Year: 2021

Should a journal retract a paper when they learn that one of its authors has earned a year-long prison sentence for downloading child pornography?

For Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics the answer was no. And experts in publication ethics say that was the right call.

The researcher in question is Jan Joosten, who held the prestigious Regius professorship of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, was convicted of downloading 28,000 child abuse images and videos and  placed on the register for sex offenders in France, according to the Guardian.

Just months after Nature retracted a paper on the “Majorana” particle because other researchers found issues in the work, Science has placed an expression of concern on a different paper that suggested “a relatively easy route to creating and controlling [Majorana zero modes] MZMs in hybrid materials.”

If such particles exist, they could allow Microsoft — which employs some of the researchers involved in the work — to build a quantum computer. But scientists have suggested that the findings of various studies do not suggest the presence of Majorana particles.

The Science paper has been cited 29 times since it was published in 2020, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The EoC reads:

A journal has issued an expression of concern for a 17-year-old paper by one of the world’s most prominent behavioral psychologists after it partly failed a statistical stress test conducted by a group that has been trying to reproduce findings in the field. 

The 2004 article, by Dan Ariely, of Duke University but then at MIT, and James Heyman, then a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, was published in Psychological Science. Titled “Effort for Payment: A Tale of Two Markets,” the article looked the relationship between labor and payment for that work: