As a sophomore at Princeton University, Rishika Porandla took a course called “The Curious Scientist,” where students practice disciplinary research skills and act as a “PI” on a project of their choosing.
Porandla didn’t have to think twice about what subject to dive into. In high school, she had studied the biodegradability of polyvinyl chloride and discovered a new process to break down the plastic. The finding led to one of her proudest high school achievements — a published journal article. She was eager to use the Princeton class to advance her discovery.
From the outset, Porandla’s project for the class seemed like “a slam dunk,” Andrea DiGiorgio, the course’s instructor, told Retraction Watch.
As Porandla dug deeper into her prior work at the Princeton Imaging and Analysis Center, however, she unearthed a troubling find: Two methodological errors. The mistakes affected the study’s conclusions, rendering the results inaccurate.
At first she struggled to accept the discovery.
“I found myself hoping the next experiments would explain away the inconsistencies,” she recalled. “I thought it might have been a calibration error in the Princeton experiment, not the one I did back in high school. I thought, ‘OK, this is a different facility, maybe I overlooked something when I replicated this procedure.”
But the more she examined the study, the clearer the reality became.
Porandla contacted DiGiorgio for guidance and started researching what to do, she told us. She read about authors submitting corrections or retractions after finding mistakes in published papers. Crestfallen but determined to do the right thing, Porandla contacted Wiley about the concerns and asked for guidance pursuing either a correction or retraction of the work.
“[It] was really hard because I had to let go of something that beyond just being a publication, beyond just being on my CV, was a full project that I really thought was part of my identity as a researcher,” she told us. “The paper represented years of work in high school [and] countless hours in the lab. It was one of the experiences that convinced me that I wanted to be a researcher.”
After a review by Wiley and the editors of Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, the journal retracted the paper in May.
Those familiar with Porandla’s case praised her candor to come forward, citing the rarity of self-retractions. A 2013 study of 1,423 retractions indexed by the Web of Science database found about 22% of retractions were self-reported, although that can be difficult to discern based on the content of retraction notices. The Center for Scientific Integrity, the parent nonprofit of Retraction Watch, recently announced the inaugural winners of a new effort to recognize scientists who self-retract. The annual Ctrl-Z Award honors researchers who discover errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the record, recognizing that doing so can come with professional risk.
“Instances of authors proactively raising concerns about their own work are not the most common scenario,” David Huesmann, editor-in-chief of Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, told us. “This author, and others who do reach out to identify and correct mistakes in their work, show an honest commitment to scientific integrity.”
Huesmann confirmed Porandla reached out to the journal directly, and an evaluation of the concerns raised “ultimately led to the decision to retract.” The journal has since encouraged Porandla to resubmit an updated paper, Huesmann said.
Porandla described herself as a “very high-achieving student” in high school, conducting internship projects ranging from radio galaxy classification and supermassive black hole studies to climate and orbital dynamics modeling at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. Her interest in electron beam research developed after a science competition where judges selected her proposal on beam therapy for osteosarcoma as a finalist.
Porandla later pitched an idea to her chemistry teacher about using high-energy electron beams as a degradation mechanism. She wanted to study whether infusing PVC with gold nanoparticles and then using electron-beam irradiation and near-infrared photothermal heating would improve the plastic’s biodegradability and make it less toxic.
Over the next two years, she studied how varying irradiation conditions affected key material properties of the plastic to maximize degradation. Teachers praised the work, and she received “pretty positive” feedback from the reviewers who conducted her International Baccalaureate assessment, she recalled.
“I actually got the referral to Wiley from my chemistry teacher,” she told us, who had found a paper on a similar topic in a different Wiley journal. “It was my own decision, but everyone was very supportive of me publishing.”
Looking back, Porandla said she doesn’t believe her teachers adequately advised her on the importance of rigorous experimental validation, replication, and independent verification before publication. At the time, she didn’t question feedback from teachers that her study was publication-ready.
Porandla was the sole author of the paper, which went through Wiley’s standard peer review process, she said. Based on her correspondence with editors, the journal had difficulty securing reviewers and the manuscript ultimately proceeded with a single reviewer. Her manuscript went through one round of revisions that primarily centered on presentation, figures and expanding the discussion in several sections, she told us.
“I did not receive any reviewer comments critiquing the study’s methodology or questioning the scientific content itself,” she said. “I feel that I would have felt more comfortable with publishing the work if there were more external reviewers or if more rounds of review were conducted.”
Porandla’s former chemistry teacher declined to comment for this story.
The problems Porandla later found in her paper related to the relationship between the programmed electron-beam exposure time and the actual delivered dose not being independently verified, she explained. Imaging and elemental mapping also revealed the gold nanoparticles in the study were not uniformly dispersed throughout the PVC matrix as originally assumed. Both “fundamental flaws” affected the reliability of the conclusions, Porandla said.
“I no longer felt comfortable having the paper remain in the scientific literature because I knew that other researchers could potentially cite it, build upon it, or use it to inform future work,” she told us.
DiGiorgio, the Princeton instructor, was impressed by Porandla’s decision to self-retract and the bravery it took to share her findings with the class. DiGiorgio herself once submitted a small correction to a published paper and called it “a terrifying process,” and one in which “you worry about your credibility, your reputation,” and “your future.”
“This is what makes Rishika’s self-retraction so important and such a show of integrity and respect for science,” DiGiorgio told us. “She could’ve been quiet about this and moved on to another project. But she made the right decision. In her reflections on the process, she discussed that getting the real results out there was more important than the personal stakes of a self-retraction.”
Porandla is now a rising junior at Princeton studying astrophysics with intended minors in materials science and engineering and engineering physics. She plans to pursue a career developing space plasma detector instrumentation for heliophysics projects.
Since the retraction, she has been conducting follow-up work to address the weaknesses in the original study and is working toward a corrected version of the article for the journal. The revised manuscript will incorporate a redesigned methodology, stronger validation procedures, and a more comprehensive understanding of the physical mechanisms involved, according to Porandla.
“I think this is an important part of my journey with this research because I see that retractions are often viewed as the end of a project,” she said. “In my case, the retraction became the starting point for a better study.”
She does worry that when applying to fellowships or graduate school, people might wrongly assume the retraction was linked to misconduct or carelessness, she said. But Porandla makes a point of bringing up the retraction when asked about her research and readily shares her story. She hopes such transparency will set the record straight. At least one researcher, Nathan Georgette, reported no harm to future job prospects after self-retracting. Ctrl-Z Award winner Kate Laskowski recounted the “overwhelmingly supportive” response she received in her field following her self-retraction.
“In my conversations with people, I try to make it known that this was a learning experience for me,” Porandla said. “I think that there’s a bit of flexibility that’s given if you have integrity and correct the record yourself.”
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Glad that a student got the experience but…. Injecting plastic with gold nano particles and then hitting it with an electron beam?
Maybe I don’t understand the broader use case in, for example medicine, but this seems like just doing science for the sake of doing science…. Fossil fuel plastic is already economically so cheap that no other plastics can rival it without subsidies, adding gold to it just seems ridiculous.