It has been cited once, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. Since its publication in December, the article has been downloaded 4,641 times, posted by 154 X users, and written about by 20 news outlets and press release sites.
A veterinary journal has retracted a paper from a major pet food company after criticism prompted the authors to re-examine their data.
The retraction is the first in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s 180 years of publication, Lisa Fortier, the journal’s editor in chief, told Retraction Watch. But veterinary researchers who wrote to the journal with concerns about the article say the retraction doesn’t address all the issues they raised.
Retractions are the stuff of nightmares for most academics. But they aren’t necessarily a career obstacle, and sometimes may be the only way forward, according to Andrew P. Anderson, a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department of Reed College, in Portland, Ore. Last month, the journal Evolutionpulled and replaced a study Anderson had conducted as a PhD student under Adam G. Jones at the University of Idaho, in Moscow. The study’s findings suggested sexual selection shaped the responsiveness of the human genome to male sex hormones. Below is a lightly edited Q&A we did with Anderson about his experience.
Retraction Watch (RW): In the summer of 2022, shortly after your paper was first published, you realized it contained a significant error. What happened?
Less than a year after he became dean of the University of Alabama Birmingham School of Dentistry, an uncomfortable email landed in Russell Taichman’s inbox.
Overlapping and duplicated panels in one of Taichman’s 2005 papers were among a list of complaints relayed by the publisher of Cellular Signalling in the April 2020 correspondence – complaints which were publicly posted on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik.
“The substance of the complaint is image manipulation, which if true, would violate our publishing policies,” the email stated. “Please note that if we do not have an adequate and timely response, we may be forced to conclude that the allegations are truthful.”
A group of insectologists is receiving praise on social media for retracting a 2022 paper in which they claimed, erroneously, it turns out, to have discovered a novel ant fossil.
The paper, “An Eocene army ant,” appeared in November in Biology Letters, a Royal Society title. The authors were led by Christine Sosiak, of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. The paper has yet to be cited, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.
For a decade, scientists have been scratching their heads when trying to put a date on primeval events like the crystallization of the magma ocean on the moon or the early formation of Earth’s continental crust.
Their problem? A revised estimate of the half-life of a radioactive isotope called samarium-146 that is used to gauge the age of ancient rocks.
The updated value, published in 2012 in Science, shortened samarium-146’s half-life by a whopping 35 million years, down to 68 million years from the standard estimate of 103. This reset the clock on the solar system’s early history and suggested the oldest rocks on Earth could have formed tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought.
The authors of a paper that proposed the Omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 had evolved in Western Africa months before it was first detected in South Africa have retracted their study after discovering contamination in their samples, as several scientists had suggested on Twitter was the case.
Soon after publication, many geneticists expressed skepticism on social media about the study, including questioning whether the results came from contamination during the sequencing process.
Tulio de Oliveira, director of the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation and the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, tweeted on December 4 about “weaknesses” in the study, including that “the quality of the sequences seems problematic”:
Last week, we wrote about the story of Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam who had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports by Rubén Herzog, of the Universidad de Valparaíso in Chile. The paper would end up retracted. At the time, Lodder had not had a chance to respond to our questions about the case. We’re pleased to share his comments as a guest post.
I’ve had a big passion for research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics ever since I had started my undergraduate in biomedical sciences at Amsterdam University College. I am currently a MSc Artificial Intelligence student and about a year ago, in preparation for a computational neuroscience course, I wanted to expand on the model used by Rubén.
I sent him an e-mail explaining the situation, and requesting some parameters that weren’t detailed in the paper so that I could start running the simulations myself. Rubén responded very quickly and was immediately very helpful with getting me started with running the simulations.
Now that I was able to run the model properly, I wanted to start off with being able to reproduce the paper’s analysis results before looking into expanding. Using the methodology described in the paper, I re-implemented the steps needed to compute the entropy. And indeed, this is where I got some different results as presented in the paper.
Sometime after it was published, Paul Lodder, a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, had been trying without success to replicate the findings of a 2020 paper in Scientific Reports.
But the findings of the study wouldn’t replicate. And unlike some researchers who might blow off criticism of their work, or blame the replicators for the failure, Herzog sent Lodder the scripts his team had used.
Lodder found the problem quickly. As Herzog related to Retraction Watch, Lodder (whose schedule has been challenging the past few weeks as we’ve played phone tag) [See update on this post.]:
