Which takes longer to produce: An infant who can sit on his own, or a retraction?

Joe Hilgard’s son wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s sharp eye for bad data when an Elsevier journal notified the social psychologist that it intended to retract a 2015 article he’d flagged on the link between exposure to violent media and aggression in adolescents. 

Well, the journal has finally retracted the paper – but not before Hilgard’s son was born and started speaking (more on that in a moment). 

Hilgard’s ability to spot bad data, and his tenacity at holding journals accountable for their publications, has now led to five retractions. Four of those papers belong to a researcher in China named Qian Zhang, of Southwest University in Chongqin. As readers of this blog might recall, Zhang lost a pair of papers in 2019 after Hilgard and others raised questions about the integrity of the data. 

As Hilgard, who also notified Southwest University about his findings, told us back in 2019 about Zhang’s previously retracted papers: 

I read one of the papers back in early 2018, saw that lots of the numbers didn’t make sense, and contacted the first author. The first author said he was going to correct it, and in May 2018 I followed up with the journal to make sure they did. The correction dated November 2018 was a mess: lots of numbers still didn’t make any sense, and it seems that F-statistics that had been incorrectly reported as statistically significant became statistically significant by the addition of a missing tens digit.

Ten months later, Hilgard, who blogged about his experience and counts the five retractions on his CV, contacted the journal with additional concerns about the data, which he’d received from the authors, aspects of which “seemed most unusual”: 

Additionally, I found that the means reported in that article were very similar to those reported in two experiments in Scientific Reports in 2013. This was particularly surprising given that these three experiments featured different populations and measures.

Here’s the latest retraction notice for “Exposure to weapon pictures and subsequent aggression during adolescence” which appeared online in Personality and Individual Differences in 2015, and which the journal corrected in 2019:

This article and subsequent corrigendum have been retracted at the request of both the Editor in Chief of Personality and Individual Differences and the senior author, Dr. Qian Zhang, following continuing concerns with respect to the data analyses. While reanalyzing the dataset, the senior author and a reader of the journal, Dr. Joseph Hilgard, who initially raised concerns, both identified several further errors that impacted the results and the conclusions reported in the article. It is this ongoing issue with the data analyses and reported results in the original paper and corrigendum that have led the Editor in Chief to conclude that there is no need to provide yet another corrigendum. Thus, it is necessary to retract the original 2016 paper and 2019 corrigendum. The senior author has apologized for this unintentional situation.

Hilgard, who tweeted about the retraction, was less than impressed with speed – or lack thereof – in the process: 

It took the editor ten months to decide to retract. After that, it took Elsevier another EIGHTEEN MONTHS to actually publish the retraction notice! They are really earning that 30% profit margin. …

We got pregnant sometime after the journal told me their intention to retract. He’s now 20.5lbs, says “dada”, tracks objects, and sits on his own. A single germ cell did all that faster than Elsevier could upload a retraction notice to their website. What a mess!

But other journals might be even more laggardly. (And such delays are of course nothing new for Retraction Watch readers.) Consider Aggressive Behavior (irony for no extra charge), which in 2019 published an article by Zhang’s group titled “Effects of cartoon violence on aggressive thoughts and aggressive behaviors.”

Hilgard notified the journal about problems with the data in that paper, which led to this 2021 correction of the work:

The article entitled “A Correlational Study Between Cartoon Violence, Aggressive Thoughts and Aggressive Behaviors: New Analyses and Clarifications” published in aggressive behavior (Volume 45, Issue 5) had errors in the participant assignment description were discovered in original article (Zhang et al., 2019). Most importantly, participants were not randomly assigned to watch a violent or nonviolent cartoon. Rather, they chose which of two cartoons to watch, before measurement of the dependent variables. Thus, the main independent variable (cartoon watched) should be interpreted as a correlational variable, not an experimentally manipulated one. The authors apologize for this mistake.

In addition, several new data analyses are reported, in which trait aggression was treated as a continuous variable, instead of a 3-level (low, medium, high) categorical variable. The following sections present the new results.

As Hilgard wrote: 

I asked Dr. Zhang if I could see the data from these studies to try to understand what had happened. He refused, saying only the study team could see the data. 

So, I decided I’d ask the study team. I asked Zhang’s American co-author if they had seen the data. They said they hadn’t. I suggested they ask for the data. They said Zhang refused. I asked them if they thought that was odd. They said, no, “It’s a China thing.”

Zhang told us that:

I agree with the retraction, which was jointly initiated by me and the editor. But I don’t agree with the claims of manipulating data in the study, because I found that errors of statistical analysis affected the results. We will apply reasonable data analyses and control the confounding variables more strictly in the future. 

He also urged us not to write about the retraction: 

Because it will certainly have a negative impact on my reputation and my family, although I have apologized for this unintentional honest mistake.

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