Oh, those insufferably progressive Scandinavians, always doing the right thing.
A group of alcoholism researchers in Denmark has retracted a 2020 paper on gender and alcohol treatment after finding errors in their results. And they’ve set up a system to avoid similar problems in the future.
The paper, “Gender differences in alcohol treatment,” appeared in Alcohol & Alcoholism in July, with authors from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. The paper found that:
women had more problems associated with alcohol consumption than men, both before and after completion of AUD [alcohol use disorder] treatment. Women with employment or education had a poorer outcome than their male counterparts, whereas childcare responsibilities or having a partner with AUD provided a better outcome.
However, shortly after publication, the authors heard from a colleague who said she’d found a serious problem in a table. Randi Bilberg, the senior author of the study, told us:
A colleague at our unit, who had not been involved in writing the paper, read it when it was published, – and she discovered an error in one of the tables that both the authors behind the paper and the reviewers of the journal had missed. It was thus pure luck.
The result of that good fortune was the following retraction notice:
Since the publication of this paper online, the authors’ have alerted us to a serious problem in the analyses of the data which has led to unreliable results being published in the journal. In agreement with the authors, editors and publisher, Alcohol and Alcoholism has therefore decided to retract the paper. The journal would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to the reader.
But Bilberg said the experience prompted her lab to create a better screening system to avoid future retractions:
It led us to not only retracting the paper, but also to immediately implementing an internal review procedure at our research unit that includes careful review of the statistical programming (and not only of the manuscript) by an independent colleague before submission to a journal, in order to prevent similar errors to occur in the future.
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