An article based on results from an online survey has been retracted for data issues, and an Australian university is investigating what happened.
The article, “International nursing students’ perceptions and experiences of transition to the nursing workforce – A cross-sectional survey,” became available online on Jan. 29, 2022.
Published in the journal Nurse Education in Practice, the study reported 110 responses to an online survey of nursing students who came to Australia from other countries and planned to remain there to work.
The retraction notice, posted this month, stated:
This article has been retracted at the request of the authors because the data reported in the manuscript are likely to have been compromised. It came to the co-authors’ attention after the publication of the article that a large proportion of the surveys reported in the study had been completed by a respondent using the first author’s IP addresses.
The authors would like to apologize to readers for this error.
Della John McKitterick of the University of South Australia, and the first author on the paper, seemed to dispute the information in the notice.
“One of the respondents has used my username (not my IP address) to enter the data,” McKitterick told us. McKitterick, whose ORCID profile indicates she is a PhD student at the university, did not tell us how she learned of the data breach or respond to our follow up query about the discrepancy between the retraction notice and her statement regarding the IP address.
The University of South Australia is investigating the matter, which McKitterick cited as her reason for not divulging further details. None of the article’s other authors replied to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the University of South Australia confirmed the ongoing investigation to Retraction Watch but declined to comment further.
Roger Watson, the editor-in-chief of Nurse Education in Practice, was unaware of McKitterick’s disagreement with the retraction notice but expressed an interest in correcting the note after we asked him about it.
Watson said he does not believe McKitterick was aware of the survey fraud in advance or its perpetrator.
The issue with this article was brought to our attention by the corresponding author of the article. They did the right thing as soon as they became aware of the problem with the data – beyond that we don’t know how they found this themselves. They helped us draft the retraction notice.
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Amazing. Of course, there are plenty of other on-line surveys which also have NO guard-rails for fake participation, which make it into the literature nonetheless. Take, for example, the US Trans Survey. It routinely gets thousands of responses. Some are from me. I assume a number of guises, and come up with wild stories for this survey. These are then reported in the “official trans medical literature”.
On-line surveys are garbage. Sometimes the garbage is intentionally set up.
Is there anything that indicates your submissions are taken seriously and included in the datasets given to researchers? You may be wasting your time as many surveys don’t simply take any and all submissions at face-value. This is especially true if you are 1) making up “wild stories” and 2) posting from the same IP address without a VPN. Besides, there’s certainly much more productive and ethical ways of spending time and creativity than intentionally providing fraudulent answers in bad faith, no?