Social psychologist Diederik Stapel has notched his 58th retraction, after admitting he fabricated data in yet another article.
He’s holding onto his 4th place spot on our leaderboard.
This latest retraction is for “Correction or comparison? The effects of prime awareness on social judgments,” published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. As usual for Stapel, this paper has been retracted because he fabricated data.
Here’s the note:
A paper on the properties of a magnetic material is being retracted after including an author without his permission, and omitting a funding source.
According to the note, the work was done in Miao Yu‘s lab at Chongqing University in China; the authors then added Yu’s name to the paper without his authorization, and neglected to list a relevant funding source.
Here’s the retraction note for “Temperature-dependent dynamic mechanical properties of magnetorheological elastomers under magnetic field,” published in the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials:
Continue reading Journal repels a paper on a magnetic material after authorship, funding issues
We’re presenting a Q&A session with Peter Wilmshurst, now a part-time consultant cardiologist who has spent decades embroiled in misconduct investigations as a whistleblower.
Retraction Watch: A UK judge recently upheld two findings of dishonesty by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service against Andrew Dowson, director of headache services at King’s College Hospital and your former co-investigator. Were you pleased with the verdict? (Last week, Dowson also began a four-month suspension from practicing medicine in the UK.)
Peter Wilmshurst: In part, because I was pleased that he was shown to be dishonest, because I knew that he was, which was why I reported him. But I wasn’t pleased in the sense that I don’t think the investigation dealt with all the issues involved in the Migraine Intervention with STARflex Technology (MIST) Trial.
RW: What additional issues did you hope to see addressed? Continue reading My life as a whistleblower: Q&A with Peter Wilmshurst
An article about the use of vaccines against pertussis — also known as whooping cough — didn’t include the fact that the author has received grants and consultancy fees from three pharmaceutical companies that help make or sell the vaccines.
The correction to “Pertussis in young infants: a severe vaccine-preventable disease,” published in Autopsy and Case Reports just a few months after the paper, cites a “desktop publishing error” that led to the following problems: Continue reading Publisher error removes industry conflicts in vaccine paper
The week at Retraction Watch featured a new grant to our parent non-profit organization, a retraction from the NEJM, and our first-ever retraction. Here’s what was happening elsewhere: Continue reading Weekend reads: Retraction reluctance; worthless papers (and stats); too many PhDs
Authors have retracted a large meta-analysis claiming that rising levels of carbon dioxide don’t always reduce nutrients in plants.
After commenters on PubPeer raised concerns, the authors say they found several unintentional errors in their data that could “significantly change conclusions” of the paper in Plant Ecology, according to the retraction note.
The paper found that the impact of rising CO2 depends on many factors — in some cases, extra amounts of this greenhouse gas could actually increase plant nutrients. Trouble is, some of the papers that cited the now-retracted article came to the opposite conclusion: Increased carbon dioxide levels do decrease plant nutrients.
The retraction note for “CO2 effects on plant nutrient concentration depend on plant functional group and available nitrogen: a meta-analysis” explains some of the specifics of the errors, and says that there was “no evidence of bias:”
Continue reading Paper claiming extra CO2 doesn’t always lower plant nutrients pulled for errors
Olivier Voinnet, a well-known plant scientist at the ETH in Zurich, has notched his 7th retraction for a highly cited paper. The 2003 paper was pulled when “additional image manipulations” came to light after The Plant Journal issued a correction earlier this year.
The retraction follows an investigation into — and then retraction of — several other papers co-authored by Voinnet. The authors originally corrected the paper after they learned one image had been duplicated, and repeating the experiment found the “same interpretation and conclusions” held true. But when the corresponding author learned of additional “data manipulation,” they decided to retract the paper altogether.
Here’s the retraction notice for “An enhanced transient expression system in plants based on suppression of gene silencing by the p19 protein of tomato bushy stunt virus:”
Continue reading Voinnet retracts highly cited paper, bringing his total to 7
A new project does the relatively straightforward task of comparing reported outcomes from clinical trials to what the researchers said they planned to measure before the trial began. And what they’ve found is a bit sad, albeit not entirely surprising.
As part of The Compare Project, author and medical doctor Ben Goldacre and his team have so far evaluated 36 clinical trials published by the top five medical journals (New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Annals of Internal Medicine, and British Medical Journal). Many of those trials included “switched outcomes,” meaning the authors didn’t report something they said they would, or included additional outcomes in the published paper, with no explanation for the change.
Here are the latest results from the project, according to its website:
Continue reading Did a clinical trial proceed as planned? New project finds out
The director of the Research Integrity & Compliance Review Office at Colorado State University (CSU) is the new head of the U.S. Office of Research Integrity, taking over a position that has been vacant for more than a year and a half.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed for us the new appointment, which was first reported by The Report On Research Compliance today. Continue reading ORI names new director, Colorado’s Kathy Partin
A paper on the genetics underlying a common neurological disorder has issued a correction that influences the results of the paper.
“Genetic Diagnosis of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease in a Population by Next-Generation Sequencing” was published in BioMed Research International, and looked at 81 families with the disease. The researchers identified mutations that might be connected to the disease. The problem, says the correction note, is that the authors classified a couple variants in one patient’s genes as “likely pathogenic,” when their true nature was less clear.
The correction explains the new numbers:
Continue reading Correction changes results about genetics of neurological disorder