A journal has retracted a 2025 paper on social media and anxiety after a reader raised questions about the data – and thanks to the mentorship of a sleuth or two.
The article appeared in 2023 in BMC Psychology, a Springer Nature title. The sole author was Li Sun, whose affiliation is listed as the School of Marxism at Zhoukou Vocational and Technical College, in China.
According to the abstract of the paper, the research explored “the impact of mindfulness-based mobile apps on university students’ anxiety, loneliness, and well-being.” Those apps were “Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer” which “offer a range of mindfulness exercises and resources for users to explore.”
Earlier this year, the article caught the eye of Steven Crane, a behavior researcher at Stanford University, who was doing a “scoping review” of the relevant literature on interventions to promote social connection in young adults.
The results in Sun’s study struck Crane as “too good to be true,” with “improbably high” effect sizes for the interventions described in the paper.
What’s more, Crane observed, the intervention itself was “minimal.” Participants in the study were “just invited to download some mindfulness apps (no measure of whether they did or how much they used them is mentioned).” Although “there’s some evidence that mindfulness interventions can improve social connectedness a little” the effects are “never this big,” he mused in emails provided to Retraction Watch.
Based on the published reviews, neither the journal’s review nor peer reviews raised questions about the intervention or the effect size. The journal seems to have asked about “textual overlap” with another paper, a concern the author addressed. Two peer reviewers had no substantive comments, and a third reviewer made suggestions on the title, introduction and implications, and suggested the author focus on “the problematic use of social media.”
Wondering how to handle the article in the context of his review, Crane reached out to Stuart Buck, executive director of the Good Science Project, for advice. Could Buck point him to people who might be able to do a “deep investigation” into the data?
Buck turned to Nick Brown, a psychologist and sleuth, who responded with a run-down of the issues he identified in the work — confirming Crane’s suspicions. He advised Buck to tell Crane to ask Sun for the data:
… and in case of refusal or non-answer then write to the journal and invoke their data sharing policy (https://www.biomedcentral.com/getpublished/editorial-policies#availability+of+data+and+materials). If by some chance the data do show up then I’d be happy to put in some time to reproduce the analyses. (I suspect that there may well be no dataset and that the results were derived proctologically.)
But as Brown told Crane, appealing to help from journal editors can be a losing battle. The response, the sleuth wrote, often is: “‘Oh, well, we have no way to actually force the authors to share their data, sorry about that’. But sometimes you have to be like Tom Hanks in the scene near the end of Saving Private Ryan, duty-bound to fire your last six bullets at the approaching Tiger tank, in the hope that it just might explode. Occasionally the editor does step up and sends some rocket-firing P-51s.”
Crane took the advice and wrote to the author, who didn’t respond. So in April he reached out to the journal via its contact form, noting the lack of response and the journal’s data policy. The appeal succeeded. The editors decided to retract the paper the following month:
The editor and the publisher have retracted this article. The article was submitted to be part of a guest-edited issue. An investigation by the publisher found a number of articles, including this one, with a number of concerns, including but not limited to compromised editorial handling and peer review process, inappropriate or irrelevant references or not being in scope of the journal or guest-edited issue. Based on the investigation’s findings the editor therefore no longer has confidence in the results and conclusions of this article.
The author has not responded to correspondence regarding this retraction.
Sun did not respond to our request for comment, either.
Meanwhile, Crane said it “feels good to do my tiny part of cleaning up the scientific record.” He said he has learned several important lessons from his brush with sleuthdom – the first being it takes a certain personality to be willing to embark on such an effort.
“I’m a pretty ‘high agency’ sort of person to go to this length to check something out, and probably wouldn’t have done it if I weren’t conducting a formal review that included this paper,” he told us. “All of this — the sleuthing, the open science practices, etc — does take real work and we do need ways to incentivize this beyond a mildly satisfying volunteer endeavor.”
While he said he was happy with how the journal behaved — “appropriately and on a reasonable timeframe” — the experience “emphasizes the importance to me of all of us adopting higher open science standards of preregistration and data sharing as table stakes for most publications in psychology. But as I’ve discovered in prior research, most of the top publications over the past decade are not following these practices, and most for no particularly good reason.”
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].