Authors of a 2016 cancer paper have retracted it after finding an error in one line of code in the program used to calculate some of the results. Reposting as our subscription software appears to be acting up again. Read the whole post here.
Authors of a 2016 cancer paper have retracted it after finding an error in one line of code in the program used to calculate some of the results. Reposting as our subscription software appears to be acting up again. Read the whole post here.
I would suggest that the retraction in question was due to a programming error rather than to a coding error. Coding error implies that an incorrect variable value i.e code was assigned to the raw data during data management which is not case here.
A simple coding error example would be reversing the variable values/codes where 1=Female and 2=Male
Not germane to this paper, but I can’t help telling the worst ‘coding error’ (in the sense of Stratis Ioannou’s post above) story I’ve personally experienced:
I was collecting data from about 15 labs for a big meta-analysis of diabetes pedigrees. Only after much head-scratching about discrepancies in the results did I discover (I don’t recall how anymore) that 14 labs used “M” for “male” and “F” for “female” and 1 lab used “M” for “mother” and “F” for “father”!