We have a few updates on stories we’ve covered.
In June, we wrote about the withdrawal of a paper claiming that temperatures in the last 60 years were warmest in the last 1,000 years. At the time, we reported, following posts by others, that the authors had been made aware of errors in their work and were withdrawing it to correct their calculations.
For several months, the page housing the Journal of Climate study read:
The requested article is not currently available on this site.
It still does. But another page that should house the paper now reads, as commenter Skiphil notes:
Due to errors discovered in this paper during the publication process, it was withdrawn by the authors prior to being published in final form.
In June, one of the authors, David Karoly, told us and others he expected to resubmit the paper to the journal, and that’s what the University of Melbourne also reports on top of the original press release about the paper (also noted by Skiphil):
Scientific study resubmitted.
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, “Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium” by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Ailie Gallant, Steven Phipps and David Karoly, accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate.
The manuscript has been re-submitted to the Journal of Climate and is being reviewed again.
Our second update is on a post earlier this week about two Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Advances retractions. As we reported, one of those retractions — for authorship issues — wasn’t signed by all the authors. But that was a publisher error, RSC Advances editor Sarah Ruthven tells Retraction Watch:
The retraction notice on the RSC Advances paper entitled ‘Laser-induced gold/chitosan nanocomposites with tailored wettability applied to multi-irradiated microfluidic channels’, DOI: 10.1039/C2RA21452K, has been corrected. All authors agreed to the retraction of this paper, but due to a technical problem not all authors were listed in the retraction, which was our error. Dr Blasi was aware and agreed to the retraction of the paper, therefore I would appreciate it if you could update your blog with this information.
The paper’s abstract page does in fact now include Blasi’s name on the retraction. However, the PDF of the whole notice — which includes the reason for the retraction, unlike the abstract page, and requires a bit of sleuthing to find from that abstract page — still doesn’t include Blasi. (Update, 11:45 a.m. Eastern, 10/18/12: It now does.) Ruthven tells us
…it is RSC policy for retracted articles to clearly state in the abstract that the paper has been retracted and the full explanation to be given in the PDF of the paper.
It’s not clear to us — particularly given how difficult it is to find that PDF (go ahead, try it and see if you disagree) — why the journal wouldn’t just give the entire reason on the abstract page.
At the moment the abstract page does list Blasi…
Yes, that’s what we reported above: “The paper’s abstract page does in fact now include Blasi’s name on the retraction.”
…of course I should not only read the blog, but also think before reacting…
Another mystery to solve, the Lewandowsky et al paper was annouced and circulated to the media (especially the Guardian) as pending publication, back in July.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/current
as there is no sign, now in October. could anybody ask what is happening to this, as the press releases and media coverage went far and wide..
Dr Adam Corner (a phsychologist, that need to be a bit more sceptical?)
in the Guardian (in July, having been sent it by Lewandowsky):
“But new research to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science has found a link between the endorsement of conspiracy theories and the rejection of established facts about climate science.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/27/climate-sceptics-conspiracy-theorists
Could someone ask the journal the status of this..
Nothing special there, papers accepted in journals can sometimes take many months before going to the publication stage.
Psychological Science is one of those that is really slow. For example, the first paper in the current issue (October) was accepted in March 2012 and “first published” (i.e., online first) on August 28th.
Also the “online first” articles shows such examples. The current last one, published “online first” on October 16 was also accepted in March. Same goes for the one published “online first” on October 15.
press release followed by publishing months later.. not the best approach really is it…
The journal definitly should get its act together. 5-7 months from accepting a paper to finally publishing it online, that’s really bad. No surprise the authors didn’t wait for that. I know of whole books that are processed faster than that, including actual printing of the book!
So was the retraction retracted? Is someone going to start “Retraction Retraction Watch”?
It wasn’t retracted in the first place as it wasn’t published. So I guess someone will have to start “Accepted For Publication, Then Withdrawn Before Publication, and Resubmitted Watch”. Not really a catchy name.
Errr….I think you will find Mike Delaney referring to the retraction notice in RSC Advances.
Can you provide a link?
From the text above:
“Our second update is on a post earlier this week about two Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Advances retractions. As we reported, one of those retractions — for authorship issues — wasn’t signed by all the authors. But that was a publisher error, RSC Advances editor Sarah Ruthven tells Retraction Watch:”
I am collecting every single aspect of fraud on climate science, which has expanded into ways of spotting and avoiding fraud in general. I am hoping as a similar area you can link this to yours as if enough people know all this it won’t be possible to continue. It only happens now as the media barely touch it.