We have a tension about resolving inaccuracies in scientific documents when they’re past a certain age.
Specifically, what should we do with old papers that are shown to be not just wrong, which is a fate that will befall most of them, but seriously misleading, fatally flawed, or overwhelmingly likely to be fabricated, i.e. when they reach the (very high) threshold we set for retraction?
To my way of thinking, there are three components of this:
More than two dozen papers by a controversial psychologist who died in 1997 are “unsafe,” according to a recent report by his former employer obtained by Retraction Watch.
The research has been subject to question for decades, because the findings — including some that “bibliotherapy” could dramatically reduce the risk of dying from cancer — seemed unbelievable.
The report by King’s College London into the work of Hans Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek notes that:
In 2015, a paper by Jean Decety and co-authors reported that children who were brought up religiously were less generous. The paper received a great deal of attention, and was covered by over 80 media outlets including The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and Scientific American. As it turned out, however, the paper by Decety was wrong.
VanderWeele notes that Azim Shariff, of the University of California, Irvine, asked Decety for the data, and
Piero Anversa, a former star researcher at Harvard Medical School who left the institution under a cloud, is up to 18 retractions. But that’s barely half of the 31 papers by Anversa’s group that Harvard has requested journals pull over concerns about the integrity of the findings.
The two articles, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appeared in 2008 and 2009. Anversa and a frequent co-author, Annarosa Leri, are among the authors on each.
Anversa ran a richly-funded lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital studying cardiac stem cells. But in 2014, critics began publicly questioning the output from the lab — questions that led to the departure of Anversa and Leri and a $10 million payout from the Brigham and Partners Healthcare to settle allegations of fraud involving the work. Anversa and Leri also sued Harvard — unsuccessfully — for alerting journals to the investigation and allegedly costing them job offers.
The retraction notice for the 2008 paper, “Notch1 regulates the fate of cardiac progenitor cells,” reads:
An influential group that studies the economic burden of medical care has temporarily removed from its website a draft report about the cost-effectiveness of drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis amid questions about the modeling researchers used in their analysis.
The group initially did little to explain the move, despite having issued a press release for the document last week, replacing the report’s page with a brief statement:
God giveth miracles … and it seems she taketh them away as well.
A group of chemists in China has lost a 2018 paper which described a “miraculous” discovery that wasn’t.
The paper was titled “A miraculous chiral Ir–Rh bimetallic nanocatalyst for asymmetric hydrogenation of activated ketones,” and it appeared in Organic Chemistry Frontiers, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
The authors, from the State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals at Dalian University of Technology, purported to show that:
A team of researchers in Europe has retracted a 2016 paper on how people with autism process social cues after finding an error in their analysis.
The article, “Social Bayes: using Bayesian modeling to study autistic trait–related differences in social cognition,” appeared in Biological Psychiatry, an Elsevier journal.
The senior author of the paper is Leonhard Schilbach, of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich and University Hospital Cologne. According to the abstract of the article:
