Rebecca Sear is on a mission to convince publishers to retract articles that use a database that purports to rank countries based on intelligence.
To maintain the integrity of scientific literature, the professor of psychology at Brunel University of London and her colleagues are writing to journals that are publishing papers that rely on the so-called National IQ database, which aims to rank countries based on intelligence. It has drawn criticism for the way the data were collected. Sear’s efforts have so far led to two retractions.
“There is absolutely no scientific merit whatsoever in the National IQ database,” Sear told Retraction Watch. “That means that any conclusions drawn from the database will be faulty and worthless.”
The database was first published in 2002 after psychologists Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen constructed what they claimed were averaged estimates of IQ scores for different countries. Critics say the database fueled networks of “race science” activists who argue Western countries are under threat from certain ethnic groups with low intelligence and higher propensity to commit crimes.
In 2019, Lynn, a self-proclaimed “scientific racist,” was stripped of his emeritus status by Ulster University in Northern Ireland after students protested against his views, as we reported. By our count, three of Lynn’s papers have been flagged with expressions of concern.
While Sear hasn’t tracked how many papers Lynn — who died in 2023 — himself authored, she is tracking the number of studies using his dataset. She shared a list with us that as of now contains 174 such studies.
The latest retraction was issued November 2 by Cross-Cultural Research, which pulled a 2023 study Sear had flagged. The paper, “Likely Electromagnetic Foundations of Gender Inequality,” has been cited twice, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The retraction notice doesn’t identify Sear by name but acknowledges she raised the concerns. It states:
Given the concerns raised by the reader, and that the original round of peer review did not meet the journal’s standards, the Journal Editor and Sage conducted a post-publication peer review of this article. Sage contacted the author for comments on the concerns raised.
Study author Federico R. León of the San Ignacio de Loyola University in Lima, Peru, agreed to the retraction, the notice states. He did not respond to our request for comment.
The other retraction prompted by Sear’s reporting, which we covered when it occurred last year, was for a 2010 paper about intelligence and infections published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Sear told us she has written to editors at 18 journals that have published papers using the IQ database. So far, however, her efforts have led to just those two retractions.
“The others, I was either ignored or just brushed off by the editors or publishers concerned on the whole,” she said. “I genuinely thought that when concerns were raised about research integrity of papers, something would be done, and that’s not the case.”
The dataset isn’t well known outside psychology, Sear noted, so editors from journals from other disciplines may not know that it is “fundamentally flawed,” she said. According to one 2010 critique, which failed to replicate the database’s low IQ estimates for Africans, Lynn’s methods for selecting data were “unsystematic” and “too unspecific to allow replication,” the authors wrote.
Jelte Wicherts, a statistician and methodologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands who coauthored that 2010 critique, told us that although Lynn’s colleague, David Becker, has since addressed some methodological issues, the updated iterations of the database are still flawed.
“Becker’s NIQ database inherited many of the fundamental flaws in Lynn’s original national IQ work that we showed quite clearly to be unsystematic and biased towards Lynn’s expectations,” Wicherts told us. “Until it has been validated with rigorous means, I would not recommend the use of Becker’s IQ data in peer-reviewed research.”
Becker, now based at the Chemnitz University of Technology in Saxony, Germany, did not respond to a request for a comment.
However, one researcher who has multiple studies on Sear’s list and spoke to Retraction Watch on the condition of anonymity, told us:
At the time those papers were written, I was not fully aware of the depth of the controversy on that topic and its connection to racialized interpretations of intelligence. Researchers in developing countries are far from such debates, they are under more pressure to publish more research papers. So, my focus then was on contributing to empirical growth and development research, not on questions of race. I stopped using it and publishing papers in impact factor journals and have not relied on it in my more recent research.
The Lynn dataset never met the “minimal standards” for being published, even when it was collected, said Gregory Kohn, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of North Florida. “I think there is a burgeoning consensus that is long overdue, that this dataset was not collected in a disciplined way to make any reasonable conclusions,” Kohn said.
Last December, publishing giant Elsevier said it was reviewing papers its journals had published in the past using the dataset. According to the Guardian, Lynn had published more than 100 papers in Elsevier journals, including several iterations of the NIQ database.
An Elsevier spokesperson told us: “In line with our commitment to investigate this matter thoroughly, we invited prominent members of the scientific community to aid us in gathering a consensus on the flaws in the national IQ database and other similar projects. This piece of work is nearing completion.”
One study on Sear’s list is a 2019 paper published by the journal Intelligence, which explored the link between national IQ and scores on a graduate admissions exam that was co-authored by psychologist Bryan Pesta.
On November 4, a U.S. appeals court dismissed an appeal from Pesta, who was stripped of his tenure and fired by Cleveland State University after his colleagues claimed he engaged in research misconduct by misrepresenting his intended use of data from the National Institutes of Health to advance a theory that genetic differences lead to a racial IQ gap.
While Pesta has argued his academic freedom had been violated, the court found that, “Whatever the controversial nature of [Pesta’s work], CSU officials were reasonably alarmed by Pesta’s cavalier handling of sensitive genomic data, misleading representations to the NIH about the nature of his research, failure to observe basic conflict-of-interest reporting, and the impact that his actions had on CSU as a research institution reliant on the NIH.”
A spokesperson for Cleveland State told us:
The ruling confirms that the university and its employees acted properly and that the law and facts support our position. We strongly believe our faculty are entitled to full freedom in their research, but they must adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity and professional ethics.
Sear said journals should retract every paper based on Lynn’s database. “Every paper that is published using the database effectively justifies the use of the database,” she said.
Lynn’s work is systematically biased, Sear said, because it has unrepresentative samples — with relatively higher rural populations and numbers of children for some nations — leading to a skewed picture.
“So as long as papers which have used the database sit in literature, that will make it easier for people to continue using a worthless database,” she says. “Retracting these articles is particularly important in order to essentially stop the continued use of the dataset.”
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It is maybe good to note that the retracted paper of Federico R. León is not about a relation between race and IQ. Instead, León has found that UVB radiation is even more dangerous than previously believed, as it is causing a reduction in IQ.
The assumed mechanism behind this relation varies between papers. I like the explanation in “Why complex cognitive ability increases with absolute latitude” (2014) most: UVB radiation → vitamin D3 → parents’ sexual hormones → family size → child’s intellectual environment → IQ chain of effects. His before-2014 papers incidentally often deal with anti-conception and family planning.