Retraction notice to “Association between low-testosterone and kidney stones in US men: The national health and nutrition examination survey 2011–2012” (Preventive Medicine Reports (2018) 10 (248–253), (S2211335518300548), (10.1016/j.pmedr.2018.04.002))

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/our-business/policies/article-withdrawal). Following publication of the aforementioned article, the first author requested that the paper be retracted and disclosed to the editors information that prompted the following retraction notice to be published in ScienceDirect alongside the journal record for the article. All authors were informed of the retraction and retraction notice in advance of publication. “This article has been retracted at the request of the authors. This study was based on data from a large US survey that used weights to permit overrepresentation of certain population groups. After the paper had been accepted and appeared online, the authors disclosed to the journal that they did not appropriately incorporate the sampling weights at the statistical analysis stage, which led to biased estimates of effect. They regret the inconvenience to reviewers and readers.” Subsequent to the retraction, the senior co-authors of the paper contacted the editor and alleged that the first author had acted in haste and had reported scientific errors that did not exist. In email exchanges involving all authors, they demonstrated to the editors that the statistical analysis had appropriately incorporated the weights used in the survey design, and thus they stood by the technical correctness of the results and interpretation. In consequence, they requested that the paper be restored without the associated retraction notice and label. As evidence of the soundness of their statistical analysis the authors provided Stata scripts and corresponding output. In a subsequent lengthy consultation with the publisher's ethical and legal teams, we reached the conclusion that the paper cannot be ‘unretracted’ from the journal's record. Despite the authors’ volte-face regarding the validity of their paper, we maintain the decision to keep this paper as retracted. However, we encourage the authors to submit their paper elsewhere to reconstruct the public record of their study de novo, without the regrettable circumstances that followed the publication of their article in Preventive Medicine Reports.