisfying explanation was not given, we notified the editors of the involved 14 journals in February 2020. The universities where two of the authors were awarded a PhD were informed in August 2020. Here we compare the journals’ response to Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)-guidelines, we report the percentage of retracted papers and other responses of editors and publishers. Main results and the role of chance Two articles had already been retracted prior to our notification. Twelve months after we had notified the editors, 4/50 (8%) (1 journal) of the articles had been retracted, 3 (6%) (2 journals) were formally investigating with notification on their website, 6/50 (8%) (3 journals) were informally investigating (without visible notification), 3/50 (6%) (1 journal) had made an expression concern and stated “caution that clinical practice or guidelines should not be based on this report” without formal retraction, and one (2%) had investigated original data and cleared it (although numerous data were identical to a study published 10 years earlier). For the other 33 articles (11 journals) no visible action had been taken. None of the journals provided feedback to the whistle-blower as required by COPE. The University of Utrecht and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel had not taken any action against the awarded fraudulent PhDs. Among the reactions of editors were the statements “I have been in the business long enough; It exists in all specialties and in every country”, “we receive 80 submissions a week, I am too busy to respond on this” and “we did still not get an answer about the result of the investigation by the local court”. Limitations, reasons for caution This was a sample of four authors who had published 52 articles. There might be investigations ongoing that are not visible for the outside world. Wider implications of the findings Retraction of fabricated studies is seldom happening, and a majority of journals is not following COPE. This not only puts patients at risk, but it also lets whistle-blowers down and it jeopardises the trustworthiness of research. COPE-regulations consider the interests of authors and publishers, but not the interests of patients. Trial registration number Not applicable

Causing Security Threat to Host State by Refugees: Context of Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh

Bangladesh has been the host state of a large number of Rohingya refugees since August 2017. Rohingya, An ethnic minority group of Rakhine state, Myanmar, have been fleeing to Bangladesh after the Myanmar army started an ethnic cleansing on that area in august 2017. Since then, Bangladesh has been hosting around 1.1 million Rohingya refugees till now. In the first three months of the crisis, the majority arrived. During the first half of 2018, an estimated 12,000 people entered Bangladesh. Women and children are the vast majority in Bangladesh, and more than 40 percent are under 12 years of age (UNHCR 2020). As per the latest update of UNHCR, 860,243 Rohingya refugees are living in 187,534 households inside the camps (UNHCR 2020). After three years of this influx, Bangladesh is bearing the burden of Rohingya refugees and repatriation from Bangladesh is a far cry from reality. As (Mallick 2020) explain that, due to China and India's rising economic and strategic interests in repatriating the Rohingya refugees to the Rakhine State, Myanmar, foreign and regional organizations were unable to take any visible action. Organizations such as the United Nations, OIC, ASEAN, and other regional bodies have struggled to put pressure on Myanmar to take back Bangladeshi Rohingya refugees.

Massively Multi-Agent Simulations of Religion

Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are not merely electronic communication systems based on computational databases, but also include artificial intelligence that possesses complex, dynamic structure. Each visible action taken by a component of the multi-agent system appears simple, but is supported by vastly more sophisticated invisible processes. A rough outline of the typical hierarchy has four levels: (1) interaction between two individuals, each either human or artificial, (2) conflict between teams of agents who cooperate with fellow team members, (3) enduring social-cultural groups that seek to accomplish shared goals, and (4) large-scale cultural traditions, often separated into virtual geographic regions. In many MMOs, both magic and religion are represented, in ways that harmonize with a social-scientific theory that defines them in terms of specific versus general psychological compensators. This article draws empirical examples from five diverse MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot, Dungeons and Dragons Online, World of Warcraft, A Tale in the Desert and Gods and Heroes.

Multiplicity-freeness of Unitary Representations in Sections of Holomorphic Hilbert Bundles

We prove several results asserting that the action of a Banach–Lie group on Hilbert spaces of holomorphic sections of a holomorphic Hilbert space bundle over a complex Banach manifold is multiplicity-free. These results require the existence of compatible anti-holomorphic bundle maps and certain multiplicity-freeness assumptions for stabilizer groups. For the group action on the base, the notion of an $(S,\sigma )$-weakly visible action (generalizing T. Koboyashi’s visible actions) provides an effective way to express the assumptions in an economical fashion. In particular, we derive a version for group actions on homogeneous bundles for larger groups. We illustrate these general results by several examples related to operator groups and von Neumann algebras.

The UV-visible action-absorption spectrum of all-trans and 11-cis protonated Schiff base retinal in the gas phase

The UV-visible absorption of retinal in its protonated Schiff-base form is studied in the gas-phase.

Coadjoint geometry for discretely decomposable restrictions of certain series of representations of indefinite unitary groups

Zuckerman’s derived functor module of a semisimple Lie group [Formula: see text] yields a unitary representation [Formula: see text] which may be regarded as a geometric quantization of an elliptic orbit [Formula: see text] in the Kirillov–Kostant–Duflo orbit philosophy. We highlight a certain family of those irreducible unitary representations [Formula: see text] of the indefinite unitary group [Formula: see text] and a family of subgroups [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] such that the restriction [Formula: see text] is known to be discretely decomposable and multiplicity-free by the general theory of Kobayashi (Discrete decomposibility of the restrictions of [Formula: see text] with respect to reductive subgroups, II, Ann. of Math. 147 (1998) 1–21; Multiplicity-free representations and visible action on complex manifolds, Publ. Res. Inst. Math. Sci. 41 (2005) 497–549), where [Formula: see text] is not necessarily tempered and [Formula: see text] is not necessarily compact. We prove that the corresponding moment map [Formula: see text] is proper, determine the image [Formula: see text], and compute the Corwin–Greenleaf multiplicity function explicitly.