A sports medicine journal has retracted a widely circulated 2019 meta-analysis which purported to find that interval training was the “magic bullet” for weight loss, after the analysis proved to be riddled with holes.
The paper, “Is interval training the magic bullet for fat loss? A systematic review and meta-analysis comparing moderate-intensity continuous training with high-intensity interval training (HIIT),” was a collaboration by researchers in Brazil and James Steele, an exercise scientist at the Solent University School of Sport, Health and Social Sciences, in Southampton, England.
Steele has some cred when it comes to research integrity, and part of that cred comes from another retraction. He was part of a team of data sleuths who have called for the retraction of seven papers by Matheus Barbalho, a Brazilian exercise scientist.
Steele himself was singed by the association with Barbalho, sharing authorship with him on a 2019 paper in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance that was pulled over concerns about the integrity of the findings.
Published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the newly retracted meta-analysis was accompanied by a press release from the journal and received a significant amount of attention in the media, both social and conventional — with pickups in at least 50 outlets, according to Altmetric.
But the article drew scrutiny from researchers in the field, prompting an expression of concern about the paper in June 2019. The nature of those concerns, as laid out in a blog post the journal published in May, were “the biological plausibility of a mean between-group fat-loss difference of 13.4 kg over 12 weeks;” that fat mass data were reported in a study that was included in the analysis but not reported in the paper; the calculated effect sizes; and the inappropriate inclusion of one of the studies in the review.
The retraction notice validates those points:
This paper has been retracted because the Editor has concerns about: (i) the accuracy of inclusion/exclusion of some studies; (ii) classification of the exercise intensity in some of the studies; (iii) the accuracy of some reported effect sizes; (iv) the veracity of the main conclusions and title.
Steele, who has been writing about the paper for some time, posted in a thread on Twitter that he “dropped the ball” on the article:
The exegesis received praise on Twitter. Andy Kirkland, a triathlon coach and lecturer at the University of Stirling in Scotland, wrote:
And Robert Csapo, a sports medicine researcher at UMIT in Austria, tweeted:
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The writing was on the wall for anyone who read the paper. Oh wow! So the gadfly gets away again? After calling for retractions of other peoples work (for the right reasons), the only way out for this person is to post all his data and code publicly for ALL his papers. Being “overloaded” is not an excuse, if you were overloaded why did you take on the project? Having ‘friends’ tweet support does not absolve him of anything. RW seems to be losing its edge. He should resign.